Allison

Allison had a short ponytail she could tuck under a hood and wore jeans loose enough to jump straight up in the air and bring her knees almost to her chest. Her t-shirts were black or navy, threadbare at cuffs and collar, not afraid of sweat or wear, some so familiar they were pocked with small holes around the waist where her belt loops rubbed, like a cheetah's spots. She wore comfortable sneakers because she knew she would be on her feet all night. Allison saw so many more female faces in the crowd these days, and they were wearing boots and slippers.

At shows when she was just into her teens Allison rarely saw other girls. They might be holding a coat so their boyfriends could go into the pit in just a wifebeater. She stood at the back too, but she was smaller than everyone. She started exploring the edges, the pulsating corona, that swayed like a lapping shore from the churning at its' center. Allison went to more and more shows and felt more rooted, understood that she belonged there as much as anyone and recognized the altruism of the crowd as she penetrated deeper. Sometimes, dancing, her hood would slip back and the singer would see a tiny girl throwing in with all the rough boys and their reckless fists, and call her out for being tough and having the spirit. Allison would pull up her hood in an Amazonian gesture, and merge with ecstatic anonymity.

The boys had all grown their hair long and the girls had all cut theirs off. The aspiration seemed to be drug smoking lumberjacks in plaid with messy beards, or smoke eyed French pixies. Everyone had an outfit and an iphone. It was a long way from the spare utility of shaved heads and hooded sweatshirts. Allison thought "Oh well," as the house lights went down and all eyes turned to the stage, "Oh well, they're here anyway." She wrapped the mic cord tightly around her hand, tapped it to her chest with three quick thumps in time with the drums that thundered to life, jumped straight up into the air and touched her knees to her chest.

Homer

It was getting to be a joke to Homer. He had a bowl of oatmeal, the bowl was clay, the tablecloth was unbleached linen, his daddy was wearing the same overalls as yesterday which were just as faded as the washed out sky, the road outside was dirt, and there was a dust colored tabby sleeping in the window. The summer leached the green out of the plants, and even magazines turned white underneath this sun. Homer had read about art and he was sure he was living through someone’s beige period.

“Bonnie and Clyde came through here, I’ll bet you didn’t know that.” Daddy said a lot of bullshit when he was pontificating, and since Homer had been drawn and sullen even more than usual, even more than was tolerable, Daddy felt it was overdue. “They were right on that road out chere, tear assin’ hell bent for leather, and I was sitting at that table right where you are now and watched ‘em go by just like I was at the picture show. I was fifteen year old, just like you are today.” Daddy found this to be a satisfactory end to the story, nodding sagely and stroking his chin like Confucius, who incidentally was a man he had never heard of.

Homer waited for the pause to become ever pregnant, and when he realized there was no post script he bunched his shoulders and cocked his head “Is that all? What did they do? Did they go rob the Mechanics Bank?”

“No,” Daddy could really make it sound like you had missed the point completely. “They just rode through, weren’t no money in that damn bank, it was the depression. Naw, we didn‘t hear it was them until week or so later, in the papers.”

Homer’s mouth dropped open in utter disbelief, “You’re fucking kidding.” Kansas had even sucked the color out of outlaws who took a break from having sex only to rob banks and shoot people. It was incredulity only a 15 year old understood.

“Mind Boy, your Momma heard you and she’d have me belt you one, neither of us wants that.”

Homer was staring hatefully at a sunflower thinking “Be more yellow.” He had collected the eggs and knew they had the same uncommitted color at the center, then washed out the coop, and had the drab afternoon to himself. He stood and shook out each leg, and started walking towards town.

He came home very pleased with himself. He had gone to meet the sailor with all his pocket money, the sailor who had been on the sea just as long as he had been on land, and who had seen a tiger in China and a Russian Cossack. The sailor put a tattoo on Homer’s whole chest, a beautiful woman with peacock feathers and a bright red rose at every corner, like a picture frame, and yellow stars around her like the sailor had seen all the way in Australia at the bottom of the world.

He strolled into the kitchen, where he had left Daddy and found him again, just as casual as could be, his plaid shirt hooked on a finger slung back over his shoulder. The sailor said not to cover it for a day or so, as if that would be a problem for Homer. The spoon dropped out of Daddies hand and clanked in the tiny china cup of milky coffee. Whispering, as not to alert Mama, but with as much urgency as he could muster Daddy said “Boy, what would you go and do a damn fool thing like that for?”

“Because I guess I’m just a damn fool.”

Chester Basilowicz

Chester Basilowicz became undyingly devoted to Krav Maga at the age of 20, and even though he wouldn't say so out loud he secretly believed it made him bulletproof.

Auf der Mar

Auf der Mar looked in the mirror every morning with bloodshot eyes, mapping the blooming sanguine rills winding a meander through the eggshell jelly, before dissolving pink to white, slowly fading out like a poorly kept trail. He decided to stop reading his horoscope, he no longer had any time for providence. It predicted the return of lost things but never the losing of them, useful divination when sailing on the Rachel, but not the Pequod. It reprimanded Auf der Mar for the behavior of the past, but never gave a clue for today. He left it on the table, with the letter that accused him in the very same way but with kinder words, looked around at four bare walls, and set out a wary traveler.

The paths up into the mountain started in pastoral fields, roiling fingers of tall grass with a squat low-canopied tree they had laid under like a blanket. Everywhere the sun yellowed was the crushing disappointment of him, the thoroughness of his failing all those he knew. He started into the hills, climbing up, chased by the memory. Auf der Mar moved quickly over the broken stones, feeling the pressure building in his chest, scouring his lungs and burning away. Coming around the ridge he saw how the day had waned, and counted it a mercy. The still, gold air broke in shafts around the treetops, falling along the dirt corridor, and Auf der Mar slowed to walk on the cobble of acorns. The slope was gradual here, and he felt the heaviness of what he carried was easier to manage after the exertion. He took it down into the shadows of trees and back up and out again, to the bluff. Facing west Auf der Mar studied the sanguine rills shot through with royal bruises, and said to the setting sun "He's only going to break your heart, and what will that do to me?"

Quibbler

Shan Tamarindo began recording music at a young age under the name Quibbler. "To get where Quibbler comes from, you kindof have to understand my whole story. I was born in New Zealand. My parents were very eccentric people, and we traveled all over. We spent lots of time in Nepal, Vietnam, and Amsterdam. My father was a bicycle mechanic and we never had any money, so we always went to places he was sure there would be lots of work. I never went to school, so my mother educated me. She taught me to read from music magazines, and bought me a tape recorder when I was 9 so I could hear the strange accent she was trying to drill out of me. I spent all of my practice time making up songs, and I think the tinny, cheap recorder really influenced where I would go with my sound."

Quibbler was first noticed after self releasing and album and EP exclusively on cassette. While not hugely prolific Quibbler gave interviews to countless blogs, websites and alternative papers. "When I was 18 I moved to New York, and got a job in a used record store. I worked for a few years but mainly spent a lot of time immersed in the local scene, working on my style. I wanted a sound that would really fill a room' but with space, you know? I wanted a spare, expansive sound, I wanted to really hear the resonance in myself. About this time I met Hax."

Seemingly on the strength of reputation and blog buzz Quibbler signed a deal with Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Records, and entered the studio. "I know people think we're lo-fi, but everything on this album is so precise. It took us 16 months to record, and we were still mixing right up until it went to press. We used all analog equipment, with an emphasis on vintage and not reproduction, which was hard to find. For the first few months we did more shopping than writing or recording. When we were looking for a sound a lot of the time Hax had to crack open the equipment and work on it, actually solder wires and stuff. Sometimes we'd burn out the equipment and have to scrap it completely and start over. There's so much reverb on this record its hard to hear what I'm saying, and I like that."

She is known for her forward thinking aesthetic. "We wanted the right look. We had to think of what people would be doing when the album came out, and then try to predict what was 6 months beyond that, because we didn't want to just get lost in the mix. And the music is that way too. We wanted beachy but not garage, and we're definately shoe gaze but not chill wave. I was listening to a lot of witch house when I wrote the album, but I wanted to go for a singer songwriter approach to space beach dub. We talked a lot about it."

The album was released to good press. "We were so happy with how it turned out. When I put it on my turntable, and that's really the way to hear it, after spending so much time crafting it for all those spaces between the sound you need an analog format that will let you hear that space between the sound, anyway when I put it on I hear the bass bounce off the corner of the room and reverb back, and that plays off of the guitar echo and the perfect hollow snare sound we got. It's like another song going on in between all the parts we're playing. When we play it out it changes in each room and really even for each crowd, because so much of the sound is how the sound bounces around. It's amazing, I might sound conceited but I think I can in this case, I honestly feel this is one of the most groundbreaking pieces of music made since the advent of the internet. I used to go to the Museum of Television and Radio when I lived in New York, and watch film of Marlene Dietrich, and Odetta, and Patsy Cline and all those icons, and I'm ready to be one of them now."

And then the radio station played the song, and it sounded like everything else.

Denielle

Denielle had a fine arts degree from a fine arts college, a path she was set on by her parents who hired her a painting mentor in high school, who had taken her on a tour of the great European museums in middle school, who had bought her professional camera equipment in grade school, who had enrolled her in an alternative education preschool, and before that named her Denielle instead of Danielle and proceeded to snootily correct every nonminority who even came close to pronouncing the name in the traditional way from birth until the present day.

She excelled in her studies, pleasing her teachers and parents. After graduation she campaigned for an NEA grant on the suggestion of her peers. She secured it, dazzling at every turn, on the premise of 'A Multimedia Exploration of America." However, when Denielle set out on this exploration, she only found a vacuum. Rudderless she traveled around the country, painting landscapes and photographing steel canyons. Challenging local mores with shocking installations in the South, recording interviews with local legends in the west, but none of it came together for her. People looked at what she was trying to do, and then turned to her and asked questions. Denielle was tired of people looking at her, they had been doing it her whole life.

Denielle found herself in the desert, photographing the craggy face of a former fitness guru in the high atmosphereless contrast of the mesa. Shots of him with his proud barrel chest, his winning smile and twinkling eyes, looking like a wrinkly version of the same photographs used in comic book strong man ads in the 50s. When they were done Denielle packed away her equipment and the guru rose to leave. He shifted his weight forward and leaned heavily on his gnarled cane, gripping it with massive paws that turned a screaming white at the knuckles, as he forced himself upright. She saw him bent and precarious, eyes closed and face obscured as he put on his hat. Denielle threw her gangly arms in the air and yelled "Stop!"

She had traveled very far to find the small Nebraskan antique shop. The proprietor met her at the door, expecting the visit from the extensive phone calls and research that proceeded Denielle. Laid out were all of the Native American pieces, and she spied what she had come all this way for. Holding up the beaded moccasins Denielle explained "These belonged to a great leader of men. A scourge of the plains who vowed to beat the cavalry back to the Atlantic Ocean. He was a transcendental mystic that haunted the dreams of presidents and the gory pages of dime paperbacks." She held them out reverently for inspection.

"But they're so small." said the shop owner.

"I know," answered Denielle opening her camera bag. "That's why I like them."

Billy

Storms came up fast in Savannah. A stirring breeze blew off the sea and the crackling air hung heavily all summer, so Billy was often caught unaware, especially when strolling under the broad limbs of Forsyth Park, where the leaves blocked out the gathering clouds. He stood at the fountain, sinking into the patter of water on marble, finding stillness in his mind and abandoning tension. Billy was prone to knots in his stomach, seemingly biologic trepidation, and his psychologist suggested that he take time to center himself in the day. Without a map Billy found that this fountain was the center. The air drew in deeply, and gave a hollow buzz followed by a metallic crash and a brilliant salvo that left spots in his eyes. Shaking off the popping in his ears Billy realized the sound of water was not the fountain, but fat drops of rain splashing down on the bricks of the park. He looked out to Gaston Street and saw business men, dressed lightly for the summer heat, dashing for shops and doorways, and he had the greatest idea of his life.

"Why isn't there a Southern film industry?" He asked the waitress who brought his sandwich in a brown paper bag. She blinked at him. He found the knot in his stomach had been replaced by a spring. He worked in a book store and in the slow times explained to his coworkers that the South had produced its' own music, sports, literature and comedy, why was it happy to let California and New York make its' movies? "In India they have Bollywood. We couldn't call it Dollywood, but I'm sure we'll think of something."

The day had turned clear and blazing. Billy walked home like he always did, and was covered in a fine sweat by the time he got there. He was restless, like the sun was an eternally stoked furnace driving the pistons of his industry, and he began working around the house. First Billy did the neglected chores; washed dishes, swept and organized the books that had built up over time like deposits of silt. The sun hung stubbornly in the sky so Billy began lugging cinder blocks from the demolished shed at the corner of his yard and stacked them neatly in the alley. When he came to the bottom of the pile he was amazed to see the sun hadn't move. It was trying to boil him out, burn away the fission of his idea into entropy, but he could not be had. Billy took up and ax and began chopping at the stout tree stump eating up his yard like a carbuncle. Billy assaulted the low table of wood and then the thick subterranean fingers, grinding it into the earth with attrition. When he was done, stripped to the waist, slick and dripping like John Henry, he looked up to where the sun cowered below the horizon, a purple crimson flag of surrender beating its' retreat, and smiled knowing he would meet the bastard first thing.