Be Scared of Everything by Peter Counter

Author:Peter Counter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Invisible Publishing
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

Metaphysical Graffiti

Stigmata

Arthur peeled a wet red Band-Aid off the tip of his ring finger, revealing the mark. Blood oozed from a deep cut in his callus, a bright cherry bursting in the early May sun, all the more brilliant in contrast with our white Catholic high school uniforms.

“It kills,” he said. “I can’t even play anymore and it’s driving me nuts.”

I marvelled at the wound. The night before, Arthur told me he’d played “Stairway to Heaven” along with the CD. Perfectly. And the song left its imprint. I figured it was the set of bended triplets near the end of the solo that did it, the sheer amount of friction during the most impossible part of Jimmy Page’s magnum opus. I imagined Arthur’s Elixir string, with its special nanoweb coating, slicing through his fingertip like a cheese cutter as he pushed the metal thread against the fretboard to make his instrument wail. I pictured streaks of sticky blood smearing the neck of his Gibson electric guitar, his refusal to stop powered by the singularity of his accomplishment. The revelry of finally playing the perfect song. I was jealous.

That night, I sat in my parents’ basement alone, between stacks of amplifiers. Classic rock records adorned the walls, including Led Zeppelin’s fourth studio album, the unspeakable one named with sacred geometry instead of letters. Pouring over photocopied music sheets in my red three-ring binder, my black Washburn in my lap, I tried to warp my fingers in the right ways to summon the song through the mesh of my amplifier. I wanted to conjure it through ritual, perfectly, like Arthur had, so I could be marked too.

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