"Hey, Candice, you got it together tonight?"

"No."

"Got it perfect?"

"No."

"Got it all to fit?"

"No."

"Ready to see if everyone else gets it?"

"No."

"That's my girl. Knock 'em dead."

The same, everyday, wasn't it? Him not listening, her not caring. Strobe lights flickering over everything, making nothing real but fixing all the tears He kept leaving every time He drove off in his fast cars closer and closer and further and further from her with every step of the wheel.

Her not speaking.

His not noticing.

And Knock-'Em-Dead-My-Girl.

Tonight she wanted to scream into that mike instead of crooning Jenny Lind into their unappreciative ears. She wasn't Jenny Lind, she wanted to sing Candace but she wasn't good enough for their ears that were trained for Jenny Lind from the moment it was typed onto the programs with lazy, apathetic fingertaps on the unforgiving keys.

The mike doesn't fit her hand like it normally does. She tries to wrap her fingers around it so they overlap but they don't.

"What's wrong with the mike?" she asks Lynn.

"It's new, sweetie. Clearer. Less static. That's what you want, right?"
No. I want my fingertips to touch each other while I'm singing, silent support and normalcy and regularity and something REAL, LYNN! LIKE NOTHING EVER IS!
"Yeah, great. Fabulous, Lynn."

"Good." And she's off to fix something else.

Can't fix this- Candice rubs away the new bruises in her shoulders. Circles, circles, circles.

"Five minutes and you're on!" said Lynn, like it was a news report and she was painted up pretty with a still face and grinning and posed just so.

No. She was fifteen, a mediocre soprano, and propping up one leg with the other on her stool. The thick smoky smell of cigars wafting on the air, dim lights, foggy, sleepy, and the most awake of all of them.

Oh. Now's the time to pretend to be nervous. She shuffled a foot against the floor, picked at her fingernails.

A voice somewhere off said,

"Okay, Candice, go ahead."

She looked out at the apathetic loungers, and breathed-

- they broke into frantic screaming, jumping—joy of being alive, joy of being here, on her on her high stage dressed to kill and brown hair skipping tangled down her back and twirling like ropy creeks in the air conditioner's breeze.

The air is hot, heavy, thick with their freedom and ecstasy. The strobe lights flash prismatic colors and everything is surreal, she's not moving at the speed she thinks she's moving at but in frames, and the air conditioner is ineffectual because her adrenaline is heating her up—she's a volcano and the magma pours through the microphone on into the crowd and they scream as they char—

It lasts forever. It lasts forever as she pours the molten material out to them and they eat it up like candy. And they scream with happiness as they eat and supplement it and don't care about the headache and the hangover because it's not here yet. All that is here is now.

She screams and jumps with them, a part of them but somehow detached from it all, up here above them on the stage. She towers above them all, a phoenix born on the wings of her fiery melody—

-the most beautiful pain ever inflicted.

She holds out the last note longer than she's ever done it before. Then she looked up from her guitar, half expecting the deadpan loungers to break out in screams.

Scattered applause. A smile or two. Nothing spectacular.

She handed the mike to Lynn as she stepped off the stage. Her chest was swelled with the rush of adrenaline that was slowly fading away as she realized who she was again.

"Good job tonight, sweetie," said Lynn brightly as she watched her go by. "You got a nice little voice."

And that's all it'll ever be.

She stepped out into the night air, breathing it in like there was nothing else. She hated the thick smoky air of the lounge.

Tomorrow she'd quit. It was a day like any other day, but it was important nonetheless.