CW 11: The Taste of You

I wrote this today as part of my commitment to the Clarion West Write-a-thon. A dedication means that person sponsored it by donating to CW, and then provided me a writing prompt that sparked the piece. If you would like something written especially for you, please consider sponsoring me.

Here’s all the work of the 41 days. You’ll also find these pieces cross-posted at Sterling Editing as incentive for writers to practice their editing and story-building skills.

Enjoy.

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The Taste of You

for Caitlin Kavanagh-Ryan. Thank you for your support of my work and Clarion West.

One of the things I love about Charlie is that he’s a hard man whose music tastes so sweet. He goes on stage like he’s ready for a fight, his shaved head and his scowl, his jailhouse tattoos, the skull etched on his synthesizer, and he sings songs so brutal they make people flinch. Bad love, violent ends, hopelessness, despair, barely containable rage. And it all tastes like strawberries and cream. It’s such a kick: Charlie’s wailing I’m gonna kill my girlfriend with a mallet and a stake, and I’m in the VIP zone by the sound board wanting to eat the music with a spoon and then lick the bowl.

“Tell me again what it is?” he said, the second time we slept together.

“I taste music. Synesthesia.” He repeated it thoughtfully while I curled tighter against him. I could feel the word rumble in his chest.

“So,” he said, “are we talking full-course meals? Beach Boy burgers? Mozart pie?”

“Humble Pie,” I said, and he laughed. That rumbled too, and ran down the scale salty on my tongue. A laugh like sex. You are all mine, I told him silently. Out loud, I said, “It’s not food, it’s taste. The intervals in music each have their own flavor. It can be chords, melody line, guitar, whatever….” Your laugh. I hitched myself onto my elbow so I could smile at him. “Music makes my tongue go wild.”

“Oh, baby, you are something else,” he said. “Come here with that wild tongue.”

#

Of course he didn’t really get it. People don’t. That’s okay. All of us who see numbers in color or feel the personalities of letters of the alphabet will be over here with a beer while the rest of you go look it up on the internet. And while you’re gone, we’ll talk about you in blue and square and A-major, in salt and sour, in ways you can’t possibly understand.

#

And of course there is music that tastes nasty. There’s the one interval that’s like something dead just walked into my mouth.

“This one?” Charlie said.

“Don’t, it’s disgusting,” I said. I think I probably made the same kind of face a dog does when it’s trying to get peanut butter out of its mouth: something sticky and wrong that won’t go away.

“Really?” He looked genuinely confused. He played it again.

“Stop it!” I said.

“But what’s the matter with it? I mean…” It is the wrongest sound in the universe, I was about to say, and then he continued in a tight, disappointed voice, “I just wrote my best song ever and it’s full of these.”

We were quiet. Silence doesn’t normally taste for me, but this one was bitter.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

#

And now it’s wrong between us. Because he really doesn’t understand. And it turns out you don’t complain about the food at Charlie’s Restaurant, because the chef takes it very personally.

Yesterday he said, “Won’t you just listen to it once? Just once?” And I said I would try. And it broke my fucking heart. It’s a love song, a good-love song, a forever-after love song, and it tastes like roadkill.

“So you really can’t,” Charlie said finally, after I stopped crying quite so hard. “Isn’t that just fucking wonderful?” And he laughed. A sad laugh, a broken laugh, a love-dying laugh. It went down the scale on that nasty interval. I still don’t know whether that was on purpose, or not.