Cora
I sit in the green room of the dingy bar, head held back so that I can see the World Serpent’s mouth on my neck, biting its own tail. I study it for a time, thinking about Ragnarok and the beginning and the ending of the nine worlds, and Thor and Loki and Frey and all the other Norse gods, Sif and Frigg and Heimdall and on and on, and the wolf Fenrir and the sea-giantess Ran. I stare at the tattooed serpent and think about my own life and wonder if that, too, will die and be rebirthed: if the world of my life will be stormed by giants and Loki and emerge anew. Maybe if I keep singing rock I’ll be able to quit my job at the dentist’s office; that would be my rebirth.
I wonder, as I often do, if I’m attractive enough to make it big—or semi-big—as a rock star. It’s a thought I try to avoid but one that arises anyway, like a tenacious hound, dogging me endlessly like Skoll chasing the sun. I have funky shoulder-length brown hair, hacked here and there for an uneven look, with bright green eyes and high cheekbones. Men often find me attractive, but then some men look at me and see nothing more than a punk girl with Viking tattoos on her neck and thumb. I look down at the rune on my thumb now, the rune which means a need not yet fulfilled—ᚾ—and I think of that need, my desire to do more than work a job I don’t enjoy, to live in an apartment I don’t care about, to fund hobbies I have no interest in. Perhaps that’s a nihilistic way of looking at things.
I stand up and walk around the room, a place that’s falling apart, the couch covered in holes and the wallpaper chipping and flaking. I think of my house growing up. Crash Collins, my father, was a wealthy man, an old-money man, the sort of man who could buy estates and think nothing of it. We had staff and grounds and all the rest of it: the American dream gifted to a girl who knew no different. That would have been fine if he also wasn’t an old-fashioned man who believed that family trumped all, that family was everything and if a girl didn’t wear dresses and learn to knit she wasn’t a girl; she was a monster.
I pace around the room, listening to the drummer tear away on his own, the lead guitarist struggling to keep up, the crowd cheering, but not loudly. There would need to be more than fifty people for the crowd to cheer loudly. I drop onto the hole-ridden couch and stretch my legs out. I’m wearing black jeans and black boots with silver carvings of wolves on the side. They were the last thing I took from the house after Dad died and the will executor arrived with his cronies to tell me I wasn’t entitled to anything, that I had to leave unless I fulfilled the terms of the contract.
I laugh grimly to myself.
“The terms of the contract,” I whisper beneath the music pounding through the walls. “Sure, why don’t I just lie on my back and open my legs and wait for the first man who wanders by to deposit a nice load of spunk in my belly, and once the baby’s born he’ll put a ring on my finger and everything will be perfect.”
I hate waiting in the green room. It’d be different if I had a band, people to shoot the shit with, but I’m more of a solo kind of woman. In all my twenty-three years I can’t remember ever having a close friend. Boys were intimidated by me because I wasn’t intimidated by them, and girls didn’t like me because I never fit in with them. I tried to. I had a period in my teenage years when I’d dress pretty and try and force myself to care about prom, but I’d always end up back with the outcasts smoking and drinking. And I never even felt close to the outcasts, because none of them cared about making something of their lives. They just wanted to smoke and drink until the end of the world.
I pick idly at the couch cushion, rolling a piece of thread between my forefinger and thumb. That was a cruel thing for Dad to do, I reflect. He knew what sort of person I was. He knew I didn’t want to settle down early. He knew that when I read the Old Norse poems I wanted to be the shield-maiden, not the wife, waiting for her man while sitting at the loom. I wonder, when he wrote that I could only come into my inheritance when I am married with children, did he feel guilty? Did his pen pause, or did he scrawl it out rashly as he did with everything else? Crash was a man of action, a man who rarely thought before he did things. Maybe that was why he was so successful. I don’t know. What I do know is that it didn’t make him a good father. Still, I’ve paid tribute to him in my own way. I’m Cora Ash now, Melissa Collins reinvented.
“Crash, Cora Ash, Crash, Cora Ash, Cora Ash, Crash.”
I’m muttering to myself like a madwoman—and really, I can’t deny that charge—when the manager walks in. He’s a big man, but not strong-looking. He’s big in all the wrong places, big at the lower legs and forearms, big at the belly, big at the neck. He’s around forty years old with a slick gray comb-over and dark brown eyes. His first name is Charles. I forget his second.
I stand up. “Is it time?” I say, eager.
The drummer is still pounding away, drowning out the other instruments and the screaming voice, but maybe I can crowd backstage, watching and waiting like a raven over a battle. It’d be better than sitting here stewing on my past, anyway.
Maybe I seem too eager because Charles licks his lips and steps forward, and I see in his face that he thinks he has me. He sees me as the tortured little tattooed girl, snake-necked, oh-so-vulnerable.
“Not quite yet,” he says, nudging the door closed behind him.
“Okay …”
I wait. I need this gig, as sad as that is. I need every gig, no matter how small.
“I’ve been thinking, Cora. You like playing this place, don’t you?”
“Like,” I repeat, leaving it up to him to decide if that’s a positive or a negative.
“You haven’t been doing this for very long. Just a couple of years. Isn’t that right?”
“Just a couple of years.” I swallow a grim laugh. It’s easy to say something’s only been a couple of years; it’s much different to live it, going from low-paid or unpaid gig to gig, trying to convince myself that I’m not wasting my time.
“What are you, a parrot?” He cackles loudly, resting his hands on his belly, and then letting his hands drop as though the action is a reflex he’d rather do without. He takes another step forward, this one much larger, so that he’s only a few paces away from me. “You need a break in this business, don’t you? You’re always reading about some big star who played the same venue for months before getting their break. A lot of talent spotters come in this place, you know. That’s one of the things we’re most proud of here.”
“I didn’t know that,” I say. It’s a lie, I’m sure. He has that look in his eyes men sometimes get: the look of ownership, the look of psyching himself up to do something, like a kid trying to get enough courage to ask a girl out but with much less innocence.
“Oh, yeah.” He moves forward again, this time less than a foot from me. “It’s true.” I smell him. I can’t not smell him. He reeks of whisky and cigarettes and old stale sweat. “That’s what you need. Someone in your corner. I’ve seen you coming and going from this place. You never have a man with you, or a friend, or anybody. Not even a band. Just Cora Ash, all alone.” He shrugs. “It makes me quite worried, you know? Call me old-fashioned but—”
“I need to leave. It’ll be my slot soon.”
I move around him, being as tactful as I can when all I want to do is head-butt him so hard his nose becomes a pancake.
He steps into my path. “You’ve got a minute,” he says, voice rising. He looks way more excited than he needs to be. “Don’t you have a minute? What’s your problem? Why are you such a loner?”
Because I changed my name a while back, and in doing so I severed every connection with casual acquaintances and half-friends. I moved from LA to this quaint seaside town an hour’s drive out of LA. That’s why.
“Some people just like being alone,” I say, taking a step back. It’s either that or feel his bulging sweaty belly against me, which is not an option.
“Look.” He pauses, eyes squinting, and then blurts, “I could make life easier for you. A regular gig. Well-paid. All you’d need to do is give me a chance. Come by my place. I’d treat you right.”
I close my eyes, hoping that when I open them he’s disappeared. He hasn’t, so I place my hands on my hips and look at him like he’s the lowliest slug I’ve ever encountered, a look designed to wither. It works. He shrinks under my gaze.
“You want me to fuck you so I can keep playing in this shithole? That’s your grand plan?”
The drummer winds down. A final guitar note rings through the building. The singer clears his throat.
“Move,” I say. I bow my head sarcastically. “Please.”
He looks like he might hit me. He wants to. He’s scanning me for weakness, any sign that I’m prey and he can became a predator. I spent my teenage years reading about Nordic men, about blood feuds and hammer-wielding gods and giants. This man is a joke.
When he doesn’t find any weakness, he steps aside.
I push past him quickly, shaken, though I won’t show it, and wrench the green room door open. Walking down the hallway, I fight my trembling lips, my clenched fists. I’ll have to put the rage into my performance.