She remembered everything except the songs. Never the chords. But the words, the things audiences came to hear, suddenly vanished mid-performance as if someone quietly removed pages from a script. It began mildly. She laughed it off. Audiences often enjoyed it. Forgetfulness humanized performers. Then it worsened. Halfway through choruses, her mind went white, like fog entering a room. She could feel the lyric nearby, circling like a shy animal refusing capture. At first she compensated. She repeated lines. Turned omissions into improvisations. Some listeners praised the looseness of her live versions.

“They feel different every night,” said some.

Yes, she thought, because I no longer know how they go. Before shows she became ritualistic. Silent repetition backstage. She studied as though preparing for an exam in a subject she used to teach. The strangest part was she could remember absurdly trivial things from twenty years earlier. The smell of a rehearsal room in Halifax. A phone number from childhood. But verse two of her most requested song dissolved like kleenex in the rain.

One musician suggested whiskey “to loosen the brain,” which proved to loosen mainly the problem-solving mechanisms. She began to fear certain songs. Not because they were difficult, but contained verbal landmines. Specific sequences impossible to fake once broken.

One night it happened completely. She stopped in the middle of the second verse, nothing arrived. The audience waited. The song was gone. But consciousness, apparently, was still broadcasting. So she stopped trying to recover the lyric and began singing whatever arrived. Fragments about hotel carpets, loneliness, oranges, dead relationships, television evangelists, soup. Something opened. The structure of the original song dissolved completely and what emerged instead was stranger and far more alive. The audience leaned forward, not because they recognized the material, but because nobody in the room, including her, knew what would happen next.