Mrs. Tzavniki listened through the air vent when Susan was practicing, she loved it and thought of it as a bonus. There was a man named Misha who played guitar before the war when she was a different person. 1939, relaxed and kind with two tight braids she grew long down to her hips. Next thing you know she hid in Linden trees with a rifle and took the life of fascists from three hundred yards away. In her journal, she didn’t call them by any political names, she simply wrote that she took the lives of strangers. That was the truth of it or maybe when you cut off your braids and adjust to constant fear mixed with sleep deprivation, it’s only logical to write existentially and objectively. Technically, the army called her a sniper but it was not the right word, that obfuscated the essential detail. She was murdering strangers and the same strangers wanted to murder her. She wished she had left some of her hair with her mother to remember her by. When she joined the war effort, like all her friends at school, she didn’t realize they would cut off her hair or that the rifle would be this heavy. .It all seemed to have happened seconds ago, now she was in her seventies, a widow and a landlady. The tenants regard her as incapable of understanding radical things like adventurous sex, magic mushrooms or communism. They have no idea who I am, she thought to herself while retracing the many different characters she played in the story of being Mrs. Tzavniki. She envied Susan’s youth and her ability to play guitar. If she knew tonight she would debut at Fat Albert’s she would attend. Susan was on a roll having written three songs inspired from the exercises in her latest self help book, The Assertive Wallflower. The exercise that tickled her brain most was to get into an argument with someone and then when it seemed really heated do an about face and take the exact same view as the person with whom you were fighting, just change sides and be agreeable. The song she wrote was about the flimsiness of whatever side you believe in. Tonight was the night. She went a week ago and checked it out, enjoyed the low stakes, the cheap cookies and the stale tea. The thing that struck her as most magnificient was the simple act of generosity that performers got in free, it only cost two dollars but it was the principle. Everywhere else, the Free Times Cafe or the Red Winged Blackbird Society you were supposed to buy something and they made you feel awkward if you were a poor musician. But who isn’t a poor musician? Is there a middle class among musicians? There’s the few at the top who won the lottery and then the rest at the poverty level. Fat Albert’s might be in the basement of a church, might not have the cache of a club but this small act of honour, no you don’t pay you are a performer, whether a horrible rendition of something by John Denver or singing about your own guts – it meant here, you are the star.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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