As Taffy Slummings awoke the next morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into an unrecognizable creature. With no mirror in his tiny cell, Taffy could see only his appendages, no longer resembling arms or legs but something more like … well, like nothing Slummings had ever seen before.
Before he could ask himself the question What have I become?, the cell door opened and a guard poked his head in. “Aaahhh!” he screamed and slammed the door shut.
Slummings was not unaccustomed to people sneering, scowling or squinching up their faces at the sight of him when he was living on the streets, and even Emma Span had recoiled at the smell of his dirty clothes, but he’d never caused them to slam a door in his face.
What has happened to me? he thought. Have I …? he hesitated to think the thought he was thinking. To name what he feared. To verbalize what popped into his head.
“I’m not Gregor Samsa!” he shouted. The cell walls were indifferent.
He studied his former arms and legs. They looked unusual, he admitted, even un-human, perhaps, but not bug-like, not vermin-like, not—he shuddered—cockroachish.
No, he concluded silently, I am not the 21st century victim of some Austrian writer’s hallucination.
“I am not metamorphosing,” he said aloud, then doubted that was the right form of the word. “Metamorphosizing?” he mumbled. Fuck it, he thought, this isn’t, this can’t be, there’s no precedent.
“It ain’t The Metamorphosis, okay?” he said aloud, expecting someone or something to contradict him. But the jail cell, indeed the universe, remained silent.
He reached out to bang on his cell door, but there was no hand at the end of his un-arm-like appendage. He studied this new extension. It was long and narrow, like his arms had been, but flatter, less round, more like a narrow piece of wood. And at the end, where he was accustomed to seeing his fingers, were something like pegs—six of them, not five—and instead of flexing and bending they seemed to turn or twist, rather like screws, Slummings thought. Lines ran up the length of these long appendages to somewhere beyond where he could see, since his head didn’t want to turn anymore. The lines looked like he had some sort of strange food poisoning that was streaking the infection toward his heart.
That thought stopped him. Did he still have a heart? He put what used to be his hand to what used to be his chest to feel for a pulse, but all that happened was that the wooden appendage groaned in resistance and the streaks twanged their opposition.
The sound filled the tiny cell. So he tried again to touch his heart. Instead, he made the same sound again. Twang. Then he tried with his other arm but the same thing happened. Twang. For a moment he considered waving his former arms around in the air to make a sort of groaning music, but he realized waving was out of the question. Beside, he was in no mood to make music.
He tried to stand, but what used to be his feet just slid out from under him and he landed flat on the floor with a great booming echo that rattled his bones. For a moment he didn’t move. He stared up at the ceiling. He saw some writing on the ceiling but he couldn’t decipher it. He squinted his eyes until he could make it out.
Not writing at all, but … musical notes. Slummings had no musical training but he recognized notes. He just didn’t know what they meant.
He worked at it, harder than Taffy Slummings had worked at anything in years, decades really, probably since he was a college student trying to impress the campus activists or seduce some coed. He was sweating, but he was filling his little cell with twangs and strums and plucks and thrums that almost seemed to make a tune.
Slummings paused in his acoustic adventures. He relaxed his arms, or what used to be his arms, and concentrated on seeing a series of the notes on the ceiling all at once.
Nothing.
He tried again.
His belly hummed.
Again he relaxed and focused on the notes on the ceiling.
His arm muscles tightened and released making the humming sound shift in pitch.
He tried again … and again … and again … until by relaxing and focusing he made sounds that flowed together like, well, like music. Only it was blue. The sound was blue, it filled the tiny cell with blue sound, and Slummings thought he recognized the tune.
STRUM-da-da-da-da-strum-strum.
STRUM-da-da-da-da-strum.
The words came back to him.
TAKE me-out-to-the ball game.
TAKE me-out-to-the crowd.
Suddenly Slummings was singing along with the music that poured out of his belly. His arm muscles tightened and relaxed to create rhythm and pitch and his whole body quivered with the sound.STRUM-da-da-da-da-strum.
The words came back to him.
TAKE me-out-to-the ball game.
TAKE me-out-to-the crowd.
“Buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks,” he howled out.
I don’t care if I never get back!
For it’s root root root for the home team
If they don’t win it’s a shame!
For it’s one … two—
I don’t care if I never get back!
For it’s root root root for the home team
If they don’t win it’s a shame!
For it’s one … two—
The cell door clanged open and a giant in a blue uniform stood over Slummings. “This ain’t no music hall, so shut the fuck up.” The blue giant slammed the door as he left. He took all the blueness with him.
“… three strikes you’re out,” Slummings whispered to his cell walls, once again the blank color of cement, but the music returned and with it, the blueness. He didn’t sing, but he heard the final line of the song in his head as his belly vibrated in the rising crescendo that ended the song:
“Old … Ball … Game!”
When the last echo of a note faded into the blue cement walls, Slummings lay on the floor in a cool blue sweat, smiling. Life was good. Music was good. Blue was good.
Baseball was the best.
Restored, Slummings fell into a deep sleep, filled with music and blue dreams.