“On March ninth of the year nineteen-ninety-four, at 1:40 in the morning, the greatest novelist in America passed out of this life and into legend.”

Approximately half the people milling around the living room quieted and turned toward the corner of the room where the band was set up. Laughter and excited conversation drifted from the kitchen and front hall; a man’s voice could be heard proclaiming “Not even!” repeatedly and loudly enough to sound amplified. Jaymie turned to look behind him.

“Dear brother,” he said into the microphone. “I’m concerned that these good people will miss an important part of the story. Perhaps if the two of us chime our spoons against our teacups both at the same time—”

A resounding smash ricocheted through the room. Several people jumped, a woman screamed delicately, and a man plagued by chronic tinnitus clapped a hand to the side of his head and fished in his pocket for earplugs. Aaron sat watching Jaymie from behind the drumset, his hands in his lap and one knee vibrating in anticipation. In front of him, the ride and crash cymbals quivered and hummed as they soothed each other and braced themselves for his next sneak-attack.

“Thank you. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jaymie Bukowski, and I was born in the same instant that my ancestor, the great writer Charles Bukowski, slipped away into the afterlife.”

Jaymie had their attention.

“Bukowski was not ready to die! There were still drinks to be drunk, sunsets to stay awake for, and beautiful women to be rejected by—his soul sought a vessel in order to cling to the earthly realm. Ladies and gentlemen, I am that vessel.”

Jo struck an angelic harmonic on the high E string.

“A descendent born at the very moment of his death—Bukowski’s spirit understood what was meant to be.”

As Jaymie described the infant days of his ghostly possession, Rex finished adjusting their bass to a clip-on tuner and spun the volume knob up. They looked around at Jo, who stood serenely with her hands resting on her strings, eyes half closed and a hint of a smile on her lips, and at Aaron, who slouched over his kit wearing a sardonic expression.

The audience began to assemble, the first few rows seated on the carpet in front of them, while more reluctant listeners stood lounging against the walls. Rex flashed a smile at Maggie, who grinned up at them from close enough that Rex could have reached out and tousled her hair.

“There were always signs. At the age of four I got into the schnapps and wrote a treatise on the absurdity of existence. In crayon.”

Rex began a gentle pulsing in the key of A.

“Knowing instinctively of my destiny, my mother raised me on German folk songs and the works of Henry Miller…”

Aaron flipped the snare switch and began the softest possible rolling march.

“I never knew my father! Outcast and scorned by other children, I comforted myself with the knowledge that I was meant for greater things. A memory of my former life whispered to me—haunted me.”

Rex began a more urgent rhythm, matching Aaron’s pattern. Rex was fairly certain there wasn't a single person who had disliked child-Jaymie, much less scorned him.

“By twelve, I had discovered alcohol. My nights were spent in solitude, writing. My first poem had been rejected by all the major periodicals. It was about loneliness.”

Suppressing a smile, Rex glanced at Aaron, who had shared a bunk bed with Jaymie until well beyond the age of twelve and could confirm that Jaymie hadn’t been lonely a day in his life.

***

Maggie listened intently to Jaymie’s speech. Jaymie Brzezinski was, by her calculations, the fourth most brilliant human alive today.

“My brothers and I stand before you, beer-maddened, the bluebirds in our hearts bursting to escape, smiling through our sadness with a set of almost-made-up songs! We’re the Bukowski Brothers’ Broken Family Band…” Rex and Aaron cut out abruptly, and the room thrummed with a charged silence. “…And you can find and follow us on most social media platforms.”

He winked. Aaron coaxed the snare into a quiet drumroll and then a great swell and finally crashed into the beat of their first song. Jo struck into the main riff.

Maggie leaned happily against the red-toqued boy from her school, letting the familiar music wash over her. She sang along under her breath as the band launched into the first verse of “Most Poets”.

“I take it you’ve seen this band before?” asked her new boyfriend, who clearly didn't understand the pressure-free audience dynamic, and felt it was his responsibility to make conversation with the girl curled against his arm.

Maggie sang, “I’ll write you a poem if I wake up on time, most poets can’t write a single fucking simple line…”

“Ha, cool, um, I like them too.”

“I got famous ‘cause the other writers never understood/ it’s because they’re all so bad, not because I was so good!” Maggie shout-whispered the words in his ear as Jaymie crooned them into the microphone.

Keegan surmised that this must mean she liked him, at least a little. Or she just really liked this band. How could one tell? Maybe he should kiss her?

Just then, Jo kicked on an overdrive pedal for the bridge section and Maggie let go of his arm to yell, “Fuck Tolstoy!”

***

“This is the worst band I’ve ever heard,” said a petit man standing against the back wall of the living room. His companion, an even more petite woman lounging beside him, giggled.

“I like them,” she said. “Is this what they call, like, alt-country?”

“His voice sounds like that guy on The X-Factor.”

“They sound like Vulpix, but with words, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.” He didn’t.

“Do you wanna go make out?’

“Yep.”

They left.

***

The band was decent, maybe even decent enough to live up to the hype generated by the young show promoters. But God, what a stupid band name.

Lucas sat cross-legged off to the side of the room and covertly jotted notes into a writing app in the phone balanced on his knee. His music blog had been getting a lot of attention this year, but lately it felt like his normally astute opinions and observations were trickling away as fast as the new ad revenue was coming in.

I can’t help but feel a deep contentedness settle over me, he wrote, as the band breaks into their fourth song, “No Responsibility.” He looked up again. The guitarist had turned on a delay pedal and was sending soft bubbles of sound floating over the heads of the crowd. She really could play.

Bukowski (if that is, in fact, his real name) leads them into a gentle ballad that, upon closer listen, seems to be about the singer’s penchant for “getting drunk and jacking off in bed”. Could he publish that, now that he actually had readers?

Though the term "indie rock" may be too broad a category to be descriptive, The BBBFB's guitar- and synth-centred sound falls firmly on the darker side of this genre; JB presents their lyrics with a frantic theatricality that hearkens to bands like Of Montreal or godddddd I don't want to write this right now

What angle should he go for here? He breathed a sigh that was swallowed by the synthesizer melody. The guitar sighed back, sympathetically exhaling a descending spiral of sixteenth-notes. He put his phone away, missing the days when he and his friends went to shows to get deranged on spiked energy drinks and didn’t worry about remembering the details later.

***

“I can’t decide if this is, like, cosmic nihilism, or if he’s just trying to get attention.”

Jaymie was midway through the chorus of “Professional Drunk”.

“Well, the real Bukowski would never have considered himself a nihilist. There are certainly themes of pessimism and absurdism in his writing.” The two students hunched in the far corner of the room, hands shoved in the pockets of their skinny jeans, deciding whether to be impressed.

“Where’d you find out about this show, anyway?”

“One of the grad students who TA’s my Moral Ambiguity class told me there’s a guy in town claiming to be the next Charles Bukowski. I thought we should check it out.”

“Well, this guy’s read the Charles Bukowski Wikipedia page, I’ll give him that.”

“If it’s nihilism, it’s more existential than cosmic. There’s a lot of hope in Bukowski’s poetry.”

“There's also a lot of literal shit in Bukowski's poems—"

“I should read more Bukowski.”

“—And death, and depravity, and misogyny...”

“This is kinda catchy though, right?”

***

"Oh my god, they're so good!" The young woman who'd co-organized and promoted the show clasped her partner's hand and bobbed on her toes to see over the heads of the thirty-odd audience members lining the outskirts of the living room.

The man nodded, but couldn't focus on the music enough to share her delight. His mind kept wandering to the small guest bedroom off the upstairs hallway.

How the hell are we going to deal with that dead body? he thought. Putting on an indie show never turned out to be as simple as you expected.

***

“Baby, what we’re doing right now, this is exactly like that scene in The Last Abbey.” The petit woman breathlessly pushed her partner against the wall of the now-vacated staircase. The band had managed to draw most of the aimlessly fluttering party attendees toward the flame of their living room corner, and she was glad to find that the upstairs was quiet.

“I know exactly what you mean,” said the small man, running his small hands through her hair and wondering if she’d just invented a movie title off the top off her head. He untucked her thin blouse from her jeans and felt his way up the skin of her back, which felt like an appropriate move for six minutes into a make-out session.

She pressed against him, angling her head up and away, and was pleased when he caught the non-verbal cue to kiss her neck and collarbone. He took the sort of deep, shuddering breath that could either come across as repulsive or irresistible depending on what mood she was in. “Let’s find a bedroom,” she said. He smiled impishly in response.

At the top of the stairs was door that opened into a dark room. They groped at the walls on either side of the entrance for a light switch, but soon gave up. The man could vaguely make out the shadowy form of a mattress on the floor surrounded by oddly shaped piles of junk or debris. A single square of pillow was lit invitingly by a streetlight shining through the curtainless window.

The girl pushed him into the room and pounced. He tumbled, laughing, onto the bed, but instead of soft sheets, his head and hands squelched into something cold, thick, and wet with slime. All around him, clammy, slippery ooze moved in, soaking his clothes and hair. His fingers, almost of their own volition, grasped a handful of the stringy mucus and, trembling, held it to the light.

He screamed.

***

Colin leaned against the doorframe, listening to the songs he’d grown so used to drumming on in practice each week. It was odd to hear his parts in their original form, stripped of his unique flourishes and fills. He noted, with satisfaction, that of the two of them Aaron was the inferior drummer.

It was the first time Colin had gotten a good look at the band from an audience perspective. He’d been recommended to them by their cousin, Sasha, and had never seen them before arriving for his first practice.

The twins were good-looking, if musicians were your thing. They were floppy-haired and lightly freckled; identical and identically dishevelled—yet somehow Jaymie always looked like he'd just given a vigorous performance on a stage or in a bed while Aaron gave the impression of having just barely outrun the cops. If you looked closely enough, Aaron had one distinguishing facial feature from Jaymie, which was a small scar on his left cheek, mostly concealed by a wave of hair hanging over his face. Jaymie wore his hair the same way either out of solidarity or because he wanted to always have the option of impersonating Aaron—he'd once confessed to Colin that he practiced keeping quiet and fidgeting, to strengthen his act for when the opportunity arose.

Aaron was slightly scrawnier than Jaymie, his posture more tense. Colin hadn't spent much time around him, since there was only room for one behind the drum set, but something about him made Colin uncomfortable. Aaron always had the expression of someone who has just realized they’re in a dream where everyone is wearing clothes but them, and is now resigned to waiting around to wake up.

The band executed the hard stop at the end of “Don’t Do It” and started into “A Place in the Heart,” the lyrics of which he’d always thought would be too emo to get away with if the chorus weren’t so catchy. Jo played a palm-muted arpeggio pattern that seemed to traverse the entire neck of the guitar and back every second bar or so.

Jo had intimidated Colin at first with her size, her quiet manner, and the facility she had on her instrument. He’d even had a bit of a crush on her at the beginning, until he’d realized what a complete deadbeat she was. As far as he could tell, Jo was entirely unambitious, yet seemed to have the self-assurance of a person who had done much more with her life than just play the guitar and watch home reno shows in her parents’ basement. He couldn't tell whether she'd perhaps been overly drug-happy in her teen years, or if she really just didn't give a shit.

Jaymie finished a line about the irremediable emptiness of the soul and backed away from his keyboard, which was more of a prop half the time anyway. He stood by the drumkit for four bars doing a shoulder stretch, and then yelped into the mic, “There’s no help for that, n-n-n-n-no, no help for that…” which, repeated sixteen times at different volumes and with one dramatic modulation, made up the final chorus of the song.

Jaymie seemed to have boundless energy. Colin had never seen him tired or downtrodden or at a loss for words, though he’d frequently seen him elated, furious, enraptured, or grief-stricken (for instance, the time one of his favourite bands had put out a bad album). Jaymie moved like he owned whatever stage he was on, and like it had never occurred to him not to be confident.

Little Rex played simple, solid, and perfectly in-time bass parts, which mostly meant you didn’t notice them much. They even adjusted tempo unflinchingly along with Aaron’s dicey drumming. Rex wore their usual uniform of a shapeless indie band t-shirt and jeans. Their brown hair was shot through with blue this week, and gelled into a spikey frame around their face. Colin liked Rex. Nice kid.

“What the hell are you doing here?” A curly-haired woman had appeared from nowhere.

Colin cringed. He should have foreseen that Sasha would be here.

“Just came to see the show,” he said, without looking at her.

“Right, you came to see the band, just for fun, after they kicked you out, after you cheated on me, their cousin. Or did you forget that I’m your bandmates’ cousin? Would you perhaps have made different choices, had you recalled that you were dating the cousin of the people whose band you are in? Sorry—were in.” Sasha had always had a knack for sliding just a hint of vitriol into a tone of voice that was otherwise calm to the point of sounding academic.

“It was an open relationship, Sash. Like you wanted.” he said, and cringed as Aaron played a fill where, in his opinion, a fill should not be.

“Not anymore, it wasn’t. You should have gotten your timing right.”

Colin was not interested in revisiting the same conversation they’d had for the last four days in a row. “They stole my pumpkins,” he said evenly. “I had thirty-six and they’re all gone. I just came to get them back.”

“Seriously? You expect me to believe you came to a house show looking for a bunch of pumpkins? You’re crazy. Look around you! See any vegetables? You’re jealous, or something. You know what? Good luck. I hope you find your goddamn pumpkins. I’m not letting this ruin my night.” She was gone as quickly as she’d appeared. Sasha had an uncanny aptitude for silent entries and exits.

Colin sighed, and Jo hit a wrong note that only he noticed, and Jaymie sang, “Hey, you don’t like it? Then get your ass out of here…”

At a quarter to one in the morning the Bukowskis finished playing Dirty Old Men, the final song of the set, and began to either pack up, seek a drink, or mingle. Colin considered this to be perfect timing, because at 12:50 the police showed up to arrest them.