Travis is lying on the short couch watching the television—even though it’s off—one leg sprawled lazily across the couch, the other sliding gradually to the floor. His arms are piled up around his head cradling his brain, which is testing daydream music lines. He’d just finished playing, but even though he’s set his guitar down, the music is not done with him.

Some muses are wary ones, approaching artists carefully, only when sure of inspiration. Some are romantic, desperate to be real and alive with their chosen watch and the inspiration is a constant, needy one. Others are lazy, tossing an artist morsels, crumbs, just enough to drive them mad with need. Travis’s muse is a fat nag, and it never shuts up. Like a town parade, a constant, incessant procession of melodies march and stomp their way across the crevices of Travis’s cortex—most of them awful, like earworms. If he isn’t talking or playing, she is annoying him, sending tunes by the thousands and yelling after all of them, asking if they’re wearing clean underwear. He plays and plays his heart out when he sits, struggling, sweating through catharsis after catharsis, and still she nags him. No matter how long he plays or hums, moans or taps, his muse returns when he stops, screaming in a high-pitch, shrill voice, “Travis! I can’t hear you playing! Are you playing? Why aren’t you playing, Travis? You need to be playing—it’s good for you—you’re gonna’ die if you don’t keep playing!” Travis can see his muse sitting just above his head, three hundred pounds over weight, with curlers in her fiery red hair. She is eating hostess cakes whole, spilling crumbs down onto his neck where they tumble into his t-shirt. He rolls over on the couch and hides his face. “That stinks! Play somethin’ else!” she hollers. And then she burps. Loudly.

He can’t sustain the image without crying or laughing or both, so he shoves his nose into the beer stained cushions and concentrates on the darkness. He is tired of feeling, tired of trying, tired of any emotion at all—knows that’s why the show Wednesday night was so… angry. He wants complacency, apathy, maybe disdain—just a break from the heart. Nick comes into the room just as Travis is turning over, jamming his face in the couch. “I didn’t wanna’ look at you either,” he mumbles, his hair stuck up on one side, his clothing wrinkled.

After Joe’s, they’d gone to ER to throw darts and have a couple of beers and then come home—the beer and the heat rocking Nick gently, lightly into bed and then clubbing him over the head. “I feel like ass,” Nick laments as he shuffles through the living room. Travis rolls back over on the couch to watch as Nick teeters randomly around the room, into the kitchen and back out. Nick stands by the couch, staring at the floor for a moment and then walks in a circle around the blue armchair. Just for effect, he bumps into the front door a couple of times like a wind-up toy.

“Feeling a little disoriented?” Travis asks.

Nick runs his hand through his hair and looks back to Travis. “Did I mention I feel like ass. I hate heat-beer induced naps. Where’s the phone?”

Travis shrugs.

Walking over to the phone base and bending over, Nick presses the page button. The phone’s base begins screaming as Travis covers his head with a seat cushion. Nick looks around the room with a vacant expression, “That’ll teach ya’ not to pay attention to the location of the phone.” Suddenly, in epiphany, Nick stumbles over to the blue armchair and pulls the seat up, revealing the phone and he collapses into the chair and dials.

Travis peers around the room, out from under his protective cushion. Nick is facing the other direction. He spots a daily calendar on the floor—the kind that have a saying for every day. Currently, it is on May 26th, and Travis picks it up to amuse himself while Nick is still on the phone. He reads a day, tears it off and throws it at Nick. Most of the crumpled-up paper balls bounced off the back of the armchair. Now and then, one of the paper grenades arcs pleasantly through the air and hits Nick in the head. After June 3rd beams him squarely in the cranium, Nick spins around in the armchair and shakes his fist. Engrossed in one of the sayings, Travis pretends not to notice Nick’s tantrum, and promptly throws the paper at Nick when he is done reading it. It misses and falls harmlessly to the floor—with about twenty others. Nick reaches down, picks one up and throws it back at Travis, hitting him in the arm. Travis proceeds to act out a miserably dramatic, looney tunes, death as Nick finishes his conversation. “All right, we’ll see you there.” He hangs up the phone and looks complacently at Travis writhing on the floor. Picking up another piece of paper from the floor, Travis sits up and throws it at Nick.

“Quit it, quit it, quit it,” Nick says with a Turrett’s syndrome tick in his neck.

Travis throws another.

“You better cut it out!” Nick hollers in a dramatic feminine voice.

“My God!” Travis declares, sprawling out across the floor. “If you weren’t so fat I might be able to breathe in here!”

“I’m not fat!” Nick yells like a deranged housewife. He gets up for a moment, covers his face with his hands, sobs, and run-stomps into the kitchen.

“Who was that on the phone?” Travis asks from the floor.

Nick keeps sobbing and doesn’t reply.

“I’m sorry. You’re not that fat. You just need to lose a couple of hundred pounds for your health’s sake, honey.”

“Well now, that’s better.” He comes back into the room. “That was Karen. She’s goin’ to ER with Chris.”

“Karen?”

Nick shrugs. “I felt like calling her after we talked about it.”

“Well, that’s cool.” Travis picks up the calendar, reads another saying out loud:

June 12th “Traveling in the company of those we love is home in motion.” -Leigh Hunt

He tears it off and throws it to on floor.

“Hey! Don’t do that!” Nick says.

“Why not?” Travis asks as he does it again.

June 13th “The only true gift is a portion of yourself.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We won’t know what day it is!” Nick says, agitated.

Travis looks at his friend blankly and proceeds to tear another day off the calendar—not bothering to look at it. “Noooo!” Nick yells, hysterically, as though watching the days of his life vanish. He stands up from the couch and rushes Travis to grab the calendar. They rough-house for a minute, Travis attempting to pull off as many days as he can in clumps before Nick wrest the calendar from him.

Staring at it in horror for a moment, Nick says, “Oh my God! It’s August 11th. I missed my mother’s birthday!”

Travis thinks on the matter stoically as he pulls himself up off the floor and back onto the couch. “I should call my brother. It’s his birthday.”

“What? Really?” Nick asks. “What’s your brother’s birthday?”

“Today,” Travis replies thoughtfully.

“What date?”

“August 11th.”

Nick sits down on the long couch again and begins reading the sayings, ripping them off and throwing them on the floor when he is done. Holding the calendar up like a holy relic of some kind, Nick declares in a deep voice, “And so brought forth good Nicholaus of the Gideons the calendar showing all men and mortals what thy real date is.”

“That would suck if it was already August.”

“It is already August.”

“Summer’s gone by fast.” Then he thinks again, “Well, not that fast.”

“It’s like it’s been going by fast—so fast, that it seems real slow.”

They sit for a moment, looking at all the days, spread crumpled all across the floor.

Read the whole thread: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: calendars, Kisten Shelley, Nick Vaughn, time, Travis Fleeting