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The Break

The Break

Written by: Dance Cry Dance
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 A musical literary audio magazine with short stories and songs from the Dance Cry Dance arts collective in Seattle, WA

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Dance Cry Dance Music
Episodes
  • Break 011: So Near Where Earth Sees Its End/No Place Safer

    Break 011: So Near Where Earth Sees Its End/No Place Safer
    Apr 18 2023
    On this episode of The Break, “So Near Where Earth Sees Its End,” written by Elizabeth Kilcoyne, inspired by No Place Safer, the EP by The Good Williams Fringe.So Near Where Earth Sees Its EndBy Elizabeth KilcoyneThe mud on my boots would have bothered me once, but it doesn’t condemn me in a town like this, and I’m far beyond old vanities now. Everybody around here knows the river silt on these banks sticks to you, even after you’re baptized. Every holy roller knows to expect a little smudge of it on the hems of their whitest whites. After sin is scrubbed from you, that mud still lingers and the preacher lets it because there’s only so much God can do about it. God made dirt. Dirt don’t hurt. Or so I’ve been told.That’s why I don’t mind to get right up next to the lip of the bank where it kisses the river, close enough that mud closes over the toes of my boots and clings so thoroughly to the hem of my pants I know years of current couldn’t wash it all away. Of course, even your graveyard dirt wants to sink its claws in me. It clings. It sinks into me like nails digging into my palms. The water won’t wash that away, no matter how long I stare into it, looking for your face and seeing only mine, dim and rippling in the darkness.You’re somewhere in this river even still. You were dispersed into these waters twice, first in those days held beneath the current, moved slow and rhythmic, skin torn from muscle revealing hipbone, ground into limestone riffle-grit, then again after you were raised from the current by search and rescue divers, like angels lifting you into the clouds. Your parents had you torched in holy flame at the Blue Haven Crematorium, near enough to heaven but not quite there. Then after your funeral rites were said, they scattered you back down here again, the place you considered heaven, the waters where in life you often floated face up to the sky, smiling a placid, Ophelia smile for only the sun to see. Water to water to water again, too fluid and lively to have ever been made from or kept in or crushed back into dust.So hell, if you want to get holy about it, I’ll be a prophet now, tired of my short career as a priest. I’ll be a seer, scrying here in the shallows among the crawfish and the hellgramites and the glimmer of low-hanging stars until God defies death and rolls away the moon to reveal your face to me once more. I’ll be the holy man who starves away, who, rose-breathed and emaciated, looks towards sainthood and away from the world, into any darkness that will show me your lovely reflection. But all I see in the darkness is a reflection of the man who thought he could be your redeemer–I suppose I once fancied myself that. A one-time baptizer, I brought you all the way to God, hand-delivered, and now he’s got you, and I’ve got the water you drowned in lapping at my boots.Sending you to Jesus was the last thing on my mind when I held you fast to that muddy river bottom you so loved to float above. I was only thinking about bringing you down below into the mud that made you a little more human, a little less starlight, with a film of current veiling your face.Did that spirit in you really fly above the clouds, or does it linger, tucked into my cheek, hanging at the tail ends of my speech? I still hear your voice, but now it says what I say, thinks what I think, and its broader mountain cadence is swallowed up in wing-clipped city tones. My voice cuts through your meaning. Morphs it with my own. It takes all memory of who either of us used to be before each other, and mangles it, blurring you and me into us with every rippling wave that laps over my reflection until the face before me could belong to us both, an image keeping the vow of one flesh where I couldn’t manage. Your whisper across my tongue now justifies my evil. It forgives my sins. It makes what I say sound true. Where we mingle, I could give our story any flavored ending and where you harmonize, our sadness could sound sweet.What’s left of you is a piece of me, but I’ve stained it like river muck and now I’ll never get it out. Now I have to search the water for any piece that hasn’t touched me yet--what remains separate from the problem, the shittiness of me. My solution, my last hope of salvation. But I’m stuck in the mud I sank you in, a haint counting out particles of sand from particles of silt until I find whatever bones and ash you left behind. I waste, waiting for sunrise, but the night of dark water in front of me stretches its spindly arms until it reaches the Mississippi and holds me farther from you and the light on an endless, sleepless current. My face hollows out into something you wouldn’t recognize, cavernous and thin as rotting leaves. In my weakness I stare, transfixed, loving and forgiving it for all its ugliness in a voice I tore out of your throat.Echo, I’ve found you, hiding in the caved-in mess of my mouth. I’ll end the selfsame way you ...
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    26 mins
  • Break 010: The Source/Apparition

    Break 010: The Source/Apparition
    Feb 14 2023
    On this episode of The Break, “The Source,” written by Josh Hanson, inspired by Apparition, a song by Jessie Marks.The SourceBy Josh HansonThey’d moved at least once a year. Furnished houses filled with anonymous furniture, or sometimes hollow, empty rooms that they would half-heartedly fill with a mattress on the floor and a pressboard chest of drawers. All things that would be left behind with only a water ring on the top or a black scuff along the base to show that they had belonged to anyone, had seen use.This new place was nice, a low, ranch-style house under tall trees, with a wide, fenced yard. Plenty of room for him and his brother to play. But beyond the fence was a stand of trees that led further back into the hills, into a maze of old concrete foundations and rusted girders and the frames of old machinery whose purpose they could not even imagine.It was here that they found the first of the bones.It was in the loose gravel hemmed in by the remains of a ruined foundation, and the boys had been using the space as a kind of no man’s land, scrabbling over the crumbling walls and belly-crawling across the gravel amongst the hail of imaginary gunfire and shrapnel, fingers digging down into the dusty rock, where he uncovered that circle of bright bone.There had been no moment of confusion, no mistaking it for something else. It was so clearly the crown of a skull, off-white with the sutures along the crown clearly marked with dirt.He called to his brother, and by lunchtime, they had uncovered most of the skeleton, the rib cage collapsed and lying in a thousand tiny pieces, but the long bones all whole and almost fully articulated. They stood over the bones and looked down, both of them quiet for a long moment. Who were they? How long had they rested here beneath the gravel and dust? It was as if someone had simply laid down in the center of the floor and gone to sleep, waiting and waiting--how many years the boys could not imagine--for someone to uncover them.He got down on his knees and began to shovel with both hands in the dirt. Somehow he knew there were more. He could almost hear them humming below the surface. They’d waited so long.Within minutes, he’d uncovered the fine bones of a hand, and calling his brother over, the two boys began to clear the ground. Both boys worked in quiet, their faces white with dust and streaked with sweat.The next morning, at the excavation site, the bones shone bright in the morning sun. Three figures laying rigid in their beds, chests collapsed, staring upward. They were about to get down in the gravel and move away more rock and dirt, when he heard something off to his left. He straightened and looked deeper into the trees, back where the rusted frames of machinery were half-hidden by weeds and the ground sloped slightly upward toward the hillside. He watched and listened. Nothing.There it was again. He moved off, leaving his brother playing in the dirt, up, toward the direction of the sound. Almost a voice. He passed through the shadow of the trees, emerging in the next clearing, the chalky red brick of an old foundation off to his left, thin trees growing up where once the building had stood. He cocked his head to the side, strained his hearing. Strained for that humming feel.He began to dig.It took hours before he found something. This time it was the long bone of a leg, very white against the dark clay that made up this part of the slope. Deeper than the others.Following the legs up to the pelvis, he soon realized that the roots of a tree were caught up with the bones, snaking through the ribs. He dug away the dirt from around the roots as well, and by early afternoon the whole skeleton was visible, the tree growing spindly and straight, rising from the ruined chest, so alien there among the bones, and he heard the hum. It was behind him, further up the slope.He followed the path up and around, away from the excavated bones, away from the house, away from the afternoon sun. He walked on until the hillside rose in a sheer cliff-face of deep red rock. He looked up, and the cliff rose out of sight above him. Scrub trees grew at the base of the cliff, and there were chunks of brick here, too, running right up into the cliff face.He followed the line of crumbling brick, just barely breaking the surface, pushing away the brush and high grass. And there was the door. Wider than it was high, maybe three feet across, with a brick archway set in the hillside. The door itself was made of thick timbers that appeared to have been nailed up from inside what he imagined must be a tunnel. He squatted down before the doorway, pressed a hand to the wooden planks. Cold. Solid.He felt the hum in his hand. It was inside, the source of that sound. Deep within the mountain. He imagined it, grub-white and hulking, rubbing itself up again the other side of the door, only inches from his raised hand. It was ancient, timeless, and patient as the earth itself. It sank ...
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    13 mins
  • Break 009: A Parting Gift/Everybody Loves Christmas

    Break 009: A Parting Gift/Everybody Loves Christmas
    Dec 15 2022
    On this episode of The Break, “A Parting Gift,” written by James M. Maskell, inspired by Everybody Loves Christmas, the song by Seattle artist and producer Nat Bayne.A Parting GiftBy James M. MaskellIt wasn’t until after she decided not to decorate that Mary found the package tucked away in the closet one Friday morning in December. Its blue and green plaid giftwrap blended seamlessly into the folded stack of flannel bed sheets and she thought she may have even seen it before without realizing. Silver and white ribbon crossed impressively tight over the top of the box—something she’d insisted on for years—but the bulky, irregular folds under the taped edges were unmistakably his. It was the one thing he’d left behind after walking out last month without an explanation. “It’s just not working out” he’d told her, his things already packed in the car when she’d arrived home from work. Last week a friend said she saw him out with a woman she had met once or twice, Katie or Kaitlyn, or something like that, and Mary wondered for how long that had been going on.She thought about the package her whole way to the office as the first snow of the season drifted down, thought about it through her morning coffee and into the staff meeting where management reminded everyone about the upcoming holiday party. Small decorations had begun to show up in cubicles since Thanksgiving, and now the more aggressive office-wide celebration was taking shape: garland hung over doorways; potted poinsettias on desks and countertops; a plastic menorah on the table by the watercooler; and of course, the horribly misshapen four-foot artificial tree in the corner, its cheap ornaments with their tattered satin threads revealing the Styrofoam core beneath. Of course, nothing could be tackier than the mistletoe someone hung over the copy machine. She suspected it was Derek, the office creep, but found out later it was actually Janice, the jovial assistant manager whose inappropriate office banter fell just under the radar of the general public.And yet, despite the poorly executed holiday displays at work, and the newly discovered gift left behind by the man she thought she’d eventually marry, the season still managed to hold for her a certain charm.Mary had loved everything about Christmastime as a child. Department stores transformed into shining lands of red, green, and silver. All through the neighborhood, ladders leaned against the gables and gutters of capes and split-level ranches as children fed strings of lights up to their fathers, untangling the lines one kink at a time and working desperately to finish the job before the first snowfall. And the music... Perry Como, Brenda Lee, Sinatra, Nat King Cole, and Mary’s absolute favorite, the angelic and haunting “Carol of the Bells.” God, how she loved the music.What she adored most was the enchanting conversion that took place inside her childhood home. Her mother wrapped and ribboned the picture frames so imaginary presents hung from the walls. A wooden manger replaced the clock over the fireplace, as monogrammed stockings spread outward across the mantle, Mom’s and Dad’s on the left, hers and her brother Joey’s on the right. And then, once Dad had set the tree in its stand and strung it full of lights, the four of them trimmed it with ornaments and silver tinsel, as the fragrant Douglas fir became the centerpiece of their home. Wrapped presents appeared beneath it, quietly, one at a time, over the next few weeks.But, with each passing year, Christmas shed just a bit of its magic. The strains of suburban life emerged as Dad’s hours were cut and money grew scarce. Their tightening budget grew more noticeable as Christmas drew near. Her family maintained their holiday routines as best they could, but over time those traditions became little more than habits, as though they were merely checking off boxes with each decoration. Joey moved out three years before her and, after she graduated college and left for the city, her parents quietly divorced, sold the house, and moved on to their own lives. Mary brought a few of her favorite childhood ornaments with her when she and her boyfriend moved in together, and the past two Christmases, while quiet, were intimate and lovely, echoing many of the sights and sounds she’d adored as a child. Now she was alone and didn’t see the point of a Christmas that couldn’t be shared.When five o’clock finally rolled around at the office that day, Mary rushed home even more urgently than usual, ridding herself of the fraudulent workplace cheer. She got off the train a few stops early, the package once more consuming her mind. The snow, beautiful that morning, had melted mostly, leaving scant patches on the grass and gray, slushy clumps by the side of the road. Why buy me a gift if he was planning to leave? she wondered as she walked the damp and dreary path home. When she reached her building, the young couple...
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    13 mins
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