The second story up on the blog today is from Megan Orsini. She’s another one of those writers that makes it look so damn easy, and whose prose is sharp, cutting like a knife. Her stories are inventive, smart and wonderful.

Her story from Music’s Box, “A Legend Unto Himself” is based on the song “15 Stories” by the band Jump, Little Children, and deals with a subject that’s not easy to talk about: suicide. The character in the song and her story tries to find some glory in a bad situation, hoping that a statue would be erected in their honor for doing the deed at hand. And this character is very particular with the way they go about it, sudden and without warning. It’s a subject that Megan handles wonderfully and respectfully to the source material.

“A Legend Unto Himself”

By Megan Orsini

A screaming pierced the otherwise silent air. Ian heard no other unusual sounds: no sirens, no panicked voices, not even a single car. Only the faint echo of the lingering scream and he wondered if the scream had come from outside at all or whether it actually came from him and he wondered, all those nights alone with no one to tell him otherwise, how many times did he cry out with no one there to soothe him back to sleep? He looked for Ava but she wasn’t beside him. It took a few minutes to remember that he wasn’t at home and even if he had been, Ava was dead.

Three days earlier it had been the phone that woke him. Ava dead in the driver’s seat. Tonight the phone was silent. Tonight it was just Ian, unless you counted the dog, which Ian often did not. The drooling dog with the perpetually exposed tongue that Ian’s brother Michael loved more than, Ian long ago decided, Ian himself. Ian told Michael to forget the dog and find a prostitute, but Michael said he couldn’t because where would the dog sleep. Michael was on the night-shift at the hospital. The dog slept with Ian.

Ian hadn’t been outside in three days. Not since Wednesday night, not since he got the call, and now it was very late Saturday. The thick glass of Michael’s basement apartment was difficult to see through, no matter how hard Ian tried. He didn’t know what exactly was keeping him inside so he covered his arms with a thermal shirt and then layered a thick flannel shirt over that.  He pulled a knit cap down over his head and shoved his hands into wool gloves and after two pairs of pants he pulled on heavy boots and when he was sufficiently bundled, when he felt that he could withstand the cold for hours or more, Ian turned the lock and the knob and went out into the frozen night.

But it wasn’t cold, Ian found.  Not anymore. The air was pleasant and hardly even nipped at his exposed nose, merely swiping it like a playful kitten and as he stepped from the curb he immediately fell ankle deep not into snow, but into an almost luke-warm puddle.

“Fucking shit goddamn shit.” Ian stood on the sidewalk. Busses sped through slush and the few people who were still out, dog walkers, smokers, insomniacs, lovers hesitant to end their night, all these people jumped over thick piles of melted and dirty gray snow. There was one lone white glacier left on the sidewalk outside of Michael’s building and Ian stomped through it, his toes not even freezing at the contact, and he kicked the snow, a child throwing a tantrum. Ian went back inside and up to the roof.

The building was fifteen stories. Ian stood on the ledge and looked down. He imagined falling and what it would feel like. He imagined that the wind would spread his arms out wide, push them back so that for a brief instant, just a single moment, he would feel like he was flying and maybe he’d flap them a little, push back at the wind, try to stay afloat, but it would never work. You can’t make yourself stay afloat, you needed some sort of contraption to hold you up and Ian hadn’t had the forethought to build himself a pair of wings, never had the forethought, never knew when he’d find himself standing on a ledge fifteen stories up.

A blue Pontiac was parked at the curb and Ian thought he could make himself hit it if he put his mind to it, truly believed in himself. He thought he’d land gracefully and perfectly intact though perfectly dead. He pulled a crooked picture from his pocket, the one he copied at the library, a picture of a girl, young, who had thrown herself from the Empire State Building and landed on the roof of a white Chrysler. The roof had dented beneath her, cradled her, and the girl looked to be nothing more than asleep. Ian would have liked to kiss that girl, part her dead and pliant lips just one last time. He thought they’d probably still be a little warm and maybe they’d contain secrets that would make him want to live or maybe they’d contain traces of poison that would make him want to die.

He’d had no desire or urge to kiss the lips of his dead wife, though he’d been to see her at the morgue, was the one to identify the body. They’d said she’d been buckled in, always with the seatbelt, even restrained when she wasn’t moving. She never could have jumped, never would have flown. When he saw her on the metal table he didn’t panic. They left him alone, a chance to say goodbye, but Ian didn’t stay with her. He sat on the cold floor of the morgue and said to her, to himself, “you should have waited. You never waited for me.” Ava was naked under the thin, white sheet and Ian had come home and found her like this so many nights before but this time as he stared at her lifeless form she appeared like doll, a mannequin, not a human, like she was never alive. Not like the girl in the picture with the crossed ankles and curled hair.

Those nights, when he came home and found her asleep, clothed or unclothed, Ian kissed Ava’s cheek gently, so gently, hardly even letting his lips land on her smooth skin, afraid to wake her, afraid to disturb her, afraid to do anything to her when she looked so soft, so breakable, like the lightest touch from him would shatter her. He sometimes hoped she wasn’t actually asleep, that she was waiting for him to come home and that maybe, one night, finally she’d open her eyes and pull him down on top of her, proving to him, again, that she was strong enough to handle him. Ava never did open her eyes for Ian.

Ian’s toes came just slightly past the edge of the roof and he could bend them down and over the side, but he didn’t dare take another step, neither forward nor back, simply stood there on the roof, in the cold, because, as it turned out, fifteen stories wasn’t all that high, really.

The river cut the city in half just a few blocks north of the building and the train tracks ran along the south side, though the train was merely a freight and rarely ran at all anymore. Ian imagined that when he jumped, if he jumped, and when he landed perfectly, that the city would erect a statue in his honor. A work of art for the work of art that he created upon falling. Perfectly intact. Perfectly dead. Not a trickle of blood, not a visible crack on his body. He would be immortalized in bronze because he took a flying leap, like so many track runners before him. That statue, of course, would not represent him as a corpse, but as a man in motion. Midway over the hurdle. Mid-swing of the bowling ball. He’d be a trophy.  A legend.

From below came a sharp, shrill scream and in the headlights and streetlights and the glow of the giant moon almost in reach Ian could just barely see a woman on the sidewalk pointing a finger in his general direction. Ian stepped back from the ledge. Not tonight. He would not give them a show. When he jumped, if he jumped, it would be sudden, unexpected. Nobody would know what hit them. That’s why he’d get the prize. For exceeding expectations. For doing more than anyone thought possible of him.