The Wages, An Illustrated Story
by Charles F. Vincent
A black-winged country singer recalls 58 years of life as she crosses a dangerous wasteland to the void, where she must battle a murderous demon bent on destroying the world she left behind.
The Story
Brandy Cinnamon Wages wanted to go home. For a year she’d been on tour, performing concerts throughout the world of Faterfair – a world populated by women who have, like her, grown wings.
But Brandy's tour bus took a wrong turn, and she was diverted from Faterfair into a wasteland encircling the void. There, she witnessed the horrific death of her male guitarist, slain by a demon.
Brandy's cohorts in Faterfair hastily cobbled together a radio to contact her. They told her the demon’s name was Eyedeevee, and that he hoped to find an interdimensional camera hidden in the void. Brandy learned the demon aimed to travel through the camera lens, past the wasteland and Faterfair to our world, which he planned to burn to fuel his own lifeforce.
The faters asked Brandy to block the demon from collecting the camera, but Brandy didn’t know if she could. She was frightened of Eyedeevee’s power, she didn't know how to navigate the wasteland, and she had no way to survive inside the void, even if she found it. But despite her doubts and fears, she’d embarked on a series of increasingly dangerous misadventures.
In this excerpt, Brandy is accompanied by her lie-detecting sister, the drummer Crystal Carmel Wages. They’re joined by David, who’s lost in time, and a talking fawn named Phon. This unlikely crew was being held prisoner in a gaol cart by an army of centaurs called Beaduren. Like Brandy and Crystal, the warring centaurs were there to battle the demon Eyedeevee, but they were deeply suspicious of the winged women and how they might interfere.
Brandy hated being imprisoned, but hoped the armed battalion would defeat the demon so her fighting skills wouldn’t be tested against the monstrous royalty of darkness.
For the Beaduren, however, the battle with Eyedeevee proved disastrous.
The soldiers’ doomed conflict reminded Brandy of the many battles she’d fought during her lifetime, while the demon’s desire to set fire to existence reminded her of the blazing fury she’d once felt toward the world...
Battle Fires
We join this chapter as fires spread down the war hill, toward the gaol cart where Brandy and her companions are trapped...
“Let us out, let us out!” I screamed. All of us shouted, our voices stoked by fear.
As the fire edged closer, The Souoth stopped and exchanged quick words with the big centaur who’d pulled the jail cart.
“What are you doing?” I shouted. “Let us out!”
He galloped toward us.
“I had to get the key,” he said, fumbling with it. The lock clicked open, but he held the door shut tight.
“Open it!” I screamed. “Open the door!”
“Why are you waiting?” demanded Crystal.
We grabbed the bars of the door and tried to shake it, but it didn’t budge – two winged women, a man, and a talking deer couldn’t counter the strength of this smaller, older centaur’s single hand.
“I touched Eyedeevee and learned his mind,” he said, displaying his blackened palm. “There is nobody in the attack party that he fears, save one. It's not a soldier. He's only afraid of the black-winged prisoner, Sad Song.”
“Me?” I asked. I peered up at the battalion retreating from the carnage on the hill. More than a hundred creatures, each a hundred times stronger than me, were running away injured. Some were being gathered, in pieces, while all around them lay smoking corpses. I looked back at The Souoth.
“Yes, you,” said The Souoth. “But he believes you’ll help him instead. Don’t help Eyedeevee!” Then he stepped back, and the barred door flung open.
“How? How? How?” The defeated chorus of mourning centaurs grew louder as the flames spiked higher.
The Souoth trotted away to join his comrades. We scrambled out the open door to join the mass retreat.
But then The Souoth paused, and turned. “Don't help him!” he shouted. “Please! Remember the joy of sharing your music with the world.”
The Green Park of Songs and Parables
My lead guitarist had just quit, and we were about to head from Hamilton into London, Ontario, to play at one of the festivals there. Just an afternoon spot, but on the main stage. I had been hopeful that we could impress, and get a later spot next year, but now I was just hoping to do a good job without the lead.
“We’re on the bill, and people are expecting professional musicians who don’t disappoint,” I said to the band. “Everyone getting on this bus is a professional. I am proud of all of you. Let’s get this show on the road.”
Jerome, the guitarist in question, had been fighting with just about everybody in the band for a while, except for me and Joanne, my bass player who had become my girlfriend of a couple of years.
Finally Jerome had started arguing with me a few days in a row.
About silly things; “Look, Brandy, my guitar is being tuned before yours, so it will be less in tune by the time we play. My lead is more audible, and so my tuning is more important, so fuck it, mine should be done last.”
As if his guitar would go out of tune in the two minutes it took for mine. Things like that.
It was extreme of him to quit in mid-tour. I didn’t really understand his reasons, and I thought that word of a dramatic mid-tour quit might precede his next auditions elsewhere. I had tried to explain this to him without sounding threatening, but to this Jerome said, “I am also tired of being condescended to as if I was your God-damned student all the time.”
Which I found upsetting, because I like to feel I am helping my musicians, not just bossing them around. I didn’t think of the helping and teaching as a bad thing. But I guess he did.
So I had been rallying everybody for a set without lead guitar, and we got into our half-length aqua-coloured school bus that had some back seats chopped out to make room for music gear, and headed to London.
It had been a decade since we returned to Canada and recorded in Toronto, where the label Snappy Tramp released my supposed ’80s comeback single and video called ‘Better Part of the Week’. Snappy Tramp folded just as the song broke into the 100 for country. I had high hopes for Snappy Tramp, but so did a lot of people. We were all disappointed. Extracting your obligations from a bankrupt company is no fun.
I could have tried for more recording, but watching the charts is like having a weekly job review that is good one or two times, but usually bad, and if it’s bad you’re on your way out. The idea of trying to recoup on another expensive music video was daunting. I think my nerves made the choice for me finally. I was still most interested in staying sane. I was a bereaved mother, not a fresh new face.
The Canadian bar circuit, through Windsor, and the rest of Ontario and then up north with a few loops through the Prairies and Quebec, kept us going, and I gave up on the records. I left chasing rainbows to the young risk-runners, and decided I was happy to bring a little joy to the good people of Wawa and Sudbury. Making a living, just like the people I was playing for. Not super-stardom, but we could pay our bills. My audience would be mining towns, and resources workers, and Ontario was still a manufacturing powerhouse full of money then. There were enough country fans out there that we could build a band, and eat too.
But now Crystal was questioning the wisdom of not making records.
“We would have an easier time keeping musicians if you could cut a new song that got some fresh attention. It’s been a long time since we released ‘Better Part.’ Maybe we should try Nashville again.”
“Maybe. Are they going to stall me with the pop/outlaw thing again?”
“You’re just making excuses, as usual.”
“Bullshit. I’m not an excuse-maker!”
“You’re a good postponer and avoider.”
“Am not. I just think that we’re doing fine.”
“We keep recouping, but it’s diminishing returns.”
“Uh yeah OK.”
“Our audience is getting older, and don’t want to drink on weeknights. People aren’t so casual about driving home loaded anymore. If scale pay keeps weakening, we’ll be trying to live out of a passed hat soon. Phil keeps saying there’s an easier way for him to book us in the casinos and those newer venues. He says things are taking a new direction. He keeps saying the T-word.”
“Tribute band? No way. I love covers, but I don’t want to get a bunch of crappy wigs, and be the older and shorter version of so-and-so, with a more rinky-dink light show. No.”
“OK miss artiste, I don’t want to do it either. But then you have to define yourself somehow, to keep people interested in you.”
“They still get excited when I play the start of ‘Trashy’, and I heard ‘Can’t Touch a Dream’ on the easy radio station in Tillsonburg. It’s my cross-over sleeper.”
“From the ’70s. Two decades ago.”
“I thought I was in some pretty good company on that station.”
“That’s nice Brandy. We don’t get mechanicals for sales of that song, but I will see if the airplay pushes up the next SOCAN cheque. But we have to keep making enough money to pay the band, a driver, and ourselves, too. It’s a big group. Right now we’re just breaking even from gig to gig, based on your stage presence and a few old songs. But it’s expensive, and the whole outfit will be in jeopardy soon, if we don’t break out of this pattern somehow.”
“Ah, shit. Why are you always so reasonable?”
“I’m just telling you to take a chance on making another recording. It’s a risk. But we can’t rest on the back catalog at our level. You’ve got the start of a few new songs—we have to put them out there if we want to stay in the game at all.”
“Why do we live like this?”
“Because it’s your dream?”
“What’s your dream, big sister?”
“Making enough money to keep gas in the bus, and pay everyone so they can eat.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Do that. Or start shopping for wigs.”
I stared out the window at Ontario for a long time.
I wondered how much my musical talent contributed. I mulled my theory that Crystal’s organizational skill combined with her drive to be Canada’s most prolific reverse groupie was a large part of what kept us going. When the cash thinned out, there was still a tall lonesome cowboy in every town from Vancouver to St. John. I think she was the biggest safe sex advocate of all drummers ever, and she lived by example.
I was still hoping I could keep something lasting with a lover, just one, for good.
As the rounded softness of the countryside rolled by, I started wondering when Joanne and I could slip off somewhere and have a lot of oral sex with each other. I thought about giving her butt some smacks, then getting my hands into her short blonde hair and yanking her pretty face into me, and then letting her yank me around to where she needed. We were due for it. I wanted to lie around and talk with her afterward, like we used to. We needed to get that part back. Two naked disheveled women, a heap of tired curves interwoven like the Ontario hills, talking about music and dreams, or about where we came from and what we believed, or about breakfast—about anything.
I liked to hear about her life. The golden retriever named Hector that she had as child, and her descriptions of the beauty of the Kingston, Ontario landscape she grew up in. How she had liked math better than other subjects, and related that to music.
She would tell of her time discovering herself as a young lesbian; both the joys, and the emotional—and physical—threats she had faced. She had been out at an age where I was still struggling with my internal life, but it was tough for her.
Once three young bashers had surrounded her and a girlfriend, and one of the guys punched Joanne hard in the stomach. One said, “Oh shit sorry! We thought you were two guys!” as if a little Canadian politeness made any kind of queer-bashing OK. They fled while she shook and cried down on the sidewalk. She thought it was guys from out of town, and it could have been much worse, but it was enough to scare her friend out of their relationship.
When she was in high school, she was groped by an acquaintance who claimed he was trying to “just get friendly and fix her.” This guy was popular, so many people accepted his flat-out denials when she dared to float a few complaints to friends, and their dismissive responses made her feel like shit, and she backed down, but she did notice their wariness of him afterward.
And she had been shoved into snowbanks more times than she could count. I admired her for trying to find ways of standing up for her self through everything, and how even when she was tempted to let go of who she was, she always came back to her self, and her truth.
I loved her love of Elvis and Charles Mingus, and how she related to their sense of differentness, and thought, or at least hoped, there might be little of both of them in her.
She was interested in my stories, and sympathetic, and kind. We hadn’t had a heart-to-heart about things for a while, and I wanted to prompt her into talking with me.
She was smart, and she was so good looking. And what a bass player. She could do this beautiful jazz stuff I couldn’t even understand. Musically, I thought she was slumming with me; while I chugged away in major and minor chords, she could play elegant jazz circles around me on her bass if she wanted. She could even do the jazz things on an electric bass, which is the instrument I like for my backing. When she played, she would get this look on her like she was desperate and satisfied at the same time. It was hot. I had never had this kind of musical, and love, and sexual relationship all in one before. This was something good in my life right then, and I felt it needed checking in on.
But my mind had to return to the work ahead.
So now we had to do a concert without a lead guitar.
I was disappointed, but I was confident in my ability to fill the rhythm guitar, and let the fiddle and pedal steel take the solos. I might even throw off my banjo and acoustic guitar and clang around on my Telecaster once or twice.
At last we arrived.
“OK get moving everybody,” I said, “We don’t have until the night to sort ourselves out. We’re up first.”
Crystal got everybody out except Joanne who lingered behind me.
As we were stepping off the bus, Joanne stretched her arms beside me and said to me “It’s because of me that you keep losing musicians.”
“Huh? I don’t see that,” I said, blinking at her in the sun and pushing my hands into the weary back of my neck. “What do you mean?”
“It’s hard on the other musicians because of our relationship,” she scrunched up the corners of her mouth. “For them it’s like working somewhere where the boss is fucking one of the staff.”
“What? Why would you say that? I don’t see it that way,” I said, feeling my brow furrow.
“I overheard Jerome say exactly that to the other men not long ago, and now he quit. I think that’s why you lost Lloyd on the fiddle in the winter and had to replace him, too.”
“Wait. Jerome actually said that before he quit?”
“I heard it. I don’t think he meant me to. They laughed too. I think it’s a strain on all of the other musicians in your band.”
“I don’t think Crystal feels that way,” I said.
“Crystal is your sister. It makes for a pretty closed club if you have your sister and your girlfriend in the band. I think they feel like they are more cut off from you than I am, because I am always getting it on with you.”
“Oh Joanne, even if it were true, which I doubt, it’s their problem, not yours, okay? It’s my thing to fix.” I said.
“That’s nice, but you’re talking to me like a boss would. Not a lover.”
I was a little irritated, but I felt bad for her and said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know it’s hard. It’s a crazy life we all live.”
I stood close to Joanne for a moment, and I touched her face with my hand, and looked into her eyes, but she still looked dejected, squinting into the afternoon light, hiding the sweet blue behind her scrunched-up eyelids.
“I forgot my sunglasses. I’ll catch up in a minute,” Joanne said. She looked gloomy as she stepped back on the bus, and I slumped in disappointment and turned and headed for the bandshell.
In the crowd milling around at the festival, a couple of guys saw me trying to be affectionate with Joanne. I didn’t even kiss her, but it got these two upset.
“Did you see that Ross? They’re lezbos,” said the first.
“More dykes playing my beloved country music, it isn’t right,” said the guy who must have been Ross.
The first guy yelled at me, “Hey baby! Go to church and read the Bible! It’s Adam and Eve, not Eve and Steve!”
“Fuck, sober up, Bill,” said Ross to him, laughing. “You’re supposed to say Adam and Steve.”
“Bah, you get it. The whole thing gets me screwed up. Doesn’t make sense. She just needs a little convincing. Hasn’t done it with the right guys.”
“OK, you got that right. But hey, look on the bright side man, maybe you could have a threesome with both of ’em!”
“Or a foursome, what do ya say, buddy? They look like the type that could take it,” said Bill loudly at me, elbowing Ross.
I thought it was funny how these guys’ conversation came around so quickly to the idea of both of them getting all naked and horny together. I considered pointing this out to them, but sized them up and thought that might be unwise. I took a breath and headed off through the doorway to the building attached to the bandshell. Why does it so often happen that everybody from my ex to random strangers think that I am their gateway to orgy sex?
I got the band on the stage punctually, blasted through a sound check, and then let it rip. Some people wandered toward the show.
Here was what it was all for in the end, and I poured out some feelings into the sunshine. The quick flicker of joy that I craved came and went, but I felt it—the fleeting vapour that kept my mind in order. The release and engagement with the crowd was what kept me playing. That, and the fact that I wasn’t good at anything else.
I strummed my brains out double hard to fill the guitar out, Tommy on the fiddle and mandolin did a commendable job on the solos he took, and Dwight filled his solos with adept beauty on the pedal steel. Joanne’s rumbling bounce on the bass had a moody flavour, while her vocal harmonies were haunting, and Crystal seemed to be working something out on the drums, in perfect tempo as usual, but with a more urgent snap. I thought, of course, this is something else that’s in it for Crystal. Even though she never jumps out in front, she does love to perform, too.
We were fairly well received as things rolled along.
The two angry guys in the crowd had disappeared somewhere, which I was grateful for, so there was no heckling from them. That wouldn’t have happened if I had said anything to them. Not that I can’t shut down hecklers, it’s just not a situation that I try to cook up.
I did a few shakes and shimmies, which kept some of the crowd’s attention, and a few people in the audience seemed to be listening closely. I hoped so. I loved this music so much.
If people were just wandering around any old festival and wanted to hear some jangle and twang and watch me shake my ass, fine; but if somebody came to follow the stories down deep into the darkness, and then soar back up into the sun on the melodies, I always tried to do it like that for anybody who cared to follow. Everybody’s welcome, and there were a few folks there for whom I thought this might be happening. As well as being a way to make a living, sharing this experience was something I could not make happen elsewhere. In many ways this was what I needed to keep me sane and in one piece.
It was a sunny afternoon and from the stage I could see a lot going on in the busy park.
I noticed something among the art displays that I could see from the stage while we were playing.
I was curious about one group of paintings; they seemed to all have no details, just squares of single colours, or at least so it looked across the park.
Then we were done our set, and we managed to sell a handful of CDs and cassettes, and hawked a few T-shirts too. The food table for performers didn’t open until later, and everyone was hungry and tired, so we just divvied up the cash from the tapes and shirt sales for lunches. Crystal wrote it all down on a note to add to the ledger later, and we decided that the band should all be back together by one hour. I walked over to the art show section of the festival, and checked out those paintings that had mystified me from the stage. Nobody else in the band was interested in what I said I thought the paintings were.
What I thought I had seen was correct. In the middle of all of the other art, with animals, and landscapes, and children playing hockey, there was this one woman, with tousled auburn hair and very unique glasses, seated in a little stall, showing paintings that were each an empty square of a single colour, all about a yard across on each side, with no frames. Just blank pearly squares, each a pastel, earth tone, or metallic colour.
“Are you the artist of these?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said quietly.
I looked into the empty spaces of her paintings. I was a little baffled, maybe even scared by her artwork, but I liked the feeling of open space. This didn’t look like my papa’s sort of thing ... but I often wondered if my daughter would have been an artist of some kind ... or maybe not.
Weird debates about Angela were always present with me in the back of my mind, and this was the one getting stirred up then. Angela had liked to draw and make art; what would she have done if she had lived? Maybe if my daughter had been allowed to grow up, she could have explained this to me; helped me to understand how the big empty colours were making me feel both anxious and peaceful.
I felt like I was falling into the blank paintings, or floating up into unearthly skies that were lit by mysterious gasses, and releasing my existence to some unknowable fate. I stared into the art for a bit. Some of the paintings had a single blob of the same colour somewhere in them, like a squeeze of toothpaste, an irregularity in the emptiness. I stared at one little blob, and I felt strangely sympathetic or affectionate to it. It looked so alone in the emptiness. The paintings without a blob started to bother me more in the context of the ones that had them.
“It’s fascinating,” I said to the artist. “So many colours, but only one colour in each painting. I like to look at a few of the paintings at a time. Each is challenging, but all together they’re intense. It’s hypnotic.” I hoped I wasn’t saying something wrong.
“Thank you,” the artist replied, “I don’t know if I made a mistake bringing them here, but I made this idea part of a grant application, and I got the grant. But not too many people are looking at the paintings or talking to me. I didn’t really expect to sell any, but I wanted to bring my art to the people. It’s a little frustrating.”
“It can be daunting, showing yourself,” I said.
“Hey, that music you were just playing in the festival. That was lively. And here I thought country music was just for the types who live in trailer parks.”
I paused for a second.
“I lived in a trailer park for a while, with my sister and my parents,” I said.
“Oh! I’m sorry!” she replied, “I don’t have the greatest apartment myself. I apologize; I don’t mean it to reflect on how you lived.”
“Uh huh,” I said flatly, “Don’t worry about it.”
“Your family should have been given proper housing, then you wouldn’t have had to live in undignified ways.”
“Yeah. Thanks. I get it,” I said. I wished she would stop, but it seemed like she was just getting started. Maybe I should have let the trailer comment go. I found myself trying to review what I had said about her paintings, to see if any of it was something insulting or stupid, that might have made her want to keep getting digs in at me.
But the next thing she said was, “All of us artists and musicians should come together, and we could take over and build a better world.”
“Stop talking, you condescending megalomaniac!” I said, holding the sides of my head, “If you insult people and then apologize by calling them undignified, your liberation of the trailer parks isn’t going to go as smoothly as you think it will.”
“I meant... I...” she stammered.
“When you make fun of poor people in trailer parks, you’re making fun of my big sister doing the dishes, and reminding me to do my homework because hers was done. Think about that. Okay?”
“Okay. Whatever. I said sorry. Jesus.”
I relented with a sigh. “I apologize. I’m having a bad day. Your paintings are cool. I find them affecting. But I have to eat, and then get my band rounded up. I hope you enjoy your project.”
“Thanks for stopping by.”
I went looking for any food truck that showed promise.
Why did I sass back at the artist, and not the two guys? Was I less scared of her physically, even though I thought she was probably smarter than me? She looked like she wouldn’t have given a damn if she had seen Joanne and me totally making out. I thought about the artist, and the two country music fans, and wondered who I felt more disappointed to be insulted by.
I was well into life, and I still felt like I ultimately fit nowhere.
Now I had a nagging feeling that today was the beginning of the end with Joanne. Just this little awkwardness today, but I figured the fights were coming. I had thought the biggest problem in our love was her feeling threatened because not all my relationships had been lesbian, and I had male partners in the past, and I wouldn’t declare it as a product of having been closeted. I had tried to convince her that it was no different from her having had different women partners before she was with me.
With guys that I liked, the obstacle was usually this perpetual idea that I had some Rolodex of women friends each waiting eagerly for her chance at half a distracted dude on a Saturday night.
But with women this other suspicion that I might just be fooling around between guys had prevented a couple of relationships from happening at all for me, and I was just left sad and alone. I believe my prayers and thinking about God seemed threatening to them as well. All these things add up to what I am, but the more honest I was with the world, the more I got suspected as a trickster.
One woman I had a huge crush on was a poet named Renata. I was dazzled by her cheekbones and her beguiling iambic pentameter, and I think she liked me back. But she had spent her teens being sent by her parents for Christian anti-gay reprogramming, and my ongoing relationship with God tormented her horribly. I was the one who backed off. I couldn’t stand the confusion that I represented to her, but I couldn’t change the true story of me.
With Joanne I had broken through, and ever since I had been working to show her the depth of my faithfulness, my faith in her, and in her talent. But now that I saw the pressures of the other band members’ resentments, I realized that as lovers Joanne and I had other problems too. I would struggle to keep her, but I had a feeling I was going to have a hard time taking control without taking control.
I thought of the people we all lose, who fade into the past in their different ways.
I thought of Angela December again, and wondered about her, and about art, and music, and the painful longing in songs. I let it all go, for the millionth time. Thinking about that, or some dust or pollen in the sunny heat, had made my nose runny, and I dug around in my shoulder bag for a tissue, pulled out one that didn’t look too wretched, and blew my nose.
Then, I saw the more drunk guy, Bill the jerk, passed out on his back under a tree. It looked like the shade had moved and was no longer protecting his prone body from frying up to a sweaty red in the changing angle of the sun. His wonderful pal Ross had abandoned him, probably off somewhere on some other stupid adventure.
Leaving him there felt like good revenge. I was still angry at him, and I enjoyed a little fantasy of him choking to death on his own barf while distracted festival goers passed him by. But I thought I would be a good Christian, and went to the cross on the flag of the Saint John’s Ambulance people who were monitoring the event, and took them over to where Bill the jerk had passed out. All the while I was struggling back and forth with the idea that contacting medical professionals wasn’t enabling.
We forget that the Samaritan in Jesus’ story was the enemy to the righteous people; a loathsome outsider, a wandering outlaw.
As the ambulance crew started to revive Bill, I bellowed, “Hey jerk-face, go to church and read the Bible! And here’s a special Sunday School lesson just for you—be sure to turn to The Gospel of Luke for The Parable of The Good Bisexual, you fucking asshole!”
He lifted his head, and his crossed eyes looked up at me. A stream of puke spilled out of his gawping mouth over his chin, and ran down his neck. And so he did not choke; my furious little sermon had saved him, for good or bad.
Generally confounded by people, including myself, I rejoined my mission of looking for a salad wrap, and I busied my mind by reminding myself to eat healthy food on the road. In spite of the aromas that tempted me to loose my frustrations in something decadent and yummy, I didn’t want to roll through the rest of the tour gorging myself on greasy fun food. I knew if I did that, I would be out on the highway as it stretched from horizon to horizon with no rest in sight, panicking in torment with a nightmare case of the shits. Trust me, don’t do that—whether your touring vehicle has a toilet or not.
I was 41. I wondered; was this how the rest of my life was going to go? Dragging my sister around the country while we were one t-shirt sale from bankruptcy, getting abandoned, threatened, and insulted, and worrying about diarrhea?
Crystal was right. Something had to change.
If I really examined my feelings, I was getting frustrated and felt like moving out to the edge of reality, ready to leap off of it.
And then do what? Fall into nothing? Fly away?
But here I was wandering aimlessly through my supposed audience, when I really should have disappeared and protected what little was left of my stage mystique. I stopped, looked up, then closed my eyes, feeling the sun on me, hearing the people pass.
“God, please,’ I whispered, standing alone in the crowd, “I need some new kind of strength. I need to find some new place. I need a way to live. I don’t know how to get there. Amen.”
This was just a few months before I found a big black crow feather in my bed, and Crystal and I grew wings overnight. Those wings would carry us to Faterfair, and later to a wasteland that surrounded the void, where we witnessed a terrible battle.
Lies That Aren’t Lies Are Lies
The chaotic retreat swirled round us.
“I can’t fly,” shouted David. “Don’t wait for me.”
“I’m won’t let you burn,” I yelled, slowing my flight so I could see him clearly.
Above us, Crystal swished her wings, then dove down beside me. The centaurs withdrew in confusion, abandoning broken equipment. As we fled, Phon joined us and the centaurs.
“They dragged my car like a cart!” said Phon. “That’s my car, down the hill. It’s new, and it’s fast, and it seats four. Follow me!”
He trotted on all fours toward a small, modern car in a clearing at the bottom of the hill. We followed, while the flames on the grass behind us flickered higher. David sprinted as fast as he could while Crystal and I glided down.
“There’s all our food!” said Crystal, pointing to a wagon that had been abandoned beside the car.
“I’ll get it,” said David, running toward the cart.
“Now is not the time to try to make yourself useful,” I scolded him. “Just go to the car.”
But he ran to the wagon. I doubled back and soared after him, while Crystal flew to the car.
...Brandy's story continues as she becomes more and more isolated on her journey to the void and her ultimate confrontation with her greatest adversary – whatever it might be.
More of The Wages, An Illustrated Story
‘The Green Park of Songs and Parables’ is one of 30 chapters in The Wages, An Illustrated Story. The main text is done. Over 200 drawing are complete with more in progress.
The Sand Keeper watches Brandy Cinnamon Wages sort black sand from white sand to unlock the gate of the void. To pass the time, Brandy tells of her journey through the wasteland, interwoven with her life story from childhood to 58 years of age.
Signing in the ’70s.
Crystal and Brandy flee cold-superstrike lighting outside The Museum of Information.
Crystal meets a man that she likes the look of.
Tina Perdue fires hacker rockets at robot drones while Brandy and band take cover.
Brandy writes one of her early songs, ‘Can't Touch A Dream’.
“I see the world lost in smoke beneath the wings of dark angel with a bone white face. She is me.”
The Wages, An Illustrated Story is a work of fiction. Any similarity to persons living or dead is coincidental. Copyright Charles F. Vincent 2014-2020