Inventing Flash Fiction from Music Lyrics
- Scott Archer Jones
- Apr 5
- 1 min read
The Song: “I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn” – The Low Anthem
The Lyric: Many years have passed in this river town, I’ve sailed through many traps
A small city hanging off the bluffs above the Mississippi, where the only place to leave to is worse than the place to leave from. My town, it damns me as much as I curse it. My dreams were lost between middle school and high school, my innocence in the slip between desire and abuse, my virginity in a sexually transmitted infection.
My feet are stuck to the pavement as the sun slowly melts the tar, and my wallet has near lost hope. I rent a room now, with a sink and a hotplate, and I work the jobs as they come. At night I write on yellow tablets at my table. I turn the lights off in the room so that the neon of the bar across the way waves across my words. A slow changing tracery of “Willie’s Finest Club,” the tracery perhaps more beautiful than my tales. But my lines have something superior to beauty.
Underneath the bed are paperbacks of Alex Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Percival Everett, Colson Whitehead, Roxanne Gay, Tah-Nehisi Coates. They’ve travelled to the horizon, and left streaks in the sky. They’ve abandoned their small cities.
Such is my place is the firmament of writing, a firmament that forms the foundation for news reports, magazine ads, movies and tv shows. The fodder enshrined in libraries, accessed by the seekers of the crafter of words and their dreamers seeking reality in pages.
This compost of humanity, that gives rise to daily broadcasts, is measured by sales, and mixes visuals with the word. I knew in college that my life choice was a long shot, with more dead on arrival that ships in the stars.
My words are not for an anticipating audience. They're fueled by the neon that feeds on the patrons of Willie's Finest Club. A part of the ecosystem that fuels the glory. The real…