Section Twelve – Dean Wilcox and Joe Mills
“Sophie never needed you to be a better person,” Maggie tells me quietly.
In my version, years after the break-up, I drive to D.C. to see her paintings in a gallery, not expecting her to be there a week after the opening. I sit in a coffee shop across the street, watching her pass in and out of the sunlit shadows of the gallery, the glare against the glass cutting the planes of the windows into angles that reveal, now and then, fragments of her work and the slope of her shoulders or the tilt of her head.
I could cross the street and open the door. I could enter the gallery, surprising her, and she might smile a wide welcoming smile that would shift to the crooked one, curled to one side as if she were whispering my name, and we could walk the gallery slowly as she tells me about each painting, her arm slipping into mine.
But, I don’t cross that street. Instead, I drink cup after cup of coffee, spending most of the afternoon with my eyes trained to the windows for a glimpse of her form broken by the sunlight and the angle of the glass and the distance; and I fall back, backward as if into trusting arms, back, into a place that is us, (like a door I open, a room I enter, drawing me forward into myself), a place to embrace us, contain us, and the once we were.
Knowing the space won’t last, its edges already folding like wings around me. The way every film fades to a blank screen, every play ends with an empty stage. The way every book must eventually be closed.
“Here,” Maggie says, “it’s time.”
We Make Mosaics with What’s Been Broken – Music by Dean Wilcox, Words by Joe Mills
Taking guitar lessons a few years back Joe and Dean discovered a mutual interest in songwriting, they have been at it for the past ten years or so. Sometimes they start with words, sometimes music, sometimes they meet somewhere in the middle. Joe’s publications include six volumes of poetry with Press 53. Dean records and releases ambient, glitch, and drone music on Bandcamp. While they have considered offering their services for weddings and bar mitzvahs, absolutely no one thinks that is a good idea.
Contact:
The Cloud Diary Music Project
We sent musicians a synopsis of Cloud Diary and a randomly chosen scene from among 12 scattered throughout the novel and asked them to respond to the scene, musically or aurally. The piece could be of any genre and any duration. It could be music already recorded, adapted, or written specifically for the scene. Find more information here.
Click here for the full Music Project playlist.