• Facebook
• Instagram

The Music’s Gonna Get You

Margo Williams

__________

Caitlin saw him from across the tavern. He was at least ten years older than she, maybe more.  His dark hair grew in waves to his shoulders; his five o’clock shadow was sexy. He strummed his guitar with such purpose. Long pale fingers. 

His gaze fell upon Caitlin, and she forced herself to hold his gaze in return. She’d seen how to respond in a movie, where the leading lady locked her eyes upon her romantic interest’s eyes just until it was uncomfortable, and then she looked away. Demurely.  Once Caitlin dropped his gaze, she allowed it to rest on his fingers kissing the strings. She knew a musician would notice that she was following his strokes.

When it was her turn to play with a different band, she took her cello from its case and straddled it. Her impossibly long legs wrapped around it, even though her mother had always said she should wear a floor length dress and keep her legs closed, resting the cello across her lap, tonight her knees peeked out behind her ripped jeans.   The banjo player stood to her left; the fiddler to her right. The Irish dirge had the audience teary eyed. Caitlin secretly blessed her mother for insisting she learn to play the cello; she arched her back and leaned into the instrument. Her man watched it all. 

It began.

In less than a year, Caitlin promised to marry him and take care of his two children from another woman.  Eventually she would be able to call that woman the first wife. She didn’t like the stigma of being the second, but she knew he loved her in a way he’d never loved the first. Caitlin knew that it was fate. She wasn’t going to do anything that made her appear an evil stepmother. 

She and her man played music all over town, singing and grabbing kisses. She rocked the baby against her bosom, and took the toddler to the park, pushing the swings ever higher. She kept herself pretty, open, loving against all odds.

___________

Playlist song: Sinead O’Connor, “Nothing Compares 2 U”

__________

Margo Williams holds an MFA in writing, literature, and publishing from Emerson College. Williams studied playwriting and set design at Harvard and interned at The Atlantic Monthly Magazine. Her publications include an anthology (The Big Picture) and literary magazines: Glimmer Train, Prick of the Spindle, Moonshine Review, Southeast Review, Beacon Street Review, O: J&L and more. She is a produced playwright (2008-Snake Oil) and an artist in residence at Elsewhere Studios and Hambidge Center. Her poems have been created into performance pieces or short films at Ars Poetica and Blue Sage Center. Her ekphrastic collection of flash fiction entitled Falling In Love Like Little Girls Fall in Love, includes twenty stories based on Carolyn DeMeritt’s photo series of pubescent girls, exhibited alongside the photos that inspired the stories at Louise Wells Cameron Art Museum and at the Wilma Daniel’s Art Gallery. Currently she is working on a memoir and a novel and serves as the Chair of English at Cape Fear Community College.

__________

🢠 Back Next 🢡

To learn more about submitting your work to Boudin or applying to McNeese State University’s Creative Writing MFA program, please visit Submissions for details.