Tone Bloody Death

I’m at a bar that smells of old raincoats, stale lager and the quiet rot of unfinished conversations clinging to the walls. The lights flicker like tired eyelids. Everything here feels slightly unwell. Owen is at the piano. Flat cap. Ponytail. Earnest posture. The kind of man who looks like he should be selling matchsticks in Dickensian fog. Charlotte once said he dresses like a Victorian orphan, and now my brain insists on adding imaginary soot to his cheeks. He places his fingers on the keys with tragic confidence. Clears his throat. Shuts his eyes. Commits. Tone bloody deaf. The first note lands wrong. The second argues with it. The third sounds like a tooth cracking. The room slowly suffocates into silence, strangled by a cascade of notes that refuse to become music. He isn’t playing — he’s blundering, attacking, committing crimes against melody willy-fricken-nilly. It’s like watching someone massacre a crowd using only soundwaves. Each key creates a ripple effect through the room. A clenched jaw. A twitching eye. A finger in the ear. A depressive thought. Of course, he’ll call it experimental. He’s a musician. Musicians like to push the boundaries, stretch their creative worth, poke at the edges of what’s tolerable. But this? This is a key too many. Literally. He looks proud. Radiant, even. Lost in his own noise. The piano itself seems ashamed. Its lid droops slightly, like it wants to hide its face. A glass vibrates on the bar, shivering in protest. My skin crawls with second-hand humiliation so intense it borders on nausea. This isn’t just bad music — it’s melodic suicide. A slow public execution of joy. I can’t take it. I escape outside, lungs gulping cold air like I’ve surfaced from dirty water. Zoe is already there, cheeks pink, eyes bright with misplaced devotion. “He’s good, isn’t he?” she beams. No irony. No sarcasm. No shared human agreement that this is an utter shitshow. She means it with her whole soul. Then again. Why is she standing out here in the freezing dark? She doesn’t even smoke. “He’s… different,” I offer, delicately, arranging my words like fragile glassware. “He’s gonna make it big someday,” she gushes, then adds with unsettling certainty, “I can feel it in my nips.” The cold suddenly feels personal. The scene slips away like a fan realising their idol wasn’t as good as the hype. I’m watching Breaking Bad, or something wearing its hazmat suit. Except I’m not exactly watching. I’m here. Hovering. A witness with no mouth, no weight, no consequence. A trapped thought drifting through someone else’s nightmare. This is the horror version. Jesse is played by Eminem, which shouldn’t work, but somehow makes perfect sense. He’s been imprisoned for a year in a basement by two corrupt cops who treat cruelty like it’s their hobby. They throw freezing water over him whenever he so much as breathes too loudly. When they finally leave the room, Jessie squeezes through a narrow gap in the bars — starved thin enough to barely disturb the dust. The guards are distracted by a mannequin — the mind boggles — dressed in silk panties and suspenders, as if depravity has a sense of humour. Jessie slips past, heart hammering, and climbs onto the roof. It's baltic. Snowfall blankets the ground in deceptive beauty, hiding whatever rot is buried beneath. Walter White — now played by a black actor, my brain apparently enjoying irony— pulls back a tarpaulin. Underneath: a mountainous grave of frozen corpses. Stacked. Preserved panic. Mouths forever screaming. Eyes iced in terror. “Run, Jesse!” he yells. A gunshot snaps the air like a bone breaking. Walter collapses, clutching his chest, blood spreading across the snow in a slow, obscene bloom. Jesse climbs a tall wall wrapped in electrical wiring. Escape is inches away. My entire invisible body leans towards him, willing him forwards. Routing for him to break free. Practically giving him a leg up. If only he could see me. The wire sparks. His body jerks. He falls back and lands in the snow, twitching once — then nothing. The silence that follows isn’t quiet at all. It howls with a thousand frozen mouths. The scene disintegrates like blood in the snow. Mat is passed out on the sofa, one hand tucked down his trousers, mouth slightly open, breathing heavy and oblivious. Something about the ridiculous vulnerability of him flips a switch in me — dangerous, impulsive, suspiciously horny. I climb on top of him and the room liquefies into the public swimming pool. My inner horn dog swims up to the surface. We start creating our own waves. Water slaps loudly against tiles. Chlorine burns my eyes. The lifeguard scrolls through his phone with saintly indifference, either completely unbothered or deeply committed to not being paid enough to acknowledge reality. I feel reckless, exposed, stupidly alive. Then Mat pulls away. “Too hot,” he mutters, and hauls himself out of the pool like something the tide has rejected. He collapses onto the tiles and immediately falls asleep again. Dead to the world. The moment evaporates like mist. I thought he was enjoying the thrill of being naughty in plain sight. He starts to snore. Evidently not. I sit, dripping with liquid shame. The scene drowns in its own disappointment. Mat’s father has died. The kind of ending anyone could hope for. Peaceful. Around loved ones. Now we’re hunting for somewhere to hold the wake. Mat has become aggressively tight-arsed. Every pound saved feels like a moral victory. His purse strings couldn't be any tighter. He’s frugal and proud — a man in a committed relationship with his bank balance. We stand inside a derelict old man’s club that looks one aggressive sneeze away from structural collapse. “Come in,” a woman chirps, too brightly. “Let me give you the grand tour.” There’s nothing grand about this tour. The floor isn’t floor — it’s stuffing. Beanbag guts shifting underfoot like compressed lungs. Each step bounces slightly, making the building feel alive in a way that unsettles me deeply. “This isn’t bad,” Mat lies. “And it’s cheap,” he adds, hopeful. Lesley sighs like a woman preparing for disappointment. “I can’t see this floor supporting our guests.” “There’s an upstairs too,” the woman says. We pass through a heavy gate and into a corridor of occupied flats. A caretaker mops the floor wearing a full Halloween costume, clown mask tilted slightly sideways like it's about to spin 360 and scare the crap out of us. “Don’t mind him,” she says. “Thinks it’s Halloween every day.” The upstairs is worse. The ceiling slopes inwards. We all crouch instinctively, like the room is slowly trying to eat us. “There’s not enough room to swing a cat,” Lesley snaps. “Absolutely not.” Mat picks up a jar from a dusty shelf. Inside floats something pale and unmistakably human. Fingers, perhaps. Toes. A quiet inventory of loss. “We’d save so much money,” he murmurs, gazing into it as though it contains divine budgeting wisdom. The jar slips from his hand. The scene shatters. It’s night. Monkey is still outside. “Monkey!” we shout. He comes running — but traffic suddenly surges, headlights slicing the dark like knives. He darts between cars. My heart thunders violently, my body braced for impact that never quite arrives. He makes it inside. Then vanishes into a crisp packet on the hallway floor. A crisp packet? My brain stalls. He eats far too many Dreamies to compress into reality like that. I kneel. Inside, Monkey is the size of a mouse. Perfectly curled. Breathing softly. Tiny ribs rising and falling. My chest tightens with fierce, irrational love. He’s unbearably delicate. A miracle of fragility. I lean closer, afraid even my breath might disturb him. The house is too quiet. Then I hear it. A faint sound. A thin, metallic plink. Another. At first I think it’s the pipes. The fridge. My own pulse misfiring in my ears. But it isn’t random. It’s a melody — or what someone thinks is a melody. Wrong notes, landing just beside where they should be. Hesitant. Awful. Familiar. The sound isn’t coming from the room. It’s coming from inside the crisp packet. Tiny keys. Tiny, merciless noise. Monkey stirs, his miniature body twitching in time with the broken rhythm, like the sound is stitched into him now, vibrating through bone and breath. The music grows louder — still wrong, still tone deaf, still unbearable — swelling until the packet quivers against the floor, the plastic crinkling like nervous skin. I reach for it. The sound abruptly stops. The silence that follows feels sharpened. Weaponised. And somewhere in that quiet, I realise I can no longer remember what the correct notes are supposed to sound like. Maybe this is how it starts — not with noise, but with agreement. With clapping for the wrong song. With standing in the cold, warming myself on borrowed certainty. With mistaking collapse for shelter, sleep for love, cruelty for control. The packet stirs in my palm, faintly ticking out a rhythm my body remembers, even as my mind loses the language of what was once right.