Shut the Lion's Mouth by Anastasia Jill

Monica and I are on booze patrol, though we are drunk and sloppy ourselves. We wear sequined skirts and too much make-up for women in their thirties, drinking and giggling like coltish girls and for a small moment, my cousin seems happy again.

Until her boyfriend Darius comes up to the table and grabs her arm. Hard. “What is the matter with you?” he asks, or rather, spits right into her ear. “I asked you to watch the booze, not drink it all.”

She yanks herself away. “It’s a party. I’m having fun.”

“We’re on in twenty minutes and my band will not suffer for your fun.”

I always hated the way he referred to Lion’s Den as his cover band when Monica was the reason they had even minimal success. She doesn’t bring this up, because the “band” was only the two of them, and if he was tense, she would be tense, and the whole performance would go to shit. She presses her lips, taking a drag from his cigarette hot temper.

“Alright,” she says. “We’ll just watch the whiskey.”

“Speak for yourself,” I say. “I’m here to have a good time.”

Darius doesn’t find me funny. He never understood why I trailed my cousin from show to show, but we’d been bosom buddies since our days on the rez. When she left to study vocal performance, I followed. There was nothing at home for me anyways.

Once he walks away, I turn from the whiskey to the boxed wine. Monica shakes her head. “You’re doing nothing for the Native image by getting shit faced.”

“No one here knows I’m Native.”

“Darius said to watch the booze.”

“Watch it? Why? What does it do?”

I want her to joke with me, but Darius has a way of ruining her night. So I let him spoil mine as well and quip, “That’s what happens when you date a white man.”

The minutes pass slowly as the walls swell around dim lighting and stereo music. Monica taps me on the elbow and says, “Come on, let’s go outside.” Once there, she lights up a single Pall Mall and breathes deep. “He’ll kill me someday, one way or another.” She laments a little further before saying, “This is the last cigarette I will ever have in my life.”

We go through this, a lot. She’s wanted to quit smoking for years. Darius doesn’t allow it - says it gives her voice an edge. But tonight, Monica speaks with the wisdom of a woman who’s learned something from carrying Darius around like a luggage bag of sorrows.

“I hope it sticks,” I tell her at last. 

She puts it out and sticks the nub into her pocket. “I love you Cathy. I’m glad you hung around.”

Like a bug buzzing around a carcass, Darius finds us. I don’t know how. His head peeks outside and he commands, “Come back inside. We’re on in five, and you need to do a mic check.”

Monica follows and I trail behind, the stone of the door rolling into place, sealing us inside. It has managed to get darker in the five minutes we were gone. People prowl from corner to corner, in various states of inebriation. Monica goes forward like a good little angel to do her mic checks and take the stage. It takes her a moment to get here, please-and-thank-you shoving her way through the crowd.

Darius’ big mouth is down my neck. “What’s taking her so long?”

Without my cousin here, my tact went to the floor. “They’re not going to part like the fuckin’ Red Sea just because you want to get up the the stage faster.”

He hates me and I know it. Don’t know why exactly, except he’s like this with everyone and it breaks my heart that he doesn’t like anyone, not even Monica.

“I love Monica,” he tells me lamely.

“You treat my cousin like shit and expect me to believe that?”

He looks at me like I’m vermin. “You and Monica aren’t even cousins.”

“You don’t know Natives. Everyone’s our cousin.”

“Even me?”

I blink at him once, twice, three times. “Definitely not you.”

Unlike my passive cousin, he shoves his way to the stage where the set is ready, and his guitar is tuned. Monica is at the mic, and silence soothes the crowd like a prayer. He plays and she sings along to other people’s songs. Quite predictably, they do a folk version of Can You Feel the Love Tonight. I cannot. Looks like the audience can’t either, the pain of irony etched into Monica’s voice, her movements, her bones.

They end with scattered applause. Darius’ face betrays him. He is pissed. I don’t have to follow them backstage to make sense of his bellowing, but I do. His voice is volcanic, too ravenous for his mouth. “What was that?”

“Singing,” she replies.

“Well cheers to that, because it was awful.”

She sighs. “I’m bored.”

He questions her, and she says, “I’m bored with this, with you and your temper, the Den, music.” She walks up and unearths her cigarette nub, putting it in his mouth and pinching it shut. She floats away with angel ease and tells him, point blank, “We’re through.” She turns to the exit and says to me, “Are you coming?”

She opens the door and steps away from the beast, delivering both of us into the safety of the night.

Anastasia Jill is a queer writer living in the Southeast United States. She has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Small Fiction Anthology, as well as several other honors. Her work has been featured with Poets.org, Lunch Ticket, apt, Minola Review, Gertrude Press, Into the Void and more.