Welcome to Ecumenica by Tyler Barton

The drunks had sung at midnight for at least a hundred Mondays. They’d drift down-street after karaoke ended and gather around my blue trash tote. 

I was used to their crooning. They could really do it. No microphones besides the night, no audience but me, who couldn’t sleep without the window open, and even then couldn’t sleep. Oh, I miss them. Alanis they loved. Morrissey they aped. Fond of hip-hop, they swapped silly lyrics for the foul ones. Fishes for bitches. Mother-hugging for -fucking. Every Karaoke Monday ended like this, morphing into Karaoke Tuesday Morning. 

Between songs they talked. I knew one of them wanted solely to impress a cook. They spoke of new approaches. Another was a young father, and they joked he was neglectful. I worried that he was. He never laughed hard enough. 

Only one time did I ever call out to them. I was an old woman already, translucent but not yet see-through. The less pressure my life applied to the world, the more determined I felt to interject my existence. Paul would’ve called it stirring the pot. Pearl, you need to go somewhere, do something new today—you’re all filmy on top. I turned over to see his grimy bible still planted on the end table. His reading glasses gathered a blur of dirt there too. As the men outside sang Motown—“Tell me, have you seen her?”—I peeled the temples open and brought them close, throwing myself into Paul’s fog. How many nights had he ignored me for this view of that book?

“It’s my birthday!” I yelled to the singers from my bed, imagining Paul mushing my slumped cheeks with his hands: Honey, you need to stir the pot. 

Sensing no response, I added: “Don’t you boys know that one?”

“We know it’s copyrighted!” one replied. I heard another’s piss hit the bricks. Then they started laughing, same key. I forgot to mention: they were all men. Some misfit family. After the night I first heard their performance, I spent a morning moving my bed so that my pillow was to the window. That’s how I’ve slept since, the window behind my head like an open brain.

No, they weren’t there the night the bar caught fire. It went up on a Thursday. Trivia. Mondays shorn of singing fell silent, like every night now is. Where sleep falls fast and with total opacity—I wake up rested, sweaty, and unhappy. 

The Bible you left, Paul, does me no good. I want to be in the world and of it. More of it.

That morning, the dawn I turned seventy-five, I was singing to myself in bed, loudly, and bespectacled. The men outside laughed, stomping out the beat as they departed. It was enough. Happy Birth-day, dear Pe-arl. It turned out to be a pleasant day—in fact, a pleasant year, a year that ushered in a small succession of happy insomniac years, the years before I came here.  

Tyler Barton is the author of the story collection Eternal Night at the Nature Museum (Sarabande Books, 2021) and the flash chapbook The Quiet Part Loud (Split/Lip Press, 2019). Find his work in DIAGRAM, Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, and The Iowa Review. Find him on twitter @goftyler or at tsbarton.com.