muse alone with orpheus (2018)
Ellie Rose Mattoon
Orpheus was nineteen years old and packing up sound equipment from a set on Austin’s Sixth Street when his agent “found” him. Agents love to say that they have “found” artists, but in reality, the Internet had done that part of Dionne’s work for her. Now she just had to keep him caffeinated in a diner booth until five a.m. while she waxed poetic about how promising he was. It turns out, according to her, that one million subscribers on a YouTube channel was no small feat.
“Think about it,” she said after asking the waitress if the diner was BYOB and if she could have an empty coffee mug for her wine. His beautiful black hair popped out like saucers on an iPhone; imagine what photographers at Rolling Stone and Variety could wring out of him. Imagine the interview sound bites that could flow from the innocence of a kind, small-town boy navigating stardom. Imagine how long his heartthrob reign could last when seventy-five percent of his subscribers were females under eighteen.
“Now the industry is changing every day with all this social media stuff,” she said, falling off-topic to compliment the way he ordered migas with no cheese. “Already know what’s good for your pipes, yes? I like that. And while I can’t make any promises, I’d like you to move to LA.”
Orpheus’ fork hung in midair. When asked about his wildest dreams, he pictured a kitchen table where he could write songs with a tree-lined view and a living room with killer acoustics so he could play for guests after dinner. His parents always told him to never stop making music for other people, and for the past two years that had meant a set on Sixth Street every Friday, three services at a Bastrop church on Sunday, and a new song on YouTube every Wednesday.
But his parents also told him to take what the gods put in front of him, and the gods had just given him a way to make an album. And one million people already wanted to buy it.
“I’ve never seen the Pacific before,” he said.
Dionne picked up the check.
When Orpheus won the Grammy for best new artist, Dionne was the first person he thanked. For being his greatest advocate, remaining his most passionate cheerleader, and for making sure security never confiscated outside alcohol at an Orpheus concert. Then he thanked his fans—the Maenads—for always being willing to put their ears up to his guitar.
Calling them “the Maenads” was Dionne’s idea, and a cultural critic cited her business strategy as an effort to “replicate the frenetic hype of groupies in the digital age.” The Maenads shared a singular identity and a signature outfit based on Orpheus’ song lyrics, posting from his concerts in their tight furry tube-tops, ivy flower crowns, and golden snake rings. He liked that they were so easy to identify; that way, he knew which girl would scream with joy at the opportunity to touch his shoe and which boy would faint after a flirtatious wink at the stage door.
In interviews, Orpheus always said that he had won the lottery with the Maenads. Most artists slaved over creating hype for their albums, but as long as Orpheus smiled and said a few friendly words, the Maenads ran half of his publicity for him.
Take, for example, the fan accounts. OrpheusFanPage reposted everything OrpheusOfficial posted with fifty extra explanation marks and a “he’s so cute i can’t” caption that somehow got more engagement than the official post approved by five marketing experts. Even if OrpheusOfficial failed to post anything for weeks, OrpheusFanPage and its sister Instagram pumped out content like clockwork. His morning spot on a radio show, a fan-submitted colored pencil drawing, even his so-called “receipt” from a Starbucks off the 405 (quad shot latte with almond milk, ordered at 6:37 p.m.!!).
Once he was at Urth Cafe with Dionne, discussing his sophomore album, when a girl who couldn’t be older than thirteen asked if he could autograph her notebook.
He scribbled it without breaking eye contact, and the girl leaned in closer.
“How’s Lacy?” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Lacy. Is she still a good girl?”
Orpheus took a moment to regain his smile. “You mean my dog!” He had mentioned the rescue pit bull a few times in interviews, and she had a cameo in his Rolling Stone shoot. “She’s fine.” The silence continued. “Do you have any dogs?” he asked.
“Nope.” The girl took her notebook and skipped away. Orpheus couldn’t help but chuckle. She hadn’t even seen him from the cafe. She saw him through the streetside window.
Callie didn’t have any pets. She had two parents and no siblings and no supervision as to how much time she could spend on her dad’s old laptop. When she was in sixth grade art, a classmate would play Orpheus’ YouTube videos on low volume so their teacher wouldn’t notice. For two weeks she was too afraid to ask who was singing. Then she opened her dad’s old laptop and googled it.
I’m wading in the water, wondering will you wait with me?
Come wading, waste a day with me. My doe, Calliope.
It’s not every day a girl gets her name in a song. The Jolenes got their moment, then the Roxanes, then the Delilahs. Now it was Callie’s turn.
After another silent family dinner downstairs, she crept up to her room and streamed all his YouTube videos while doing her math homework. Then she stayed up late to scour his Wikipedia biography, where she learned his debut album was coming out in two months and he only chose Calliope because it rhymed.
Within a week, OrpheusFanPage was active. Within a month, it had six thousand followers.
Other girls at the lunch table only gave Callie a cursory nod before looking down to refresh their Instagrams. Now she could do the same. But instead of pictures of parties she wasn’t invited to and bikinis she would never fit inside, Callie scrolled through thousands of likes from followers around the world and DMs from mutuals to schedule collab posts. These accounts were her real friends; there was never a shortage of things to talk about thanks to their shared love of all things Orpheus. And as owner of the oldest fan account, Callie got to be in charge because she loved him first.
When the account hit two million followers, Callie celebrated by asking her parents if they could get ice cream in Santa Monica. She said it was to celebrate straight As from last quarter, no other reason, and that she wanted to play Orpheus’ new album on the car ride.
“I’m glad you just use his music to study,” Callie’s mother said as she plugged the phone into the aux cord. “His fans just seem so…” she wrinkled her nose... “savage.” Her mother’s only knowledge of the Maenads came from parenting Facebook posts, all of which warned that one strum of Orpheus’ guitar could get her daughter addicted to raves and cocaine.
Callie would wait to try to explain to her parents that enjoying someone’s music never hurt anyone, and not every Maenad liked Orpheus for the partying. Some, like her, just wanted a place to go during those long evenings alone in a dark room.
Orpheus met Eurydice at his third Grammys afterparty. He’d seen her ten years ago on Disney Channel. She’d heard him four years ago on Spotify’s Discover Weekly. But they first laid eyes on each other in an alcove behind the open bar when he was looking for a place to hide from the TMZ photographers. Eurydice had hidden in this alcove for the past five years.
“Congratulations on your win tonight,” she said, breaking the silence, and Orpheus blushed. He hadn’t thought about how dopey he must look with the trophy swaying in his elbow.
A producer peeked inside the curtain with a goofy smile and one of those reusable Ziplocs that came with the VIP swag bags. Not originally included: the scattered, half-crushed pills at the bottom. Orpheus raised his eyebrows at Eurydice, trying to look cool as he took one between his fingers.
“What the fuck?” she slapped his wrist and scattered the dust through the carpet with her heel. “I thought your whole dumb transplant thing was an act!”
A glass of club soda with lime over ice swirled in her other hand. She wasn’t even drunk.
Orpheus’ hand stung. “Dumb transplant?”
She pried the bag out of his fingers and tossed it in the trash with her cocktail napkin. “Child performers lose five years to that shit. Save your time.”
Over the past few years, Orpheus had stopped apologizing. But Eurydice coaxed one out of him without even trying. The moment she chastised him with those unimpressed, big brown eyes, he was a goner.
“I didn’t grow up with this kind of attention,” he explained. “And I think I’m starting to get sick of it.”
“That’s a good thing. Once you’re used to it, you’re dead.” She pulled out her phone. “You have a good security team yet? My guy can give you some recommendations.”
“Don’t those cost money?” Orpheus grew up barely being allowed to order soda at the drive-through, and every bill that left his wallet still felt like a personal failure.
Eurydice rolled her eyes. “Orpheus, you shit money now.”
In part they grew so close because Eurydice knew everything about being famous, while Orpheus knew absolutely nothing at all. She took him to bars that didn’t call the paparazzi, taught him how to discreetly leave concerts hidden in a supply cart, and told him it made sense to just buy his parents’ house in Bastrop instead of sending checks home for rent every month.
When he asked her in bed one night why she kept him around, she smirked, kissed his clothes hanger shoulders, and told him that he was a fresh glass of water among the sea of LA men. He didn’t go to parties to network. He went to meet her friends, and he didn’t judge them based on the magazine gossip from ten years ago. Not to mention that she could flip through her cell phone contacts-—A “Who’s Who” of Los Angeles—and struggle to find any other superstar who still made time to play a set at Cedars Sinai every Thursday. He was her personal check on reality, her impetus to be a real person before she was a celebrity.
Every notable SoCal couple gets married on the beach, but the two of them agreed to have their ceremony in Redwood National Forest because it reminded Orpheus of the ashy trees back home. The guests turned in their phones before the event, but Eurydice told Orpheus that there was never a guarantee; at the very least, seeing who leaked footage would be a good test of their friends’ loyalties.
One of Orpheus’ aunts sold a video of Eurydice running down the petal-strewn aisle to People, and Eurydice’s sister-in-law sent a video of Orpheus’ serenade at the reception to OrpheusFanPage for free.
I’m wading in the water, wondering will you wait with me?
Come wading, waste a day with me. My doe, Eurydice.
A few years ago, that would have been another viral moment that made him more saves and prestreams and branding contracts. Now it made him order another champagne on their honeymoon flight to Hawaii.
Dionne called him on the plane, still slurring from the night before and asking if she could make the most out of the “less than ideal” situation. His eyes slanted towards Eurydice, curled against his side as if it were a part of her body as well. The money could buy her something nice. Maybe even a hideaway house where they could find some privacy. The call with Dionne lasted three and a half minutes.
The next morning, a full audio recording went on Spotify. “Wade with Me (Wedding Version) (Live).”
It got one eight hundred thousand streams within the first twenty-four hours.
Fifteen of those streams were from Callie. She played it on an endless loop while making a video compilation of Orpheus and Eurydice’s love story. This was always her favorite part of the day. Those hours after dinner when she could change into her embroidered Orpheus crewneck, queue up her Spotify playlist of his songs that were close to streaming milestones, and enter a few hours of flow at her desk illuminated by the keyboard backlight.
Of course, he had every right to change the lyrics from “Calliope” to “Eurydice.” If she were Orpheus, she would change the lyrics for her wife. Especially if her wife was Eurydice. Callie zoomed in closer on a photo of them at the Met Gala last year, Orpheus’ palm circling Eurydice’s tiny waist like she was just another instrument to make music with. Was Eurydice’s stomach caving in or jutting out? What would Callie’s do in that tight of a dress?
“it’s like the gods drew her with an airbrush,” Callie captioned the video. “i can’t.”
The Maenads gave OrpheusFanPage major pushback for posting the wedding video and the love compilation. Not because they violated Orpheus’ privacy, but because most Maenads spat out their vodka at any mention of Eurydice. There, of course, were the girls and boys mourning the star’s marriage as if he were their own lost lover. But there were five times more “genuinely concerned” fans who worried Eurydice might only be marrying him for the money, or to avoid being a has-been star. They pointed out how Orpheus wasn’t signing autographs at the stage door anymore, how an assistant only responded to his fan mail and DMs with form letters. He had changed since he met that snake. She’d changed him.
For Callie, Eurydice wasn't the fandom’s adversary as much as she was another figure in the Orpheus story to gush over between album releases and tour dates. The Maenads had their time to write fan fiction about Orpheus falling in love with one of them, but now it was time to spotlight his true, perfect love story with a goddess among women.
She added #proEurydice💃 to her page’s bio, and for a long spell after the wedding, OrpheusFanPage posted more photos of Eurydice than its namesake. Callie scheduled an hour every night to delete any comments that accused Eurydice of ruining Orpheus’ music, his personality, and most recently, his fan accounts.
About two months after the wedding, BuzzFeed released an article titled “The Maenads Are All Grown Up, And It’s Not Cute Anymore.” The sweeping condemnation of Orpheus’ original fans featured videos of good-time girls screaming at clubs until DJs played his music, rubbing their bodies against his posters on the wall, and spray painting spindly green snakes over Eurydice’s billboards. Dionne Walters, Orpheus’ agent, said in an interview for the piece that Orpheus was “eternally indebted” to the Maenads, but Orpheus himself declined to comment.
Fair-weather fans started claiming that they liked Orpheus’ music, but they weren’t a Maenad. Or they used to be a Maenad, but they weren’t anymore. Goodwill reported a surge in donations of tight furry tops.
The Maenads shared a common love in Orpheus, but after the article they shared a common enemy too. Kisso Baker coordinated her followers in sending thirteen pallets of the Goodwill fur tops to Buzzfeed’s editorial office. Then Callie’s mutual, OrpheusLover, led a campaign to make thousands of throwaway accounts and report the journalist’s Twitter for inappropriate content until the algorithm suspended him. It took him ten years to amass ten-thousand followers, but the Maenads could raze all of it with a few clicks of their keyboards. Did he still think they were just good-time girls?
Callie let the cursor blink a few times before adding #proMaenad👯♀️ to her profile on the line below #proEurydice💃. It wasn’t just for protection, after all. It was for solidarity. Every group has their crazies, but if a guy really liked Orpheus, he was just considered a fan. Why then, were all the girls considered fanatics? Callie had called herself a Maenad for the last five years, and she wasn’t about to change her identity because some thirty-year-old journalist thought she only used Orpheus as an excuse to get wasted.
Orpheus wrote his songs by scribbling separate lines on flashcards, then moving everything around to get it in the right order. Sometimes what started as a verse worked better as a bridge, and other times a closing line became the intro to something entirely new. Sometimes he had to rip a card in half just to switch the order of a sentence. Eurydice always pointed out how he looked like a conspiracy theorist at the kitchen table, frantically shuffling all those cards around. “In my day,” she said. “I got in a booth and sang what Walt Disney wanted me to.”
Now, at Cedars Sinai, a gigantic tube cut through the twenty-six-year-old throat that had once sung theme songs for kids TV. And as police collected Orpheus’ memories of the day, he thought of the flashcards on the counter. Of a song that wasn’t in the right order yet.
The problem wasn’t so much that the snake was poisonous, the doctors said, but that Eurydice was allergic to that particular snake’s antivenom. Awful luck, they said. Especially for a mensch like Orpheus. The least favorite part of their jobs. Such awful luck that the police were here.
A second anniversary hike up to the Hollywood sign. Orpheus begged Eurydice to let them do it, to have mercy on his poor transplant soul. He hated himself for that now. At 9:39 a.m., Eurydice posted an Instagram from the trail head as part of her promotional partnership with a water bottle brand. As usual, she turned her comments off.
After that, Orpheus remembered the least remarkable parts of the hike in the most vivid detail: the pulsing burn in his thighs, the sweat stuck to Eurydice’s tank top, the striped, bronze-green hillsides that beckoned him to look away for just a moment. But the scream and the two bloody circles plunged into her ankle blurred into the flight to Cedars Sinai and the call to 911 and the way he carried her towards the helicopter like a limp Barbie.
It was awfully strange that Eurydice just happened to get bit by the worst possible poisonous snake, a breed that wasn’t even native to Southern California. As if it were personalized for her. “Is there anyone who might want to harm your wife?” the officer said.
He scoffed. “Why do you think she turns her comments off?”
Dionne brought a guitar. Orpheus played “Wade with Me” at Eurydice’s bedside and asked the nurse to stop recording a video of him doing so.
“You have to eat something, Orpheus,” Dionne whispered. “Maybe drink something?” With enough prodding she persuaded him to take a walk downstairs and buy a bouquet from the gift shop. “Don’t you trust her to stay alive for fifteen-some minutes?”
Orpheus moved further away from the bed, his feet landing heel-to-toe as if he were taking a sobriety test. He didn’t understand how the girl who knew everything, the girl who balanced promotion and privacy with an acrobat’s grace, could, at the end of the day, be just as fragile as the rest of mankind.
If she came back, he would never play again. If she came back, they would go somewhere safe, and he would only ever play for her. For his doe. Even if she never came back, he could bury his guitar in the soil with her. Even though she had to come back.
He took one look back at his wife, and the monitor wailed.
The doctors would say it was a coincidence, but he wondered if that one look back disturbed the balance of the universe, sending a whoosh of air across the room that catalyzed just the wrong chemical reaction inside of her heart. Or maybe that one look back meant that he didn’t actually trust her to stay alive, because he knew deep down that she was already gone.
Orpheus came home that night with a trash bag of her clothes. Eurydice had only let them buy this hideaway house after forcing the seller and every visitor to sign an NDA. On moving day, the two of them planted trees all along the yard to keep voyeurs away from the sprawling glass window, then rested at the kitchen table with a glass of sunset wine. They watched a single stag wander into the clearing outside. It stopped and stared at the couple for a moment, as if frozen with two onyx stones for eyes. Then it scampered off at the click of the back door handle
It was too dark to see the trees now, and no one waited for him. His parents avoided the tabloids and wouldn’t hear the news until he called. Dionne only left a voicemail to ask when he would be ready to perform again. Two deboned salmon filets sagged into the counter, abandoned by the chef who took his unexpected days off with grateful gusto.
Lacy the pit bull licked his hand awake three days later, and she didn’t stop until he got off the couch. Dionne paid a grief consultant to call and say he’d feel better after taking a walk, but it took nearly four hours to go through the motions of getting toothpaste on the toothbrush, getting the heel into the groove of a shoe, and plugging Redwood National Forest into Google Maps. He ignored Dionne’s voicemail about how many more concerts he was allowed to cancel before breaking his contract.
Orpheus found a tree trunk to lean against and strummed the guitar with his eyes closed. He played for no one but imagined he was playing in a crowded living room for Eurydice and their children. Even if that was a dream that now would never come true.
When his eyes opened, a girl sat next to him on the tree trunk, her own eyes closed. She was Eurydice’s opposite: blonde hair and pale skin. He stopped playing, and her head turned over to him.
“That was really pretty.”
“Thank you.” Orpheus pushed his guitar into the dirt between them.
“Did you hear about the girl who died? The girl that song is about?”
His shoulders relaxed in relief. She didn’t recognize him with the sunglasses. “I did. Terrible.”
“Ding dong the bitch is dead, am I right?”
At that he shot up, and his sunglasses fell to the forest floor.
“Oh my God,” the girl stepped closer, cracking the sunglasses under her sneakers. “Oh my God it’s you!”
Orpheus abandoned the guitar and sprinted back down the hill to his car, but the Maenads had already found him. He shadowed his eyes with his hand and tried to pretend that they weren’t talking to him. Eurydice used to joke that Orpheus was a common enough name. They could be talking about anyone.
A rock flew in an arc above the crowd and pummeled into Orpheus’ left foot with a crack, the foot he used to tap out rhythm at concerts. “Can you sign it?” a girl in the back whined, unable to see where the rock landed. He sucked in the pain like a knife.
“Oh my gods, let me help you,” the blonde girl looped her arm through his, surprisingly strong, and pulled him away from his truck. “What the fuck Kisso?” she screamed, not even grunting from the effort of dragging a man one foot taller than her. “You’re not supposed to hurt him.”
Their snake rings glistened. They glared brighter in plain daylight than they did buried in the strobe lights and fog machines at his concerts. He remembered the symbol that had gone on each of Eurydice’s vandalized billboards. The personalized serpent that just happened to be lingering on their hiking trail.
He elbowed out of the blonde girl’s grip and ran blind through the pain back to his car, clicking it locked just as the fingers from three different hands traced the back door handle. Three warning honks and he was putting the truck into drive, regardless of who was in the way.
“Call Dionne,” he said to the car as his good foot slammed on the gas. “Call Dionne.”
He didn’t wait for her to call him her star or to invite him out to drink or circle back one more time about rescheduling concerts. He waited for the call timer on CarPlay to start counting up.
“I want you to cancel my tour.”
The other line of the phone crackled. “Orpheus. You don’t understand the consequences of this. These events can’t happen without you.”
“Why do you think I’m asking you to cancel?”
Dionne’s voice tinted a darker shade of red. He hadn’t heard that voice since he refused to defend the Maenads for the BuzzFeed article.
“You have a fan base. They’re counting on you. I’m counting on you. And if you can’t respect us, I can’t—”
“Fuck the fan base,” his voice crescendoed, rising through the crack in his car window where girls held their phones for a good picture. “I’m never playing for whores again.”
Callie got an extension on her English essay so she could have more time to delete every explicit comment and block the profiles. If she waited, they could try to suspend her account the same way they had suspended the BuzzFeed journalist. Her parents now knew why she was always in a hurry to fork down her dinner, but they still rolled their eyes at the idea of protecting a fan account as if it were a lunar mission. However, they couldn’t argue with the fact that this fan account got her a social media internship at Spotify this summer and a full ride to UCLA this fall. It was everything to her, and everything couldn’t just collapse after four tumultuous days and a few TMZ articles.
OrpheusFanPage’s followers had fallen by ten percent in the past two hours. Meanwhile, MaenadMeetups grew by three thousand followers. Even in the empty bedroom, she couldn’t help but break the silence and laugh at that. Until tonight, #proMaenad👯♀️ had meant #proOrpheus👨🎤. What were they without him, after all?
Maybe Orpheus wouldn’t be playing for the crazy Maenads anymore, but he would still headline more intimate sessions for the normal fans like her. He could take his time to grieve, return with a new manager, and keep giving her a place to go every night like he had for the past seven years.
She gave herself a short break and scrolled through the r/Maenad subreddit. The top post made her arms freeze. A picture of Orpheus’ signature red pickup truck. Canonically, he had driven the truck from Bastrop to LA when he was first getting started.
Someone found it parked outside of a Beverly Hills Mansion on 513 N Crescent Drive. Could this be the secret house Orpheus alluded to in his song “Just For Us?” A throwaway account commented that the address was bought two years ago with an NDA.
Orpheus wasn’t in the right mental state—he usually parked that truck in a garage immediately because it gave away his location so effortlessly. He’d said in an interview that Eurydice was the one who always got on his back to do so. And Eurydice wasn’t here now.
Callie started her own car—the used Jeep with the Maenad bumper sticker - and floored it towards Beverly Hills. She wondered if, in real life, she would be able to tell which of the fans there were pro-Orpheus and which were pro-Maenad.
Orpheus woke up to a light acoustic instrumental trickling through his home speaker system. It sounded like his old song about the stag in the clearing. He hated listening to his own music, but as he rolled over to turn it off, the ice pack fell off his ankle with a jolt. A girl with matted hair under her ivy crown held a vodka bottle in one hand and the remote in the other.
“You said you’d never play for us again,” she said, firm enough to highlight that it wasn’t a question. The glass from the back window hung in shards around her feet.
At first, he was too dazed from the pain meds to wonder who she was. “Did Dionne send you?”
“The Maenads are still really sorry for your loss, you know,” she said, pulling at her top and letting it snap back against her chest. “But was that all we ever were to you? Whores to buy your concert swag?”
The scene grew behind her. With the back window shattered, cool air blew a small line of identically dressed women inside. Each lifted the ones behind them up over the window ledge and into the living room. Lacy howled from her crate upstairs. Orpheus hadn’t used that crate since the pitbull was a puppy.
He gripped the smartphone tighter. Dionne sent him straight to voicemail. Her greeting now reminded callers that she no longer represented Orpheus. Eurydice had texted him the 24/7 security contact a few months ago, but he’d never bothered to save the number.
“You really should go.” He rose from the couch, trying to casually saunter away instead of shaking at the smell of alcohol on the girls’ breath.
She didn’t chase him to the front door, because when he opened the door Maenads would be the first thing he saw. Girls in ivy crowns back from the bar, girls in smart waitress dresses just off their shifts, boys in vintage jackets and baggy jeans. They piled inside, circling him, and the music from the speaker went silent.
“Eurydice isn’t watching you anymore,” someone whispered as they stroked his arm.
“Everything can still go back to the way it was,” someone clawed into his shoulder.
“Play a song for us in the living room, Orpheus.” Someone raked through his hair, pulling up dandruff with her nails. “You’ve always wanted us to put our ears up to your guitar.”
They swarmed around him like a dome until all Orpheus could smell was bare skin. Until all he could see was a rainbow of pink and brown and black tones that grew darker the harder they pressed against his eyes. His broken left foot buckled on the hardwood floors. It would be the first limb to fall.
For a moment, Orpheus wondered if he was about to be torn apart. Then he knew.
By the time Callie pulled up her parking brake on the steep hillside street, it was over. Two police cars ran their lights back and forth over the road silently so as not to wake the neighbors. She slipped a twenty to the officers, who said that while the closet mop was soaked with blood, no one was in the house when they got there. Not even Orpheus.
Callie wandered closer up to the stairs of the house and ducked under the caution tape. The police didn’t notice her, and if they did she would insist that she never came to hurt him. Only to make sure he was alright. Who was she kidding? They weren’t friends. Even if he gave her a future, and in a twisted way she gave him his.
Besides that chance encounter at the Urth Cafe, he had barely ever laid eyes on her. But she knew enough about him to glance at the dog growling through a crate at the top of the stairs and say, “Hey, Lacy.”
The dog quieted at her name and stopped nipping at the newcomer’s fingers when Callie scratched behind her ears. Her tail clanged against the metal. Callie opened the crate, and Lacy raced down the stairs to the broken back window as if she had been called.
For a moment Callie lingered alone on the top of Orpheus’ staircase, wondering if she should follow. If the music was playing outside or just in her head.
“Orpheus?” She crept further through the high-ceilinged living room and jumped into the yard where trees hugged a steep incline. Ivy leaves and pinecones covered the grass. Lacy howled at the bottom of the hill.
At first, she thought he was Lacy’s ball. Then, she tapped him with her foot. Balls roll more like bricks when they have a neck and a nose and two ears jutting out of them.
After she screamed, Callie had a few moments before the police ran to join her. A few moments to brush the hair out of his eyes and frantically try to push the caked blood off his forehead with her thumb. A few moments before the police flashlight illuminated the rest of his body, scattered about the yard like an Easter egg hunt, and she became a witness immortalized in tabloids and magazines and made-for-TV documentaries.
Callie had a few moments alone with the head of Orpheus. After that, she was just alone.
About THE AUTHOR
Ellie Rose Mattoon is a first-year medical student at Johns Hopkins University, where she studied creative writing as an undergraduate. Her work has been previously published in JSTOR Daily, The Summerset Review, and The Xylom, and her writing has received support from the Louis Azrael Scholarship and the Meg Walsh Fellowship. She loves exploring new art museums for story ideas, and she first saw Berge’s Orpheus statue at the Walters in Baltimore.
