Kragen:Not even in your head?
Me:Especially not in my head.
Kragen:I name everything. My guitar has had three names. Currently Gerald.
Me:You named your guitar Gerald.
Kragen:He went through a phase.
Me:I’m not going to ask.
Kragen:Probably wise.
Kragen:My clan would say Gerald proves I was always the wrong kind of orc. StillWater orcs don’t name things. They sit with them.
Me:StillWater?
Kragen:My clan. Muted, deliberate, internal. Not exactly known for running a bar and playing guitar solo on Friday night gigs.
Me:And yet here you are.
Kragen:And yet here I am.
The next time I pick up the burning pen, I can’t deny that I’m past the upper corner.
I’ve moved down the left side of the soundboard, the cluster expanding into a spray, stems forking and forking again just as he described them on the hillside—you’d come over a ridge and the whole slope would be pink.Not the whole soundboard. I have standards. Just the left side, flowing down from the corner in a considered asymmetrical design. Tasteful. Still tasteful.
I work until the light from the west window goes orange, and then I turn on the lamp and keep working.
The thing about pyrography is that it requires a particular type of attention—not the broad focus of planning or the narrow focus of precision measurement, but something in between, a state where your eyes and your hands are in conversation and your brain is mostly out of it.
It’s the same state I used to find in gymnastics, in the middle of a floor routine, when the music and the movement and the apparatus all lined up and I stopped performing and started just being in it. I haven’t thought about gymnastics in years without the weight of loss attached. It occurs to me now, somewhere in the third hour of burningvelaraflowers onto a dulcimer I was paid to leave plain, that I’m not thinking about it with that weight right now.
I don’t examine this.
I keep burning.
Me:How does a StillWater orc end up running a bar? I’ve been wondering.
Kragen:StillWater orcs sit with things. They don’t perform.
Kragen: I’ve spent the last eight years performing.
Kragen:I wanted stages. I wanted noise and rooms full of people and music that moved. My clan saw me as a problem to be solved.
Me:Were you?
Kragen:Probably. I was very loud about wanting different things. Which is very un-StillWater of me. Loudly wanting things you’re not supposed to want is its own irony.
Me:So the Emergence was…
Kragen:The Emergence was the first time in my life I exhaled. I got here and there was music I’d never heard and instruments I didn’t know existed and humans had no opinions about what a StillWater orc was supposed to be. I walked into Walt’s bar shortly after I arrived because I could hear someone playing guitar through the door. Walt was hiring. I worked the bar, then started playing on the small stage. I’ve basically never left.
Me:And yet.
Kragen:And yet what?
Me:You described those flowers like someone who remembers exactly what a hillside smells like.
