Joan scrambled to dump the pushcart of her possessions into a Coney Island trash can on the beach off the boardwalk way down from her building so her landlord wouldn’t see. Night fell in rumpled black over the Atlantic, her phone buzzing angrily at her hip. She should’ve been gone already, across any bridge, through any tunnel—whichever chute from the city was swiftest—but if she left her life intact, she might be tempted to return.
Salt water slid underfoot, the call of children in her ears. She nestled the Martin on some newspapers in the sand, free of its case—she couldn’t help treating it delicately even now—while she stuffed her tortoiseshell picks and boots and half-used bottles of walnut oil and her camel-hair coat and mustard-colored suitcase and toy lobster into the can on top of cotton candy cones and french fry boats. Next came the old CDs of the four other singer-songwriters in the Gonewriters’ Collective. And on top of that, her wire recorder, used for experiments and one-offs, which had required its own brutal, dedicated trip from the apartment, that beast. Then the ribbon mic and the cassette 4-track that built her signature sound—the precious machines she could barely afford and that she’d serviced for years—crashed through garbage to the base of the can. This nothing trash can, where she’d discarded the ends of so many hot dogs shared with Paige and Maya and Nick Blade, cigarette butts, the crumpled flyers of one another’s shows. Two hours ago, Joan had fled the venue, Paige’s face crumpling in confusion as Joan dodged her, the crowd already roaring for the next act. Arms trembling, Joan reached for her Martin. Her fingers met its neck. She’d crush it against the seawall, and then she’d be gone.
The prewar Martin was a parlor guitar, svelter and nimbler than the muddy dreadnoughts rampant among folksingers and dabblers, hailing from the age of field recordings and songs of unknown origin: tight, punchy, cutting through the mix. The short scale of the neck made the strings more accommodating to Joan’s athletic fingers. Perfect for her own compact body, distinctive and elegant. And its sound was focused, pure, so unlike plodding, woofy dreadnoughts. Other musicians thought Joan ridiculous for hating dreadnoughts, but she wouldn’t waste her talent on some brutish clanger designed to drown out resonator-backed banjos. Not that she could bear to think of her career anymore.
The Martin was Joan’s second guitar, her main squeeze for the last twenty years, since after college when she’d retired the pudding-yellow acoustic she’d bought for nothing at a yard sale at fourteen. The Martin had cost all her meager savings, plus the last two installments of her undergraduate student loan, plus a hundred dollars she’d made on a blow job, a badfaith transaction with an acquaintance and the only time she’d taken money for sex, and only because she needed that Martin before it sold to some SoHo trust-funder who’d hook it to the wall and let it die. She’d walked by it for a month, pausing to gaze through the window at its dark mahogany frame, sleek and almost skeletal, the opalescence of its fretboard, the marks on the pickguard that told her it had been loved before, it had been played hard, it held history. She grieved over the spectrum of hacks and douchebags who’d one day abuse it with power ballads or gift it to an indifferent nephew who’d abandon it under laundry while playing video games nearby. The day she bought the Martin was the best day of Joan’s life. She’d rescued it from the rest of the world, carrying it home like it weighed nothing, bundled in sweaters because she couldn’t afford a case.
She hovered the Martin above the seawall, her skinny arms steadying under its heft. She could play a whole concert standing up without a strap—savoring the pain and masochistic bending it required, foot on the monitor to relieve pressure—so suspending the Martin for its last moments was nothing. The sea nudged the wall in looping rolls, ingesting and regurgitating unwanted bits of Brooklyn: the severed head of a toy cheetah, empty spectacle frames cocked curiously toward the light, cartons rinsed of their creamy Russian salads, all the waste fresh and sharp-cornered, never submerged long enough to burnish smooth or blanch. Children laughed at her, but children laughed at Joan on normal days, the way she followed her nose down the beach with curious intensity from the cement slab of her apartment building, with its pastel umbrellas and bikes packed into bathtub-sized balconies, all the way to Brighton Beach and back every night she didn’t have a show, which was most nights lately, which would be every night now. She raised the Martin so high that the tendons in her arms locked. Her phone zapped her: a text from Maya Banerjee, one of the Gonewriters, the group of scrappy musicians who’d supported her for twenty years. Joan lowered the Martin. Steady. Steady. Why the fuck, Joan? said Maya’s text.
Joan’s organs hardened to a knot. So Maya knew. Paige must have told her. In a heartbeat all the Gonewriters would hate her. The core of her community, destroyed by disgust. They were her life. Without them, even just without Paige, there was nothing.
Joan couldn’t bear to release her grip on the guitar and respond. She had to escape. Phones had been raised tonight, so many glossy rectangles, watching. Videos recorded in Love und Romance, the punk bar she’d played two hours ago. She wasn’t punk but indie-folk rock-whatever, though once you grafted genres, they hemorrhaged meaning. And now all those phones held Joan’s image in the fog of the club, a slim, dark shard between bouncing orange circles of light, stepping to the edge of the stage. Hair swollen into a triangle above her shoulders, that sliver of air between her front teeth that it had never occurred to her parents to correct. Though she was forty-three, Joan was as skinny as a teenager, which a man had told her once before she peed on him. Lines fountaining from her eyes and gray hair fluttering at her temples, flesh pale in the club gels, as she reached her arms down off the stage, into the crowd. If Joan didn’t respond to Maya’s text, or anyone’s, maybe her life could remain the same: meager gigs, Paige’s twenty-one-year-long friendship, one-night stands, boiled vegetables in her dank apartment, the ocean loud and invisible beyond its walls. She reached into the memory as though she could seize herself by the shirt, pull herself back, rewind reality. Step back, Joan, from the edge of that stage. Pick up the Martin. Play your next song. Don’t be a maniac.
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From Songs of No Provenance. Used with permission of the publisher, Catapult. Copyright © 2025 by Lydi Conklin.
