"I'm not wearing that."

"You have to! Our image -"

"Our image be damned. I refuse to degrade myself by twirling around onstage in that hideous thing," Hades protests. "You wear it."

"Guys, please." I snatch the mass of gleaming black PVC and glimmering surgical steel buckles from his outstretched hands, clutching it to my chest on my way back to my closet to hang it up. I return to them disemboweling one another with their eyes. Wouldn't that be a pretty sight, all that blood and those entrails, maybe with Pain slumped over, long blue hair clotting purple in a pool of his stomach contents and bodily fluids. That'd make a fantastic song. I'll have to write it down later, once they're done bitching each other out. I add, "Get over it."

"I'm not wearing it," Hades says again.

"Fine! Career suicide is in these days," says Pain.

"Why don't you go commit suicide?"

"You think I haven't tried?"

"Trust me, Pain, the whole world wishes you had gotten it right." Hades ruins the effect by putting his ring finger to his cornea, right by his iris, to adjust the crimson contact.

"Fuck you!"

I sigh, questioning the ceiling in place of the heavens, demanding a nonexistent God to explain why I am forced to deal with these ungrateful plebeians. At last, I settle on murmuring, "If you just pissed him off so much that he leaves the band, I will kill you." Imagining it plants the seeds of a grin on my face, as I can see Hades sprawled out in the bathtub filled with water dyed red from gashes in his narrow wrists. I can see an alternate scenario, too, one in which Hades is a pile of pieces in the bathtub, limbs and extremities floating in water like vegetables in a pot of soup. As I fantasize about acting on these visions, I realize that I need him for the show my boss is letting us put on tonight at work, or rather, after my shift ends and the stage is open.

"He's too much of a pussy," says Hades, and flounces off.

If one of them should wear the dress, maybe it's Hades.

An hour before I'm supposed to be at the bar, I put on my fake eyelashes and all my makeup, though I have to vie for space with Pain, who puts on even longer, thicker falsies and smears mascara and eyeliner down his face, then coats it with clear lip gloss to make it shine. In the doorway, Hades waits, tapping his foot halfway on the hallway carpet, half on the bathroom linoleum. What a bitch, seriously. I roll my eyes and glance at Pain, who is slicking another coat of clear gloss over his blue-painted lips and making a kissy face at his reflection. Gag me with a chainsaw and bury me under Poe's headstone, but he's a bitch, too. I'm stuck with a couple of preening prima donna bitches, but they're the only ones with vision in this hellhole that is our town. Talk about humble origins for what is to be the greatest of all bands in the span of all time that humanity has defiled this earth.

I can't concentrate. I leave the van at home so the guys can pack up our instruments and fit their feuding egos into the front seat, and decide to walk to work. We live down the block from the bitchiest woman in town, or maybe I should say cattiest; I'm sure she's contracted feline leukemia and will be an interesting autopsy specimen in another few years as it runs its course. I see the doctor's car outside her house right now. He's probably making a call on the patient. I turn the corner by Pain's parents' old house, the one they sold to move to the trailer park in their expensive RV. Pain pretends he doesn't know them anymore, and I don't blame him. If my parents crushed my spirit and self-expression by burning all my clothes and making me go to school in my underwear or in my dad's clothes, I would hate them, too. But mine aren't that humanly cruel, as flawed and mundane as they are.

At work, I keep thinking Larry's gonna beat my ass for being slow on the uptake. Every order I get, I feel like I've forgotten when I reach the bar, and every regular customer's name has dropped out my mouth the minute I open it to speak. I manage to get most orders right - except for the asshole who ordered some obscure version of a Cosmopolitan, as if that type of sugar-coated bitch beer is acceptable to drink in this shit-pit of a town. We're not "-politan" enough to earn the "-mo-," much less the "cos-." God, this whole place is a thickening miasma of backwater death. Living here is like living in a graveyard where you know all the names on the headstones, and one is beckoning to you, calling to you to join the other ghosts. I wish I could, sometimes, but I don't want to be caught and stopped, like Pain, or too weak to carry through, like Hades.

Delilah isn't here tonight. I suppose William finally did her in, not that it would surprise anyone, except maybe her; the piano is empty, but when I drift past it on my break for the night, a bottle of water in my hand, it reeks of the alcohol she drowns her sorrowful spirit in. She won't admit it, but William is practically a murderer. If we had a decent judge in town, not that laughable imitation of one who doubles as mayor, he'd be convicted without laying another finger on her.

Schadenfreude isn't normally my thing, as painful as I find existence; I don't revel in watching Delilah crush her qualities in drink and the basest of human beings. But I am grateful to her for granting us the stage tonight. I hate to do her injustice, but when compared to Pain, she's not quite the piano player she seems to believe she is. I let her continue in her flawed perceptions of the world and its smothering darkness, whose hands wrap tighter around her neck each day with each drink she tosses down her gullet, bruising her. I'm grateful for her being gone, wherever that is.

The bar door opens up at midnight and Pain and Hades come in. I wish that I had convinced Hades to wear the dress, as anything would be an improvement over his pinstripe bondage pants, some he bought two years ago in Des Moines, and the red mesh over a black bustier he found on a dumpster-diving mission to recover his copy of the house key. Pain is better dressed and better made-up, but then, I think Hades is taking on the role of the world and punishing me with his lack of real vision.

We set up there, on the stage, in front of the six people lingering in the bar like sweat stains on a jock's t-shirt as he pommels someone with real creativity. There are already microphones there, courtesy of last week's impromptu show in which I played a few numbers with my guitar and no pathetic bandmates whose dedication wavers too easily. It takes a while, but now Pain's keyboard is up, acting as both drums and synthesizer tonight, and I get my guitar from Hades and sling its strap around my neck.

Larry is watching us with narrowed eyes as I lean into the microphone and a wail of feedback, similar to the wail of my soul, caged by the confines of an intolerant society, shrieks through the room. "Test," says Hades into his microphone, the moron.

"Hey, everybody, we're Nosferatu on Sunday," I say.

Nobody claps. Larry is polishing a glass that I can't say for certain, but am pretty damn sure he's been scrubbing at diligently for twenty minutes now, his crow's-feet deepening around his narrowed, focused eyes. One of the two remaining women takes a swig of beer and slams the bottle down on her table, totally blind to the sheer talent glaring out at her from the corner of the bar.

"Our first song tonight is called 'Erotic Surgery.'"

As Pain begins to play the first notes, the keyboard set to its organ tone, the same woman leaves her bottle and walks out of the bar, shaking her head. I assume she needs a cigarette to be able to come back and process the sheer sound, the magnitude of this moment. She's seeing history in the making here as we perform live, giving them songs from our first album. I'm sure it'll be in stores as soon as we can get somewhere that a talent scout might emerge from the shadows and record us there, on the spot, in our ultimate musical perfection.

"Cutting through my flesh, your scalpel
Rips at my soul, screams of rapture
Escape my acidic throat. Now I yell
For mercy, but my goddess, you refuse," I sing. My voice is the perfect blend of operatic and dangerously husky; I know not only because I have an ear for talent, but because Pain assured me that I need to be the frontman. Neither he nor Hades has quite the seraphic - or would it be Satanic? - voice that I have. My voice could bring the rapture, if I chose, but I don't choose. I choose to remain on Earth to teach these morons about true, good quality music.

"Shut the fuck up!" screams one of the men, who follows the beer-thumping-cigarette woman's route, but he, like so many fools in this world, has no intention of returning to enlighten himself.

I try to announce the next song, but another two are leaving as I try to tell them that we're about to honor them by performing "Semiramis." I proceed with the chords as if we still have six people, seven if you consider Larry an audience member, which I do not. He's moved on to another glass, probably because the first one went to the third man to eventually leave and dishonor our presence by refusing to hear the music that will one day inspire millions to make us millions. I try to tell the remaining listeners that Semiramis, the dark, deviant, lustful Whore-Queen of Babylon, walks among us, her ghost clawing at our throats as we climax in the night, but another leaves, this time hurling a shot glass at us.

It barely misses Pain's head, but he plays on, hardly wavering as he hits the button on his keyboard to change the pre-recorded drums to the tempo for the chorus. He echoes me as I invoke Nimrod of the Inferno, though his voice, too, is quivering like a mass of meat laid on the chopping block.

We're midway through what Hades and I swear will be our number one single when we break out of this town's dismal scene, a song Hades wrote and called "The Morgue Beckons Me Hauntingly," when the last patron, the last member of our uneducated, prejudiced audience, dares to up and leave.

I stop playing the minute the door closes behind her; the woman who went to smoke never returned, and now Larry has finished polishing the glasses to a shine and wiping down the bar, and he's giving me the look that so clearly reads, "Get over here." I hand my guitar to Hades and obey, my feet moving as if he is the morgue of the song, begging me, pulling me close to its icy death-cold, wrapping me in a blanket of rigor mortis. That's a good song title, actually; I should write more about death throes sometime. Maybe after I describe spilling entrails? Or after I come up with a recipe for human soup fresh from the freezer of macabre delights?

"Look, Grey," says Larry, quietly, as if he thinks that by saying my false name in a mutter, he preserves its former hold over me.

"Larry, I've told you, my true spiritual name is Die."

"Okay, spiritual Die, artist formerly known as Grey," says Larry, "I need to talk to you."

I glance back at the guys; Pain is shoving his hair out of his eyes and packing up his keyboard, taking the stand down, while Hades is adjusting his bustier, looking petulant. "Okay."

"In fifteen minutes, you chased six customers - paying customers! - outta my bar."

"Okay," I say.

"'Okay' doesn't justify that racket you just made. Gr- Die, you're a good employee, and I'm not gonna fire you, but don't quit this job to sing," Larry continues. "Leave the stage to Delilah."

"That untalented would-be siren?" I ask. I try to keep my voice low, to prevent Hades and Pain from listening to the insult he's just laid across my shoulders like a freshly slain, sacrificed deer given us by Mother Nature's bloodthirsty hands.

"A helluva lot more talented than you guys," he says, adding, "sorry to say," though I know very well he isn't.