Priscilla Monroe's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Priscilla walked home with the acetate pressed to her ribs and the chihuahua warm against her side. The disc was hers. That was the whole problem. She had one copy of a duet nobody had heard, and no way to put it in front of anyone who mattered. A record in a coat pocket was a novelty. A record on the air was a career. She needed a room full of ears, and she needed it before the producer noticed his shelf was short. She stopped in the village square and thought. The wooden clock above the post office read a quarter past four. In an hour the square would fill. Farmers came in for the evening market. Shopkeepers closed their tills and stood by the fountain to talk. On Fridays a man set up a small speaker on the fountain's rim and played dance records for tips. She had watched him a dozen times. She knew where he plugged in. She knew he took a break at five to eat. She walked to the fountain and waited. The man arrived with his crate and his speaker and set them on the painted basin. She offered him two dollars to play one side of her disc through his rig at five sharp, no questions. He looked at her, looked at the money, and nodded. At five he lowered the needle and stepped back. Her voice came out of the speaker, doubled, singing both parts of the duet. The square went quiet. A woman near the herb rack stopped counting change. A man at the notice board turned around. When the last note ended, a small round man in a grey coat pushed through the crowd. He said he ran the Pinevale Bandstand on Saturday nights. He said he had a live radio feed to three counties. He said he wanted her on the stage that weekend, singing it live, and he wrote his name on a card and pressed it into her hand. Priscilla walked away with the card and the disc and a booking she had not asked for. The bandstand feed would carry her voice past the village for the first time. It would also carry her name to every producer who listened on a Saturday night, including the one whose shelf she had emptied, and the manager whose signed release still gave him half of whatever she sang next. She had found her room full of ears. Now the wrong ears would hear her too.