The Muse-Pawn Emporium

The Circle K clerk’s eyes were iridescent moth wings, and he was weighing my voice in a tiny jeweler’s scale.

The device sat on the Formica counter between a display of beef jerky and a tray of stale donuts. It was brass, old, and tarnished. One pan held a small lead weight; the other held nothing but the vibration of the word I had just spoken. The needle trembled in the center.

"Heavy," the clerk said. His nametag read Hollis. He did not blink. The shifting patterns in his irises swirled in violet and gold. "Heavier than fifteen years ago, Jude."

I flinched at the name. For fifteen years I had driven twenty miles out of my way to avoid this intersection. I had sworn on the silence of my empty house that I would never cross this threshold again. I had told myself the Muse-Pawn booth didn't exist. I told myself it was a hallucination born of anesthesia and grief. But desperation is a solvent. It dissolves even the strongest oaths.

I pulled the collar of my cashmere turtleneck higher. The fabric scratched against the scar tissue hidden beneath it, a habitual irritation I had grown to depend on. The air held the scent of musty clothes and Pine-Sol. Outside, rain lashed against the plate glass, blurring the neon gas prices into streaks of red and blue. Inside, the hum of the refrigeration units was wrong. It was not the mechanical drone of compressors. It was a chord.

I looked past Hollis to the wall where the beer coolers should have been. The glass doors remained, but the shelves of aluminum cans were gone. In their place stood hexagonal tanks filled with viscous, clear fluid. Inside each tank, a bioluminescent jellyfish pulsed. They were not animals. They were pawned potential.

One tank near the floor glowed with a faint, sickly teal light. The creature inside was small and shriveled. It beat against the glass with a rhythm that sounded like a heartbeat in a hollow room.

"Is that it?" I asked. My voice cracked. The needle on the brass scale dipped sharply to the left.

Hollis glanced at the scale, then at the tank. "That is the deposit you left. The collateral for the loan."

"I paid the loan," I said. "I promised one hit song. I gave you five number ones. I want it back."

Hollis reached into the pocket of his red vest. He produced a contract rolled into a tight cylinder and tied with a string that looked like hair. He placed it next to the scale.

"You pawned a muse," Hollis said. "You didn't sell a soul. There is a difference. But the terms of retrieval have changed due to... interest."

He leaned forward. The moth wings in his eyes fluttered, shifting the color from gold to dead grey.

"You want the jar," Hollis said. "You want to stop feeling like a photocopier of a photocopier. You want to write words that actually cast a shadow."

"Yes." The word was a whisper.

"Then the price is a trade." Hollis tapped the glass counter with a fingernail. It made a sound like a bone splintering. "I don't want money. I don't want another song. I want the instrument."

He pointed a long, pale finger at my throat.

"I will give you the muse back," he said. "If you pawn your voice. Not your talent. Your physical voice. You will never speak or sing again. In exchange, I will use it to scream for someone who cannot."

I gripped the edge of the counter. The fluorescent lights overhead flickered, casting long, jumping shadows that looked too thin to be human.

"Who?" I asked.

"A stranger," Hollis said. "Someone drowning in grief so thick it has sealed their throat. They need a proxy. They need a scream strong enough to break a timeline."

He pushed the contract toward me.

"Your voice for your truth, Jude. Do we have a deal?"

I looked down at my hands. They tapped a four-four rhythm against the Formica, a nervous tic that had started the week after the clinic visit fifteen years ago. These hands had written songs that played in grocery stores, elevators, and dentist waiting rooms across the world. They had built a mansion in the hills and a reputation as "Silvertongue," the industry's most reliable hitmaker.

But the house was empty. The songs were lies.

I looked at the tank near the floor. The jellyfish pulsed again. A low F-sharp minor hummed through the glass. It was the key of the lullaby I had started writing in the waiting room, the one I never finished.

"If I walk away," I said.

"Then you keep your voice," Hollis answered. "You keep the fame. You keep the money. And you leave that little spark right here in the jar."

He adjusted the cuffs of his shirt.

"And you continue to be a ghost in your own life."

I felt the vibration of the phone in my pocket. It was a phantom sensation. The phone was in my car. But I could hear the voicemail stored on its chip, the one I played every night at 3:00 AM. Ira named her. Two seconds of audio from a number I had blocked but could not forget. The grief I had pawned was not just creativity. It was the somatic memory of a future I had terminated to save a career that was nothing but a coat of paint over a rotting wall..

To sing without that memory was to sing without blood.

"I can't write another lie," I said.

Hollis nodded. He placed a small inkwell on the counter. The liquid inside was not black. It shifted color, iridescent greens and violets swirling in the suspension. It looked like crushed velvet. It looked like the dust from a moth's wing.

"The terms are binding," Hollis said. "Sign."

He offered a pen. It was heavy, made of bone.

I reached for it. My fingers were stiff. The dilemma was a blade pressing against my throat. To speak was to lie. To be silent was to die. But this trade offered a third way. To burn the instrument to save the music.

I uncapped the pen. The smell of the ink was pungent, organic and musk-heavy.

I thought of the awards gathering dust on my mantle. I thought of the silence in my house that was louder than any applause.

I pressed the nib to the paper.

The ink flowed cold. It did not sink into the fiber of the page; it sat on top, shimmering. As I formed the ‘J’ of my name, a sharp pain lanced through my larynx. It felt like swallowing a shard of ice. I did not stop. I wrote U, then D, then E.

With the final stroke, the pain vanished, replaced by a numbness that spread from my vocal cords outward.

Hollis blew on the signature. The iridescent dust settled.

"Done," he said. The moth wings in his eyes beat once, slowly. "Now for the transaction."

He reached under the counter and produced a tuning fork. It was black iron, pitted and rough.

"The stranger is waiting," Hollis said. "And she is screaming. You need to let it out for her."

I placed my hands flat on the countertop. The glass vibrated against my palms. It was not a mechanical rattle. It was a chaotic swarm of frequencies, thousands of trapped notes buzzing against the surface.

Hollis held the black tuning fork. He struck it against the edge of the register. It made no sound. The air around the tines warped, bending the light of the fluorescent tubes overhead. He held the vibrating void inches from my lips.

"Scream for the stranger," Hollis said. "Not anger. Grief."

I closed my eyes. I hunted for the feeling I had buried under fifteen years of platinum records. I found the knot in my chest, the one I ignored while accepting Grammys, the one I drank gin to dissolve every Friday night. I pulled the knot loose.

I opened my mouth.

The sound did not start as a scream. It began as a rattle in my chest, a physical rejection of the air in my lungs. Then it tore free. It was not musical. It was a raw, jagged noise that scraped the lining of my throat. It was the sound of a door slamming in an empty house.

The scream hit the tuning fork and amplified.

The fluorescent tube above the jerky rack exploded. Sparks showered down on the dirty linoleum floor. The glass of the counter spiderwebbed under my hands. The crack shot outward, jagged and fast, forcing its way toward the hexagonal tanks.

It struck the jar near the floor.

The glass shattered. The viscous fluid splashed out, soaking the cuffs of my pants. The bioluminescent jellyfish dissolved into a cloud of pure, blinding light. A chord rang out, F-sharp minor, clear and devastating. It was the sound of the song I had never finished.

But it was not alone.

The destruction of the jar triggered a chain reaction. The other tanks boiled. The air filled with a sudden, crushing pressure. I gasped as a flood of foreign memories slammed into me. I saw paintings that had never been painted. I heard symphonies that died in the minds of their composers. I felt the texture of sculptures that remained trapped in stone. It was a tsunami of unmade art, and I was drowning in it.

Through the chaos, Hollis reached out. His hand was terribly cold. He pressed his palm against my throat.

The sensation was immediate. The burning in my larynx stopped. My vocal cords felt as though they were dissolving like sugar in hot water. The scream cut off. The connection to my lungs remained, but the bridge was gone. The instrument was taken.

Hollis withdrew his hand. He held a fistful of silence.

I fell to my knees in the wet, glowing ruin of the shop floor. I clutched my throat. The skin was intact. The pulse beat against my fingertips. But inside, the architecture was gone.

I tried to say No. I tried to beg. My diaphragm shoved air upward, a desperate, heaving gust, but it hit no resistance. There were no cords to vibrate. No friction to shape the wind into meaning. I was a bell without a tongue. I clawed at my neck, digging my nails in until I felt the sting, trying to find the mechanism, but there was only smooth, terrified silence.

Hollis watched me. He didn't smile. He opened his hand, and the silence he held drifted up like smoke, joining the dark. Then the lights died.

---

I woke on the wet asphalt of the parking lot. The rain had stopped. A puddle near my cheek reflected the flickering red K of the sign above.

I pushed myself up. My hands were raw, embedded with tiny shards of glass, but the pain felt distant compared to the emptiness in my neck. I opened my mouth to scream, a reflex of panic.

Silence.

Not the silence of a pause. The silence of a void.

I coughed, or tried to. It was a terrifying, frictionless spasm. My chest heaved, my mouth formed the shape of a sob, but the only noise was the wet slap of my tongue against my teeth and the hiss of breath passing through a tunnel that no longer had a gate. I scrambled backward on the pavement, my heels skidding in oil. I roared at the sky, jaw unhinged, veins bulging in my neck.

Nothing.

The world was loud with distant traffic, the hum of the sign, and the drip of water from the eaves, but I was a dead spot in the center of it. A mute hole in the audio track. I sat on the damp ground, shivering, and let the air slide uselessly in and out of my lungs, realizing that I could never again tell anyone that I was afraid.

I drove home in a world that had become an orchestra. The tires on the wet road hummed a constant cello note. The rhythm of the windshield wipers was a percussion track. I could see the structure of the sounds, the architecture of the noise. The silence in my throat was not a void. It was a canvas.

In the months that followed, I became a ghost. I communicated through text and email. I sent demos recorded on a synthesizer, layering the tracks with an exactitude I had never possessed before. The songs went to young starlets and aging rockers. They sang the words I wrote. They topped the charts. They called me a genius. They did not know they were singing the autopsy of my past.

One Tuesday in November, I stopped at a bodega in Silver Lake for coffee.

The air held the sharp tang of burnt espresso. I brought a carton of oat milk to the counter. The girl behind the register was young, in her teens. She had dark curls tied back with a green ribbon. She was humming.

I froze.

The melody was low and intricate. It was an F-sharp minor progression, unresolved, leading into a bridge I had written on a napkin in a clinic waiting room fifteen years ago. I had never recorded it. I had never played it for a soul.

I stared at her. The girl looked up. Her eyes were dark, devoid of moth wings or iridescence. She stopped humming and smiled. It was a sad smile, practiced and worn.

She pointed to the total on the register. I paid. Then I tapped my ear and pointed at her, raising my eyebrows.

She blushed. "Oh. Sorry. Just a habit."

I pulled a notepad from my pocket. I wrote: What song is that?

She read the note. Her expression softened. "It doesn't have a name. My mom... she used to hum it. She said she heard it on the radio once, a long time ago. The night she found out she was pregnant with me."

She looked past me, through the window at the gray street.

"She was going to... she wasn't going to keep me," the girl said. "But she heard that song. She said it sounded like the baby was already singing to her. She said it made her brave."

She looked back at me. "Mom died last year. I hum it when I miss her. It helps with the grief."

She wrote her name on a napkin and slid it into the bag with my coffee. Vera.

I looked at the name. I looked at the curve of her jaw, the way her hands moved.

The stranger's grief was not random. Hollis had not taken my voice to heal an anonymous soul. He had taken it to comfort the daughter of the woman my song had saved. This girl was the echo of a choice made in a different timeline. She was the twin of the ghost I carried.

I took the coffee. My throat was empty, but my mind was full. Nothing was gone. Not the music I had pawned, not the child I had not kept, and not the voice I had lost. They were here, humming behind a counter in Silver Lake.

I walked out into the cool air. The door chimed behind me. It was a perfect C-major.