There was a stage. A microphone. A guy with a guitar and another at a piano. One spotlight trying to mark out everything up there and missing the edges. And that was it. If the audience in the jazz bar had been expecting anything more, anything grander or, well, jazzier, they were disappointed. Most were. It was a good place to be disappointed in.

It was a good place to spend money when it had nowhere else to be spent too. That’s mostly what these people were doing. Spending money that they didn’t know what else to do with. Spending it on trying to capture something. The past. By ordering Bourbon and listening to jazz and sitting in little cramped up booths on benches of cracked red leather in the dark they were trying to go back. The thing was, what they didn’t know or maybe didn’t care was, it wasn’t their past to go back to. It was the stuff of movies, of broads and molls and gangsters and machine guns and class.

They never had that.

They wouldn’t have wanted it. Then. But they did now.

They sat and drank and listened to the music which was average and forgettable. It wasn’t the movie score they were looking for.
Until that night. They sat and drank as usual, and they waited. And they saw someone different walk on to the stage. She was tiny, but she had something. A thing. A presence. She had something long ago about her.

When she sang the room became darker because the only thing that existed was her. When she sang the room became smoky even though cigarettes were banned these days because the smoke was in her voice. When she sang the crowd actually listened because her soul told them to.

Afterwards the audience came back to the present, a little shaken, a lot changed.

And the tiny woman went home and sang to no one.