Year: 2023

Duration: c. 6 minutes (PENDING EDITS)

Instrumentation: electric guitar, drumset, 2 violins, viola, cello, contrabass

Drum requirements: either 2 kicks or 1 kick with 2 pedals, floor tom, rack tom, snare, hi-hat, 2 crash cymbals, 1 ride. Additional kit optional, to the drummer’s taste.

Premiere information: never officially performed - the premiere rights are up for grabs, folks!

Notes:

you are seventeen years old flying down the interstate at 85 miles an hour in a busted old sedan while the sun sets red on a hot, muggy day - the AC is on but it’s busted too, the air it blows is sticky and warm and you are boiling alive in this damn car ---

you pass another exit leading to another town with the same seven chain restaurants and a motel identical to the one in the town before. you’re blasting music from a scene that died when you were a baby over your awful, tinny speakers.

(No one understands you. No one ever will.)

you pass a billboard that cost someone millions, demanding that you repent; another that is nothing but eyes, wide and staring ---

a rotting barn screams its warnings of hell across unending empty fields ---

when the CD runs out of music to play you’ll listen to the radio telling you once more that everything is going to shit and no one will admit that it was them that made it so, no one will step up and say, “it was me! I am guilty!” the sky is washed in blood. maybe it was you. maybe only God can save you now ---