Plugger: ‘WASAAS’

Plugger/Bums from Deep Space present their first joint under the Che Underground label. What happens after the fairy tale ends?

It’s been a long time, you know? I mean, a long time. Since she rode off with that guy while they stood waving their caps until she disappeared over the horizon line, a lot has happened (or should have happened?) — but nothing has really changed.

How long was she with them, anyway? (Outside of her crystal casket, I mean.) A week? It’s crazy how much difference that little bit of time made. But in the mines, time doesn’t move the same way. There aren’t the same visual cues. And the time you’re on the surface is that much clearer, but it’s brief, you know? Little pinholes in a black box.

After she left, they tried to keep the place in order, the way she showed them. But the dust, right? There’s always dust: in boots, in hair, in seams. It collects in ripples on the cabin floor, it gets into laundry and food. It seems pointless, chasing all that dust.

At least it’s not a coal mine. That’s dirty business. They’d heard about this salt mine in Poland where the miners carved fantastic sculptures into the salt — a whole cathedral, even, right in the salt! That would be cool to see. Gemstones don’t carve so easy — they’d send the gems off by the cartload — along the same route she left by — and wait for the money to come back, and provisions and tools, and maybe even a magazine or banjo strings.

Look. It’s not like she totally cut them off. There’s a good reason for everything that happened. She did invite them to the wedding … Only it turned out later that a couple of the invitations got stuck in a badger hole, and the other five didn’t feel cool if the whole team wasn’t invited. Ha! They were pissed about that one for a long time, until those other invites turned up, all muddy and full of dust.

They did get an invite for the daughter’s christening. (That kid must be … Thirty by now! Damn.) And they really wanted to make it, but they were waiting on another shipment. So they sent along an emerald teether and hoped she spotted it in the pile of presents.

Then they heard she was sick — for real this time, no curses or cures. They meant to get in touch, but it felt weird after all that time.

Had it even been a week out of her life above ground? It could have been less. She hadn’t been in the mines … Her time had passed like normal. Was it really cool to show up after blowing off the wedding and everything? Maybe it was better to stay dusty ghosts, gray and out of the way.

So … They didn’t even admit it to each other, but it was kind of a relief when they heard she’d finally died. The bright pinhole had passed. The dust was still in place, right where it had been falling all those years. The fragments of days above ground passed quickly.

But still in the evenings, they’d sit outside the cabin by the wood stove. And sometimes they’d play that song she used to sing when she was with them.