Background Music

By KyleeliseTHT

When Concetta Pianto sang her Il dolce suono, the people on Bokeem slowed to listen. But no one ever asked why she sang so often. “Nor did they query the vibrant bruises, tracked downward from her face to her limbs.” Background Music is a woman’s story of societal denial and private suffering—though the pain is not Concetta’s alone. There are others. A cross-dressing teen, a dutiful wife, and a mutt named Red-eyed Blue suffer, too. But no one ever asks—Why?

• Language: English
• Publisher: KyleeliseTHT
• Release date: May 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311674166

KyleeliseTHT

Kyleelise is a Yankee by birth and a southerner at heart. She was educated at South Central Community and Albertus Magnus colleges and Yale University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She has worked as a researcher/writer, print journalist and editor, and producer. Kyleelise writes mostly fiction, now, from her home near the Gulf of Mexico, where she lives with her family. You can learn more about "Kyleelise the fiction writer" at kyleelisetht.com.

Book preview

Background Music

KyleeliseTHT

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 KyleeliseTHT

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Cover Art by D. Lammie Hanson used with permission from the artist.

Table of Contents

* Il Dolce Suono*

* The Arrangement*

* Ruins Revived*

* Mournings*

* Reputation *

* The Intercessor *

*An Angel, Not So Much*

* The Prettiest Boy on Bokeem*

* Who Will Sing for Concetta?*

* Buried Burdens*

* CHARACTERS FOR BACKGROUND MUSIC*

About the Author

*Il Dolce Suono*

The old women on Bokeem Street cried when Concetta Pianto sang each morning, while their men played cards outside Frankie’s Pizza Palace across the street. There, Frankie De Luca and his son, Frankie Jr., kneaded and proofed dough to be divvied up for pizza, bread, and his Hawaiian wife’s Italian-style dango jiru. And those men out front, who’d sit every day, just across the street from Concetta’s place, looked up only occasionally from their games to watch dolled up Tito-G float O’s from his mouth, plentiful as those churned out from a bubble-making machine.

No matter how haunting her lyrics, Concetta’s il dolce suono prettied the air. Sung out from her kitchen window, two stories high above the street, the matriarchs‒even the ones around the corner on Rockwood and as far away as Sepher‒slowed to take them in. And their eyes lowered, as if some sadness slipped between smiles and tugged at their comfortably deep pains.

Why did Concetta sing so often? No one ever asked. Nor did they query the vibrant bruises, tracked downward from her face to her limbs.

Her arias should have saved her. At least that’s what her mother had taught her.

Sing your mad song should a time come when you must, Concetta recalled the lesson. A good man will fall to his knees and never hurt you again.

Maybe six years ago. Not since. Michael Pianto never learned to be a man. And he wasn’t good. Concetta’s songs were like shards of glass set to blackboards, screeching jagged words incomprehensible yet enjoyable to the man’s sadistic ear. He’d never turn them off. No one ever suggested that he should.

* The Arrangement*

Concetta had been handed over to Michael and made his wife after Billy J, the neighborhood’s kingpin numbers runner, made sure that her first husband, Sammy Rouledge, and their two boys, disappeared. They’d been friends, Sammy and Michael, all their lives. And