Questing Song

By Richard Quarry

When social worker Damon Shorter, once an aspiring jazz musician, hears one of his clients singing snatches of songs unlike anything he's heard before, their beauty captivates him. Erina has spent her early adulthood see-sawing between psychiatric wards and the streets. She tells him she never writes anything down and never tries to make these phrases into a whole song because every moment of life should exist only for itself.

Damon starts getting visions of reviving his faltering song-writing career. But trying to impose some structure over Erina's on-again-off-again hold on reality brings him deeper into himself and his past failures than he wants to go.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Quarry
• Release date: Jul 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223748113

Book preview

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Questing Song

Richard Quarry

Copyright © 2023 by Richard Quarry

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Contents

Questing Song

About the Author

All You Ever Have To Do

Questing Song

Erina, Damon Shorter said gently, please take your contacts out. It was about the fifteenth time he’d asked. They’re what’s making your eyes burn.

No! It’s the poison. The lens keep the poison out.

She huddled on the far end of the threadbare couch, feet drawn up protectively against him. She held her arms clasped across her striped blue and red sweater, face turned away so that all he saw was her blonde hair. Besides the contacts, God only knew when she’d last taken her runners off, or her sweater or jeans either. Not recently, judging from the stale, musky smell.

Damon could hang with that. As a caseworker on the city’s Outreach Team, he’d known lots worse. Smells to gag you; smells so potent you wondered how one human body could generate them all. Smells that in conjunction with a cut or abrasion could spell big trouble.

Erina had at least a week to go before she reached that stage. And she was a tidy person by nature; you could see that from the fact that her fine golden hair never got really caked. The comb, at least, wasn’t out to get her. Not yet. She might even take a bath in another day or two. Unless she got afraid the water company or the landlord or some former co-workers from a job she’d left six years ago were poisoning the water.

But the contacts, that was bad news. Erina said she’d had them in three days straight, waking and sleeping. And now her eyes burned. How about that?

She was at least nudging the level of self-harm where he’d have to go through with his threats to call for a psych eval.

The state would put her away. First an initial three-day observation, then three, four weeks until the meds had a chance to kick in. Then they’d release her to — drumroll, please — nothing. Tent city. These rooms, squalid as they were, would have gone to some other lost soul and it would be at least a year, likely more, before he could get her another for-real apartment. Only it wouldn’t be him, it would be someone else because she’d never trust Damon Shorter again, not even as little as she did now. And most other workers, they didn’t have his touch with shuffling the card of bureaucracy.

The cracks in the pavement were opening up beneath her.

Erina, he said, softly as he could through his mounting frustration, it’s the contact lens that are drying out your eyes. That’s why they burn like that.

It’s the poison! In the air!

There were only so many times you could repeat yourself. He’d been leaning toward her on the couch. Now he settled back and took a deep breath, just like you were supposed to advise the clients to do.

What he really wanted to do was shout at her. Maybe shake her a little too.

Hope, that’s what kept whipping you the bird in this job. You’d think he’d of been around enough to move past the common fallacies of working with crazies: that cause and effect were ever going to come into alignment, that any traction some show of compassion seemed to get you would last beyond that first no, or that they could actually deal with the very minimum requirements of reality if they’d just try a little harder!

He wanted to say, look what I’ve done for you. Go on, look around.

He could cross the room in two long steps and span it in four, the floral curtains were not of this century, and the overhead light was of a vintage where it risked being looted by Restoration Hardware and sold to yuppies. The no-longer-quite maroon couch alerted you to every single spring, and rested one corner unevenly on an old phone directory (!). The scent was a mix of slowly decaying upholstery, ancient smoke from weed and cigarettes, and the decomposing take-out whose crumpled bags and boxes he could see rising high above the wastebasket in the tiny kitchen. The mix of hip-hop and cop shows blaring through the thin walls from all sides would have driven him crazy, whatever effect they might be having on Erina.

And yet. The only competition was a blue tent on the sidewalk next to a chain-link fence.