Delaney Kelly
Aileen Aberdeen might have blamed the dressing room fluorescents for her sallow complexion, the way her skin, taut as taffy, stretched and retained the shape of the tug, before melting like candle wax down her chin—if only she weren’t so hungry. Even her cigarette breaks ’neath the blazing sun did little to restore the flush to her cheeks. Gone were the days when the ends of her fire-red curls bounced as she tapped her steel-toed cowgirl boots at the lip of the stage, when a flirtatious wink didn’t creak like a loosened doorjamb.
Aileen pat down her hair, flat as roadkill, to the split ends, then unscrewed the mirror bulbs one by one until the black tumbled over her shoulders, the dressing room a cave she could nest into. It was a sin to retreat from the light, her old mentor, La Grande Chuparosa, used to say. Let the music fill you up, let it take you to the place where the sinful die happy and you never hunger. Chuparosa knew how to command a room, how to have the audience pawing up her skirt like lap dogs, right until the day a stake drove through her heart and took her song away. Theirs was a life of bloodlust self-preservation, and sometimes it was better to go out in a burst of flame than a slow starvation. For Leen, here, now, that meant booting it to Sin City soon as possible, where a veritable feast awaited her.
Aileen lit a cigarette then put it out on the top of her pale white hand, an ashy stigmata. She didn’t feel a damned thing. Not since she was small and her fingers barely made their way around the frets of that old six-string, when she first became aware of the rhythm of the blood in her veins. Only now, Aileen Aberdeen was certain that she was dying.
* * *
The June Star was a dive bar on the outskirts of Las Vegas that housed many a country crooner over the years. A hub for illegal gambling and prostitution, the owners constructed a small platform stage after the war to attract a more polished crowd. But the original crop clung like flies, the somber-sweet songs muffling their under-the-table dealings. No one of good moral standing came to The June Star just for the music—no one of good moral standing would step one boot print into the desert sand this far past Vegas city lines, where the glow of the casinos did little to blot out the harsh beat-down sun.
It was quieter than a coyote’s crawl when Aileen took the stage, her stool screeching against the floorboards. The heat hung in the air like a wet towel wrung out to dry, sopping with sweat and smoke. She tuned her guitar as the men groaned heavy in their chairs, thick billfolds used to wipe the sweat from their brow. Aileen Aberdeen opened her mouth to sing. It was a voice that fluttered with the grace of cool desert air, and when she swooped into the lower register, her sultry tone spun like steam from the hot springs. In 1958 The Reno Responder called Aileen “Nevada’s most auspicious crooner.” The Carson City Caller remarked that she was “the greatest songbird to grace the desert plains since the cactus wren.”
Now, in a smoky corner of the desert, that voice rang out over the heads of the sweaty men and shook the tobacco-flecked droplets from their lips. Aileen singled out one man in front, looked him dead in his blackjack eyes. She sang about love and loss, for it was all she knew, then everything clicked into place. There was the familiar tug of something being pulled taut, its sizzle and snap in the air. Around the room, the lit ends of the men’s cigars hissed with electricity. The steel twang of her guitar lassoed around the captive man’s heart, and then he was on his feet, jaw agape with the Texas chew dangling like stalactites in his mouth, reaching toward the shine on the tip of her boots. Yes, yes, Aileen pleaded, her sickly sweet song dappled at the edge of her cherry-red lips. She could already taste the metal on her mouth.
But then someone dropped their glass and the spell was broken. The man looked away, briefly bewildered by his compulsion to stand, and he returned to the chips at his table. Aileen kept strumming, tapping her white cowgirl boots, the frizz of her red hair singed under the stage lights. The men knocked back their steins, sticky foam dribbling on the ground. When she finished her set, they clapped a polite round of applause before parting their palms to reshuffle their cards.
* * *
“That was shit.” Her manager, Rusty Tack, held his shiny head in his hands, cigarette held by the gap between his two front teeth. A ghost light sat on the stage as The June Star busboys swept and mopped the sticky floors.
“Yer tellin’ me,” said Aileen.
“Yer set’s runnin’ a little stale lately,” Rusty muttered as he counted the cash, his amber-colored aviator sunglasses obscuring from Aileen the dwindling sparkle in his eyes. With his characteristic dark sideburns and shimmery silver spurs stretching in his ears, Rusty was the best in the biz for the most depraved. He’d get Aileen where she needed to go and he’d look the other way when she did what had to be done.
“You think I don’t know that?” said Aileen. “It’s . . . this heat. It’s makin’ my hairs stand on end, my strings go sharp. An’ I’m so . . . so . . . hungry.” Her pale fingers shook in her lap. Rusty knocked the basket of scorpion toward her and gave her a pointed look. Aileen rolled her eyes.
“How bout we warm up back home an’ then hit Vegas on the way back?” Rusty crunched on the scorpion, its little black legs stuck between the gaps in his teeth.
“You can’t be serious.”
Rusty made a face and crunched even louder.
“No. No. Aileen Aberdeen goes forward, not backward. I’m tired a bein’ on the road. I want to settle down somewhere you can’t see the ends of the settin’ sun. Vegas was always part of the plan.”
“Yeah, well,” said Rusty. He kicked himself up from the table and turned to face The June Star’s saloon door. The sun swelled round and full as a skin blister over the great dry expanse. “Settlin’ down ain’t for our kind.”
“I know.” Aileen drew her hands to her temples in an attempt to steady her faltering vision. She pulled a canteen of water to her lips, but it went down like fire ants scurrying up a rusty pipe, and she spit it on the floor.
“If you don’t figure somethin’ out soon,” continued Rusty, “it’s only goin’ to get worse. For me, too. I bet all my cards on you, y’know.”
“Fine, fine. We’ll get back on the road.”
“I’ll load up the van.”
A crack rang through the air. Aileen saw one of the busboys give Rusty a smirk, slinging a towel over his shoulder.
“I’ll be right back,” said Rusty, and he and the busboy disappeared behind the swinging kitchen doors.
* * *
The drive from Las Vegas to her hometown would take all day, and the thought of going back made Aileen’s stomach squeeze tighter. The desert heat twisted her organs, though there was nothing for her to throw up.
She finally broke when the dead of night lulled to a cool. There was no sign of life save for the distant cry of a coyote.
“Pull over!” she sputtered, mouth chalky with dry saliva.
Rusty looked at her through the dashboard mirror, his aviator eyes mirroring the light of the moon. “What, here? Now?”
But Aileen had already leapt from the car, running on all fours and kicking up dust with her boots as she propelled faster, faster, ’til she disappeared into the brush a mile out. There was a cry and a yelp and a long string of silence. Rusty glimpsed a dirt-smudged Aileen through the rearview mirror, emerging from the bushes with a mat of twigs in her auburn hair. She left a blood-smudged thumbprint on the car door lock and her Devil’s Delight lips smacked of satiation. But digesting the coyote was like pouring fool’s gold through a sieve, which for her kind only stalled the effects of starvation.
“Step on it,” said Aileen, breathless. “I need to do my set before next nightfall.”
* * *
Salt Scuff, Nevada looked exactly as she had left it. Once famed for its selection of sweet sorghum ice, the town was one block of single-story corner stores in an otherwise insignificant ring of dust. As they sped past the dented city sign, Aileen saw the painted smiling faces above her parents’ family store, The Aberdeen Canteen—noted among locals for being the first soda fountain in the whole Southwest to serve Coca-Cola. Aileen averted her eyes from their static billboard stare, just as they had averted theirs when she’d married her husband, kept their hands firm around his shoulders at family dinners just as he kept his hands firm around her neck.
By midmorning she and Rusty walked through the swinging saloon doors of The Spinnin’ Spur. This venue was near identical to The June Star except that it lacked the renown that proximity to Vegas brings. But what stayed the same were the vagabonds who drifted in with their flasks tucked close to their breast and whispered out the door just the way they came, like tumbleweeds. Just before lunch the place was already crowded with drunks, slick with whiskey sweat and a sheen of gray tobacco on their teeth. Aileen was loading in her equipment when Rusty approached.
“Leen, there’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
She smelled something suspicious. Rusty rarely introduced her to new folks—it was best if they kept undetected as possible.
Hiding behind Rusty was a girl who looked about 12, with big brown eyes and curls of dark coiled hair that framed her solemn face. She held the sides of her thin frame like she was a row of dominoes that threatened to topple from a whistle of wind. Wolfie True was her name, Rusty said with a smirk, “cause she’s always howlin’ at the moon.” She was from Old Lick, Nevada, just a skeeter’s buzz away from Salt Scuff. Aileen paled. She didn’t know anyone could be “from” Old Lick in the same way that a pebble isn’t from the underside of a screeching tire. It was a place so hot from direct sunlight that the sky and the earth were blanched the same blinding white. A marvel of science, Old Lick was, for nothing had roots there and nothing could stay.
Wolfie was just shy of seventeen and small for her age, quaking with desperation as if circling vultures were fixing to pluck the meat from her bones. But Aileen recognized in her the same bug-eyed ambition that tethered her together when she was her age, and her instinct was to crush Wolfie beneath her boot. Rusty let the two of them shake hands, like they were colleagues, like there was enough food to go around, before announcing that he would be taking on Wolfie as a client and that there was only one slot open in Vegas.
* * *
“A new client?!”
Aileen cornered Rusty in the dressing room, nearly splitting the door from its hinges. “First I’m warmin’ up back home, now I’m competin’ for scraps with some two-bit kid. What happened to the plan?”
“The plan . . .” Rusty trailed off, and it became increasingly clear what the plan was. Aileen’s power was faltering, and Rusty knew it.
“She’s a baby,” said Aileen. “So small she prob’ly ain’t even seen blood yet.” “Oh she’s seen blood,” said Rusty. “Wolfie’s had a hard life, you know. Her father tried to kill her.”
“My husband tried to kill me,” said Aileen, fixing the Devil’s Delight on her lips. “What’s the difference?”
“The difference is you sing like you’re full,” Rusty said. “And we both can’t afford any more empty nights.”
“So what happens if I can’t feed here? You’re leavin’ me back where I started? Please Rusty, I can’t go back home.”
Rusty shook the last of the burning ash from his cigarette, the light winking out from his eyes. “Course not. I know a couple good holes out west you can crawl into and die.”
* * *
The tips of Aileen’s fingers buzzed with heat as she strummed her opening set, “(You’re Nothin’ But A) Cactus Blossom”—a crowd favorite. She lamented all of the failed romantic entanglements after her husband, how she prefers a man who’s stiff, prickly, and hurts her when she gets too close. After all, a tough exterior means the juice inside is sweet. Aileen held the memory of the taste on her lips. Then she saw Rusty hunched over a barstool, caught her mirrored reflection in his shaded eyes, and saw the weak and pathetic little girl she’d tried so hard to outrun. No matter how much Aileen rehashed her trauma for a prone audience, it was she who would forever be the container for the trauma, an unshakeable pebble of the sole. As she strummed the outro chords, Aileen’s fingers curled tighter around the guitar’s neck, nails springing from the steel, and the memory loosened like a drop rope.
A few men in the room were compelled to stand. One drew closer, hand outstretched, until he was close as a shaving razor and she could smell the sweat simmering on his skin. The man reached, stuck his finger in her mouth, and Aileen began to suck, the taste of a dirt-caked fingernail mixed with fresh meat baked by the sun. She continued to strum on her guitar, the hypnotic tap of her boots lulling him ever deeper under her spell, until her mouth was at the knuckle, peeling back the skin and the salty sweet flesh, his blood curdling against her expectant tongue. She’d been at this for many years, known what she was capable of for longer, but the feeling was always brand new. It was like being born again into a second skin, and Aileen was a rattlesnake shivering into her next coat.
The man pulled away—that was new. He withdrew his finger from her mouth, the skin tugged all the way back, index finger bone stripped bare and pointing in the direction of the dressing rooms where Wolfie was rehearsing her song. Aileen watched as the other men lifted their wayward heads and drifted toward the scent of something somber and new.
Young Wolfie True sang about love and loss, for it was all she knew. She sang about her father, who had the misfortune of standing in a general store when a young white boy, short a nickel for his daily bubblegum fix, accused him of stealing the coin. Wolfie knew he didn’t do it, for he’s an honest man. Her father ran, back to the rickety porch that they shared, and the lynch mob followed. She watched as they struggled to mount their makeshift gallows in the crumbling white dirt, and she got an idea. Wolfie opened her mouth to sing, just like she did every night, when her father was asleep, in the space where the crickets used to sing their creaky song before they too abandoned Old Lick. It was a painful melody, the kind that burned like the liquor she was forbidden to drink, but she felt that familiar tug in her chest, the kind of tug that parts the air with the strength of its feeling, and watched as the men bent their ears in the direction of her song and pitched forward as if taken with desert fever.
Wolfie didn’t mean to hurt anybody, but she felt her stomach rumbling with a hunger like she’d never felt before, and soon her teeth were reaching for the tender spot on the men’s necks where they slung their sweat-soaked towels after a long day in the mines. She ate and ate and ate, their bodies a warm mash of bones and gold-flecked soil against her viper’s jaw, until she’d cleared Old Lick of the dirty white men who’d come to hang her father.
Aileen’s fingers stiffened against her six-string until it split a crack down the middle of her manicured nails. It was a good song, the most aching blues she’d heard, and that was precisely what made Wolfie dangerous. Aileen Aberdeen strummed harder and put a quiver in her voice, anything to drown out the pain, but now the men were at the young girl’s backstage door.
Wolfie went on:
Papa True’s eyes held a new horror beholding his daughter. He always knew there was something not right about her, for she was an unwanted child who killed her mother by absorbing too much blood in the womb. Wolfie knew this was the truth, for he was an honest man. And when he thrust a kitchen knife under her ribcage, she wasn’t surprised by that either. She pried the blade from his hand, looked him in the eyes that were made of the same mud as hers, and told him that she could either swallow him whole like she did that mob, or she could gut him ’til all the blood draws out. Wolfie’s father ran ’til he was just a smudge on the blanched earth, though once you’ve run out of Old Lick, you’ve got nowhere else to run to. Wolfie knew that he wouldn’t tell a soul what he’s seen, for he’s an honest man.
The young girl could scarce get the words out fast enough, her mouth garbled with the sound of joints popping, and tendons—it was always the tendons—the sound of their stretching when wrested between incisors. Aileen covered her ears, though it was a sound that usually made her mouth water. Wolfie was being greedy now, the carcasses piled high outside her door, a buzzard’s display of wealth. The power of her song was too great for a girl her size. Rusty fanned the flies from his mirror eyes with a fat wad of cash. Aileen knew she must be stopped.
* * *
On the road, Aileen sat in the backseat while Wolfie sat up front with Rusty, a western saddle resting on the seat so she could see above the dashboard. The Salt Scuff Sentinel called Wolfie “the future of blues music” and “a spirited addition to the canon of female sorrow.” All before she’d so much as stepped one foot on the stage. Last night, while Wolfie flossed the flesh from her teeth in preparation for the Sentinel spread, Aileen threw herself against the dressing room walls. She needed to remember the pain in order to recapture it. It’d been so long since she’d been hit that she forgot how to compartmentalize her pain into a digestible four-chord story. All that remained was the taste of her husband’s blood after, the feel of the same hand that clenched her windpipe sliding down her esophagus. She couldn’t sing about starving—that was akin to begging. She needed a new tactic, a new pain to tremble her treble. The dressing room incident got her a nasty purple stain on her left eye and nothing more. That morning, she’d blended both eyes with Beelzebub Blue shadow to conceal her shame.
“Y’okay back there?”
Aileen looked up. Wolfie dropped something in her lap. It was a pile of fingers. Scraps from yesterday’s feast. Aileen was ashamed of how quickly she lapped it up, though it lacked the flavor a fresh kill brings. Wolfie’s flatline mouth curved at the edges. She looked at Aileen like Aileen looked at La Grande Chuparosa. Now there was a woman who always felt full. Old Chuparosa’s stage presence was almost as big as her boots, with a voice that could strip the leather from a holster, before she became a husk with a song caught in her throat, waiting for her prodigy to repackage the magic. By the time of tomorrow’s Vegas show, Wolfie True would be dead, too.
* * *
Rusty’s car rumbled to a stop at a gas station in Aciaga Falls, home to the Carlson mines. It was a ghost town, left abandoned after the water which carried the golden sediment downstream dried up, leaving only drifters just as hungry for a change in their well-dry lives as the musicians come to entrap them. It was also the last place Aileen had seen Old Chuparosa alive.
Rusty exited the car to go pump and pay for another pack of menthols that would last him the evening’s drive into Vegas.
“Don’t go anywhere,” he said, giving a long look to Wolfie instead of Aileen, because the dying don’t make a break for it. They were so close now, Aileen could almost taste the decadent fatty tissue slow-roasted under casino fluorescents instead of ultraviolet rays. She looked over at Wolfie, who’d climbed on top of the car to watch the sunset, curved as an old rooster come deliriously to crow the dawn. Her spine lurched as if yearning for something in the great expanse of dust and dirt. Like nothing could ever take the pain away, for the pain was all around her. They didn’t have long now before Rusty came back.
“You been here before, right, Leen?” Wolfie asked, her eyes fastened to the dwindling light.
“Ages ago,” said Aileen, and as she said it she felt the gust of Chuparosa’s last drawn breath hit her cheeks.
“I have a question I been meaning to ask miles back.”
Aileen’s veins stung like downed powerlines. “What is it?”
“You know where to get sorghum ice round these parts? I heard it’s best in these roadside towns, and I ain’t have time to stop since Rusty scooped me. I don’t care if it stings all the way down, I want to try it just once.”
“Oh. Sure. Yeah, I’ll show you.” Aileen’s pupils dilated like snake eyes on a fixed die. “But first, we oughta grease our hinges.”
“What’s that?”
“You mean you never warmed up yer voice before you go onstage?”
“No, I don’t warm up. I us’lly jes sing from the heart, creaky as the old ticker is.”
Aileen tried to hide the heat rising to her cold cheeks as she said, “Well, if you wanna be a proper singer like me, you oughta make a habit of greasin’ yer hinges. I bin in the business longer than you could walk, and they’ll tear you limb from limb in Vegas if you ain’t ready.”
Wolfie looked at her then, with the caught-in-the-headlights look of a mule deer who ends up with a tread mark at its throat. Aileen’s voice didn’t quiver that night she uttered her final words to La Grande Chuparosa; her hands didn’t shake when she drove the stake right through the old crooner’s heart. But her six-string–plucking fingers did twitch now, her songbird’s lilt caught in her throat when she looked at Wolfie, at all the hunger baked into her bones. Aileen caught a glimpse of her waxen reflection in the girl’s dark doe eyes and flicked away her gaze like cattle flick away flies.
“I wanna be a proper singer jes like you,” Wolfie said. “Please, show me.”
* * *
Here’s how Aileen would do it: She’d lead Wolfie to the abandoned mine shafts so they could tune their voices to the caverns. Aileen swore by this method, she’d tell the young girl, which she discovered by accident after a childhood of playing in places she shouldn’t, before she graduated as an adult to playing with people she shouldn’t.
Because “Nothing makes a canary sing quite like the threat of all hell raining down from above,” she’d add with a wink. Aileen may be dying, but it wouldn’t take much more than a light shove, a nudge of her steel-toed boot. So delicate as to be an accident. She’d take Wolfie’s song on the road, polish it around the edges, squeeze into it to fit her hurt. It didn’t have to be true so long as it was potent with the ghost of someone’s pain. Wolfie didn’t have what it takes to last for long. You had to be a predator to survive in these times. If anything, Aileen was saving her from a worse fate, wasting away forgotten, with no one to recall how beautiful you sang, if only for a moment, if only to feel less hungry and alone.
* * *
When Wolfie took to the stage at The High Roller the next night, she sang about love and loss, for it was all she knew. She sang about a girl who was dying, whose auburn curls cascaded like sand dunes against a sun-melted sky. But the copperhead got stuck somewhere the sun don’t shine, where no one can hear her cry. And what is a songbird with no one to hear its song? Legend says she’s still cheep-cheep-cheeping with a stolen melody under miles and miles of dirt long since excavated of precious minerals. Wolfie wished she could forgive her, for she knew what it meant to be alone in this world. She settled for forgetting old Aileen Aberdeen instead. So Wolfie ditched the car and the reflecting man and stuck her thumb toward the Vegas city lights—but not before getting herself some sweet sorghum ice in a paper cone, and for one brief second before it stung on the way down she was the same little girl whose daddy didn’t run away.
In that cigar-stenched backroom, Wolfie told her rapt audience exactly what she’d do to them, how she’d coax the peel off ’em before tonguing their syrupy insides the way a cat laps up milk. They oughta know, she said, because most people aren’t lucky enough to know how they’ll meet their end, and her daddy raised her to always tell the truth. It didn’t make no difference to her victims, for they felt the timbre of her trauma and Wolfie felt their desperation to be emptied out, and so she did just that, a fig-nested wasp of the anatomical other, and for one glimmering second Wolfie understood what it meant to be wanted.
Delaney Kelly is a Brooklyn-based writer and playwright from Cleveland, Ohio. Her short fiction has featured in The B’K, Thimble Literary Magazine, and After Dinner Conversation, and her plays have been produced at Red Bull Theater, The Chain, and Yale Cabaret, among others. She is a member of the New Haven Writer’s Group and the 2025-2026 PlayPenn Playwrights Cohort, and an alumna of Oberlin College. Her website is leftyscissors.net.