Louie woke up, pulled his blanket off and The King greeted him, ever silently but always watching. Louie stared back this morning, and shook his head as he left the bedroom and entered his bathroom.

He brushed his team and the King watched, hands in his pocket but that same regal gaze from Selma unhindered by time. Louie turned back, his toothbrush in his mouth, and continued brushing.

Spit. Rinse. King still staring.

“Fucking hate going crazy.” Louie spoke out quietly.

---

Louis King had been going crazy slowly (or was it rapidly?) for the past 2 years. There was no breaking point or anything like that, it was just that he saw dead people that were important to him. A steady rotation of 4 different dead people, each with relative media pull, all coming to him. The King was the only one that didn’t speak though, he just stared, or nodded, or shrugged, or sneezed.

Louis was not sure why this was happening to him, he knew they didn’t exist but when he reached out to touch these people, they feel like what he would expect them to. Fleshy. Solid. Real.

His insanity had creeped himself out at that point, but it was still self-diagnosed and he wasn’t in the mood to head to a psychologist to tell them what he saw, so they could confirm what he had already known. So he would just go about his life, regular as ever.

---

“How are you doing?” Laura asked him at practice. Louie shrugged.

“I’ve been better.”

Laura nodded, moving over to her drumkit. They had been using the same practice-space for the past six months. It seemed like Jimmy was late. Laura slowly started a drumbeat in spite of time, the King tapped his foot and nodded his head in rhythm with it. Louie smirked, this fucking guy.

---

Jimmy was in shortly afterwards, pulling off his coat covered in snow. “It’s like a godamn blizzard out there.” He stomped his boots in a rhythm reminiscent of Laura’s beat. “Like St. Nick himself is cumming all over the city, it’s nuts.”

“Ha! Nuts.” Laura said, pointing at Jimmy with her drumsticks.

“I see what you did there Jim, you sick fuck.” Louie said, laughing a bit afterwards.

“So, we gonna go over these songs, or no?” Jimmy asked, pulling his guitar strap of his neck and strumming out a few chords, “Aye?”

---

Practice ended quickly, their songs were for the most part, free-flowing and long. So for today, practice had served as a brainstorming session, building on songs and concepts within songs they had been working on.

A little bit afterwards they hung around outside of the space, talking with the next band prior to their practice, joking around.

---

Bed was a comfort that Louie couldn’t do without and in that corner, staring was that man again. There he was, disappointed in the African-American experience some odd 50+ years after he had any business to be. A dreadful irony that Louie knew, and if he was a rude person he’d laugh.

He’d laugh at the whole insanity of it.