Free Vivian In Red by Kristina Riggle

vibrating in my own chest as if I’m the one speaking. Don’t we all just want to be heard?
    My legs buckle and I fold down, hitting the landing first with my knees, then my palms, then I hope to God I don’t tumble all the way down and break my neck, all for the sake of a canopy bed. As my blurred, dark vision goes all the way black I’m thinking how different it all would’ve been if only I’d bought that goddamn coat somewhere else.

New York, 1934
    “H ey, Milo, you listening?”
    Milo sprang upright from where he’d been resting his head on his desk. Allen’s hands hovered over the piano keys. “I’m gonna play this one time, so pay attention.”
    Milo closed his eyes and let the notes wrap around him, through him. He moved his fingers across the desk, an invisible keyboard. It was hardly an elegant system, but so far it worked better than Milo squinting himself sick at the music. He’d listen to Allen play it through one time, and between his memory and what his eyes could decipher, he’d lock it into his brain.
    Allen had spotted him curled into a C with his pounding head between his knees after squinting at music all day.
    “What’s your problem?” he’d asked. “You got a hangover?”
    “Headache. My eyes aren’t great, makes the music hard to see.” As soon as Milo said it, his instincts dulled by exhaustion and the tight pain across his head, he felt a dart of fear that Allen would get him canned, make room for a piano player who could read music properly.
    Allen hadn’t replied, which Milo found hardly reassuring. Instead, he began to pace their tiny office, a comical task in that box-shaped space. Then he nudged Milo’s shoulder hard enough that he almost knocked him off the chair. “So, how are you with playing by ear?” Milo squinted up at Allen, his vision wavering into focus on his friend’s smile. “Because I’ve got an idea,” Allen said.
    And thus was born their partnership in keeping Milo employed.
    Milo was afraid the bosses would figure it out and send him packing, soon as they realized he couldn’t actually see the music he was plugging. But no one paid him all that close attention once he got hired, and the bosses—who now answered to Warner Brothers, which pillaged the catalog for their films regularly after buying them out—had other things on their mind than whether their newest plugger could see.
    So as long as Allen kept helping him out like this with the new material, things were swell. And for his part, Allen seemed fond enough of Milo not to mind so much. They all seemed to help each other out, Milo noticed. The office girls would cover answering the phones if one of them stepped out for a bite, or the fastest typist, Helen, would sometimes do some of the other girls’ work for them if they were having a tough day.
    There was no acknowledgment of this. They just went ahead and did it. Milo suspected that none of them wanted to see one of their own out there on a bread line.
    Milo was practicing the newest tune—sentimental slop rhyming “love” with “dove”—when he nearly jumped out of his chair. “I don’t have time for this!” bellowed the manager at Mrs. Smith, the head secretary with her brown hair slicked back on her head and pulled into a tight knot at the nape of her neck. “Get me another girl, and one that can type this time!”
    He saw him stomp his way back to his office, and Milo figured it was time for a lunch break, anyhow. He paused by Mrs. Smith’s desk. She was a widow, poor thing, a waif of a creature, of indeterminate age. She carried herself with an air of weary maturity, and her hairstyle was old-fashioned, but when she flashed a rare and cheerful smile, she could be a fresh young girl of twenty.
    “You okay?”
    She sighed and glanced briefly up from the carriage of her Corona. “Swell. Know any girls who can take dictation, read music, and type like the wind? If so, send them my way. Miss Jones got herself