The cello felt awkward now.

She had to hold it differently, what it used to rest against was no longer there. That meant she also had to change her bowing and how she held her arms. In away, it was like learning to play all over again.

Losing her breast was something she could deal with, but she wasn’t prepared for the mastectomy to so severely affect her playing. She didn’t expect to be perfect immediately, but the extravaganza of sour notes pouring out of her instrument shook her confidence.

In the back of her mind, there was the creeping doubt that the Memphis Symphony Orchestra wouldn’t bring her back for the next season, that she’d be relegated to gigging weddings to make ends meet.

She practiced harder than ever to keep that fear at bay. Each bad note a challenge to be better.

Then one day at rehearsal, something happened.

“Alisa,” the conductor called her name from the podium. “First chair cello will be out for this concert. You take the lead.”

She looked around for a moment, stunned. “Me?”

“Well, yes.” He crossed his arms. “Unless you don’t think you can do it.”

“No.” She smiled. “I can.”

Memphis Note
The Memphis Symphony Orchestra has been a part of Memphis culture for over half a century. Started originally as a group of twenty-one musicians, the Memphis Sinfonietta outgrew their original performance space and moved into Ellis Auditorium where the group evolved into its current form.

Cal Alley wiggled the handle of the nib pen in his teeth like it was a cigarette holder. It helped him think, though that kind of thinking often led to him walking down to the newsroom and bumming a smoke. He really meant to keep his promise to his wife to quit, but what else was he supposed to do to pass the time until inspiration struck?

Flippantly, Cal had once told a reporter that it took him ten hours and twenty minutes to finish a strip. Ten hours to think of the right joke, twenty minutes to draw it. Most days he wished he hadn’t been so exact.

Ok, I need a break, he thought, getting up from a desk to find a smoke.

As he walked down the hall, hands frustratedly stuffed into his cardigan pockets, a lanky twenty-something rockabilly hippie mash-up disaster sauntered past him. His perfectly quaffed pompadour bounced as he walked, love beads jangling atop his parka.

Cal’s mind immediately snapped to. He saw the guy as a chicken, feathers and all, dressed like a hippie, sign in hand, protesting the war.

Suddenly this was a day when it wouldn’t take ten hours.

Memphis Note
Cal Alley was a second generation newspaper cartoonist. His father had won a Pulitzer for his creation of the strip Hambone, which his son worked on after graduating from art school. Cal made a name for himself taking over his father’s position as the Commercial Appeal’s editorial cartoonist then creating the strip “The Ryatts” which ran almost thirty years after his sudden death of cancer in 1970.

Dickson scratched at his stubble and tried to think of something nice to say. “This ain’t exactly what I had in mind when you said you’d been workin’ on the electric blues, boy.”

“Not electric blues. Electronic blues.” His grandson was hunched over his iPad, fiddling with a bunch of dials and a keyboard that wasn’t really there. “You know, like how triphop remade hip-hop into something super modern. I want to do that to the blues. Introduce it to the digital generation.”

“Trip what now? Boy, I think you’re missin’ the point of the blues. It’s gotta be organic and natural, it’s somethin’ you feel. Ain’t something a computer can come up with. The blues comes up with itself.”

Putting the iPad down, his grandson frowned at him as series of distorted beeps and clicks, arranged like the 12-bar blues started to roll out of the speakers. “But didn’t you say that music, especially music in Memphis, was about combining things that no one had ever thought to combine before? Rock came from people combining blues and country into something new.”

Dickson nodded, the boy had a point. The music was terrible, but he had a point.

Memphis Note
If America is a melting pot, Memphis is a blender. Things thrown into the mix have no choice but to be pureed into something new. It’s how we came up with rock and roll, it’s how we push the edges of rap, it is the cultural slurry that is at the heart of this city.

She steps away from the scuffed metal eye piece of the coin-operated tourist binoculars with a confused look on her face.

“I have to admit, this isn’t what I imagined when you said you were going to use our money to haunt downtown.”

Another member of his grant board steps in behind her, peering into the glasses.

“How did you do this, again?”, he asks, aiming the lenses toward the downtown skyline.

The artist takes a deep breath, readying his tech speech. “We took old maps and historical records, matched them against modern survey data, and built up a digital 3-D ghost world inside of a computer. Then, using augmented reality software, we overlay the past as a holographic projection through the glasses.”

“I see smoke.” Says the man at the glasses. “Where’s that coming from?”

“Dial’s set to the 1870s. The Yellow Fever. Probably burning bodies, maybe a riot. Key events are built into the program. Set it to the 1860s and you can watch the Battle of Memphis, if you wanted.”

“How exactly is any of this haunting?” Questions another board member.

“There’s nothing more haunting than the past, it’s the stuff ghosts are made of.”

Memphis Note
Everything described in this story is technologically possible right now. We can use augmented reality to create an invisible world around that is filled with ghosts from the past. And with everything that Memphis has been through, you could stare through those glasses for days and still not see it all.

She spat on the grave. And then the rain started, as it is wont to do when a spurred lover stands alone over her dead partner’s grave.

In her hands, a glossy photograph flaps in the wind.

“Dammit, Will.”

The photograph is of them. It is in blinding color, over-saturated, perfectly composed for that half second of life between shutter opening and closing.

They are standing at one of his openings. Before one of his photographs. Her arm is around him, but his is not around her.

No one ever knew they were together. He told her that he kept too many public lovers; she told him that it didn’t matter. But, regardless of what either of them said, it always did.

She puts the photograph back into her purse, and swings the camera draped around her shoulder into her hands. Holding a hand over the lens to mask it against the falling rain, she presses the shutter button.

“You were always a bastard. But you’ll always be my bastard.”

The shutter clicks. It’s a picture of his headstone. A perfect capture of the austere grey of the day.

She’s shooting black and white, in opposition to their color.

Memphis Note
William Eggleston was born and lived in Memphis, Tennessee. More than any other photographer, he is credited with bringing color photography into the norm of both art and commercial consumption. He currently lives in Memphis, in declining health, and complicated circumstances.