My frequent visits to Bar Schwellenangst, locally known as The Swell, often exposed me to the most eccentric of individuals. This place was a goldmine for writers like me who struggled with character creation, although none of The Swell’s attendees were ever as noteworthy as the woman who sat across the bar counter from me on a frozen December night. There could only be, I surmised, one distinct reaction every person who met her must have had:

          She was dying.

          By my cursory estimation over the tilted rim of my whiskey glass, she verged on anorexia nervosa, although I suspected my guess to be incorrect. The unforgiving bun that pulled at her blonde hair stretched back the skin of her forehead and temples. What I could see of her face was pale in a way that reminded me of a white satin moth, and I recalled how I wanted to be an entomologist when I was a young boy. Her striking features matched with expressive brown eyes that dared me to explain my reasoning for staring at her. She could have been a brilliant method actress. The rest of her face hid underneath a black medical mask that looped twice behind her ears.  

          I finished the sliver of whiskey at the bottom of my square glass and slid out of my barstool seat, intent on holding a conversation with this stranger. She watched as I walked over to sit two spaces away from both her and the folder of papers splayed out in front of her.

          She shifted atop her barstool, uncrossing and recrossing her legs under her dress fabric as if permanently uncomfortable. The only part of her that didn’t appear ready to shatter was her hands, deft but strong enough, which I noticed as she reached into the small purse resting on the seat beside her and plucked out a bottle of pain medication. After unscrewing the lid and shaking three thumbnail-sized pills onto her other palm, she pulled down her mask and set each pill one by one into her mouth, dry-swallowing them all. The pill bottle went back into her purse, and her mask covered her nose and mouth again. She hadn’t looked away from me yet.

          When she finally addressed me, I felt as though all of her previous motions were an action-informed version of human aposematism, and my persistence in staying seated here was rewarded – or punished – with hearing the clarity of her speech.

          “Are you going to give me your name?”

          What is your name would have been too simple of a phrasing for her. The hint of accent in her voice was obviously eastern European, but I couldn’t detect from which country she hailed.

          I asked, “Should I?”

          “Yes.” She closed the folder in front of her, but not before I glanced at its papers. Sheet music. “Mine is Dehlia.”

          “Evan,” I said, then gestured with a short nod to the folder. “You’re a musician?”

          “Pianist.”

          “Is that pre-selected music, or did you compose it yourself?”

          Dehlia laid a hand atop the folder and fingered its upper right corner, daring it to cut her.

          “I composed it, yes,” she said. “My final concerto. I perform tomorrow evening.”

          “Oh? Where?”

          I followed the Adamic stretch of her thin index finger to The Swell’s front door, almost expecting her to be pointing at God.

          “The Stawarski Concert Hall at City Centre. 7 p.m., if you plan to attend.”

          “Why the Stawarski?”

          Her answer suggested a finality to the setting that both unnerved and intrigued me.

          “It is a beautiful concert hall. It will be the perfect place to house my concerto.”

          “Would you like to see me in the audience?”

          I imagined that she held a wry smile underneath her mask; it didn’t reach her eyes.

          “You,” she replied, “are the type of man to see things through to their end, I think. If you don’t attend, you will never forgive yourself. The middle rows have open seats, still.”

          “Great. I’ll buy a ticket tonight.”

          Eager to not let any awkwardness fall between us and yet dreading my own next question, I released a breath and leaned an elbow against the bar counter.

          “I hope this doesn’t sound rude, but let me ask. What’s wrong with you?”

          Dehlia didn’t hesitate to answer.

          “I am dying, Evan.”

          “Cancer?”

          She took her dress’s skirt folds in her hands and lifted them to her knees, exposing her legs which she uncrossed for examination. I stayed silent for a long moment, sternly concentrated on their warped state. The lower half of her right leg strained to turn away from itself; her left knee tilted, almost twisted, to the right.

          “Polio,” she corrected me.

          Dehlia let her dress cover her legs again, but even so, I remained stuck staring at them, unable to reconcile their appearance with the rest of her: a glass-blown figurine whose lower half cooled imperfectly. I forced myself to look back up to her eyes, those owlish things that magnified themselves against her gaunt face, and I searched for any semblance of emotion in them. Finding none, I realized that the grief of accepting her own death had come and gone long before I met her. It hid somewhere in the backstage of her mind but would never again appear in the spotlight.

          “Polio?” I repeated. “There’s a vaccine for that. You didn’t get it?”

          “I am allergic to it.”

          My oh that followed left in a whisper. She didn’t seem like the type of woman to expect or want any sympathy, especially not from someone she met minutes ago. I swallowed habitual words of condolences and reassembled my thoughts.

          “When did you find out that you…?”

          Dehlia looked down at her folder and tapped one hand’s fingers in invisible chords atop its cover.

          “Five weeks ago. There is nothing to be done,” she explained. After a pause, she added, “I am going to kill myself at the hotel across the street after tomorrow’s recital. I do not intend on living long enough to discover when I am forced to quit being a pianist.”

          I straightened my posture and blinked a few times, processing what she had said. If I had more confidence and less morbid curiosity, I would have flagged the bartender over to us and alerted him to call an ambulance, have them check Dehlia into a hospital and put her on suicide watch, do something to prevent her from carrying out her plan, but there was no stirring of my heart. Instead, my mouth clamped shut as my hands folded themselves into a ball of pressure atop my lap, and I sighed through my nostrils. I wondered what kind of person I was, to not intervene on a serious matter simply because doing so felt like I would be interrupting a song’s due course.

          “What will you do with your sheet music, if you don’t plan on playing it after tomorrow?” I asked, my solemn voice picking words like a barefoot man stepping through broken glass.

          Dehlia picked up her folder, thumbs sweeping affectionately over its front. When she tilted her head in a slight angle at it, a momentary burst of panic shot through my chest. I thought her neck might break, or her head might fall off her body.

          “I suppose,” she said, “I will leave it with the concert hall director. If they want to release it through a music producer for me posthumously, so be it.”

          A part of me was irrationally disappointed that she didn’t want to leave her music with me. I wanted to be in the rest of her life, just to see how it would all play out until the end. She was the opposite of the perfect girls who inundated my novels, and in the same way she was unforgettable, reminding me of my own mortality in a mixture of poise, grace, tact, and ease that made death seem like nothing more than the turn of a book’s page.

          She swiveled around on the barstool and gestured with a glance to the nearest wall’s corner.

          “Would you mind giving me my cane?”

          I hopped off my seat and hurried to the corner, its shadow having hidden the cane from my view until now. Its curved handle was made of ivory, like a piano’s keys, and had her name carved into its right side. She took it from me and lowered her flat shoes onto the wooden floor. Steadying herself with the cane, she grabbed her folder of sheet music and began walking towards the bar’s exit. I suspected that she knew I was watching her leave.

          “I’ll be at your recital tomorrow, Dehlia. I promise.”

          When The Swell’s door opened and let a strong, wintry wind blow into the bar, I pictured her being lifted into the air and carried away to heaven.

~ ~ ~

          I heard Dehlia’s concerto two days later over the radio on my drive to work.

          The concert hall had paid the local radio station to play her song following the early morning’s news of her death. She overdosed in a hotel room bathtub two blocks from The Swell, depressed celebrity style.

          I wondered if she knew I wouldn’t attend her performance, or if she even bothered to look for me in the audience. I parked my car and unlocked my phone.

          The built-in Call app was still open, 9-1-1 typed out but never contacted.

Brenna Walch is a poetry editor for the online literary magazine Lodestar Lit and a fiction author currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing Fiction at West Virginia Wesleyan College. Her poetry has been published in Oddball Magazine. Brenna is currently working on a duology, a magical realism flash fiction collection, a one-act play, and many other creative pieces. When not writing, she can be found reading, drawing, critiquing films, or figure skating.