"Battery" by Alex Carrigan

After Jose Hernandez Diaz

The man in the Metallica t-shirt always has a drumming sensation within him. It comes up before he can open his eyes in the morning and glance at the stock numbers on his phone. It scrambles the eggs in the frying pan and stirs honey in his first cup of tea. Later today, the drumming sensation will make him think about how good his coworker's earrings would look on him. The man in the Metallica t-shirt, while he’s trying to pack his lunch, will feel a particular drumming sound named Athena threatening to birth herself from his temple. He taps two fingers on his temple in the same rhythm as the drumbeat from “Master of Puppets.” This usually dissuades Athena, and she resigns to her basement apartment in disgust. She’ll pick up a pair of drumsticks and play the drum beat from St. Anger on the exposed pipes. The man in the Metallica t-shirt will try to go about his day ignoring the drumbeat. He put egg cartons up along the walls of his skull years ago in order to keep Athena down. He doesn’t know the tape loses its stickiness the longer the cartons stay up, and that Athena will one day burst out using a drumstick she carved into a shiv. Then she’ll be the woman in the Metallica t-shirt.

Alex Carrigan (he/him) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Alexandria, VA. He is the author of Now Let’s Get Brunch: A Collection of RuPaul’s Drag Race Twitter Poetry (Querencia Press, 2023) and May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022).