Queenie the Night Club Singer Sings Again - a very short microfiction flash story by Rob Hopcott

Queenie moaned about everything; laddered stockings, her hair, the hours, the piano player and, most of all, about the pay my dad, the owner of Kizzeees Night Club, gave her.

"You've got nothing to complain about with the extras you get from your clients," my dad grumbled. "I reckon you ought to be paying me for letting you work here."

My dad was not wrong. I'd seen her in the passageway to her dressing room being very friendly with a man from the audience. People didn't pay too much attention to a small boy with no mum slipping in and out of their forest of legs.

But, when she got close up and made love to the microphone with the lights down low, her husky voice sang sweet and sad songs that lured her listeners siren-like onto the rocks of romance.

To me, as I roamed Kizzeees at all hours through my childhood, she was the embodiment of everything that was motherly, and throughout my adolescence a goddess of femininity.

When I dreamed the dreams of puberty, Queenie huskily played the leading roll in my fantasies.

My dad said it was the cigarettes that made her voice so unique.

"And it will be the cigarettes that kill you Queenie," he warned.

And they did.

I wasn't allowed to go to her funeral because dad said I was too young so I stayed back at the bar listening to sad songs on an old record player - but none of the singers could match my Queenie.

Queenie's death devastated me for weeks. Kizzeees was never ever the same again and soon after my dad closed it down and retired.

When I went off to College, I started an on-line fan club for Queenie. The message board memories came flooding in from people who had visited Kizzeees and had been touched by her singing over the years.

I discovered one of Queenie's fans had made secret tape recordings of her performances and arranged to put them on a CD and thousands sold within just a few weeks.

I can imagine her now demanding her cut and then grumbling it wasn't enough.

But I reckon she'd have been pleased and she would have given me one of her huge rose petal hugs. I loved her hugs.

From the CD sales, I saved enough money to open a music shop, so I reckoned she was, in her own way, still looking after me.

When I married, it was to a woman who, like Queenie, moaned a lot about her big behind and laddered stockings. Sadly, she wouldn't let me call the little girl she gave me by my favourite name.

Now I'm old and lying here alone with my memories in the hospice, with cancer gnawing it's final way through my vitals, it is Queenie's husky voice singing far away that still comforts me.

It won't be long now Queenie. I'll soon be with you again.


The End

(Rob Hopcott - online author - fiction - news)

Copyright Rob Hopcott 2007. All characters and places in this very short night club singer flash fiction very short story and other free on-line humor, short stories, flash fictions, micro-fictions, sudden fictions, post card fictions or very short stories on this site are fictitious and no reference is intended to any person living or otherwise.