An offering of fiction where an avid music fan gets the opportunity to mingle with one of their heros. Or do they?…
by: Robin Kalota
Frank Zappa sat at the edge of my swimming pool, skinny legs immersed in the water. He dangled a Marlboro cigarette out of the side of his mouth and had a beach ball in his lap. It was one of those multi-colored ones, like the ball that hit me in the head at one of his concerts.
I sat down next to him, our bodies almost touching as we sat perched over the water. The sun hung high, and he seemed almost glassy, like the surface of the pool. We both sparkled in the chop of the water.
“Where’d you come from?” I asked, my voice lilting up in that sing-song way. I could see our reflections in the pool.
He exhaled and the smoke curled its way up my nose, the aroma of tobacco swirling with the scent of chlorine and salty sweat.
“Hit the right note when you ask that.”
I heard he could be a stickler for the right cadence, how the words fall into place. I have trouble saying the right thing at the right time. Especially when I’m talking to myself, or someone I’m trying to impress.
I kicked my feet, splashed a froth of water on his legs, his reflection rippling on the surface of the pool like a cracked mirror. He wasn’t fazed. He was used to people messing with him, questioning him.
“Is that real,” I asked, as I pulled at his mustache, at the soul patch beneath his mouth. “Was any of it real? You were supposed to give us answers. I mean, ‘Billy the Mountain.’ What was that all about?”
“You listened to it,” he said as he slipped into the water, his mop of hair spreading out like tentacles. The bubbles formed a portal, a target, where he went in.
He swam in circles around my legs, then pierced the surface of the water, hands held up high, clasped, like an arrow. He was paler than I expected. And hairier. But his head had a glow around it, numbers and words and notes swirling in the air above him, caught up in tiny spheres, full of water drops and oxygen and bursts of sunlight.
“You are what you were in high school,” he spouted as he emerged from the deep end. I had to think about that. I was invisible and insecure, looking for validation, an identity I could slip into.
“You were the wise guy dangling clues in every verse. What does that make you?” I asked as he sunk back down, the top of his head creating a dead spot in the pool, dark and still and silent, my reflection almost completely blotted out. I poked my finger at his crown, watched as it rippled the water instead.
“You’re making waves now,” he answered, “what does that say about you?”
I usually hate questions that are answered with questions. Especially questions about choices that don’t have easy answers. But I read his songs and sang the words; now the questions are mine. Didn’t he say it gets harder the more you know? And what I’m seeing, I’m questioning.
Frank pulled at my feet. I thought he was playing around until I slipped off the ledge into the shallow end, the hard stone chafing my behind as I slid over the tiles. He held my head below the water, just long enough for his lyrics to sink in, then let go a second later. I gasped, the water oozing from my lips and nose. “Valley girl, drama queen. You’re figuring it out,” he sang into my ear, as I knocked one side of my cheek bone with my knuckle, trying to force the water out.
“What did you say?” I asked, as I pulled myself up onto the ledge, my head still soggy and dense from being dunked. Pieces of my reflection coalesced as the water swayed, then slowly calmed. Frank’s was nowhere to be found.
“You can’t hear if you don’t listen,” Frank sang from the abyss, his voice like a fading echo as he executed a flawless flip turn in front of me. He disappeared into the watery blue, leaving me with his words and a splash of pool in his wake. How perfectly Frank.
Robin Kalota is a writer who lives in Lake Oswego, Oregon. Robin has appeared in The Phare, Claudine Literary, Brilliant Flash Fiction and Hotch Potch Literature and Art. She has been shortlisted in Fractured Literary and won first prize in the 2025 WestWord Craft and Connection competition. You can find Robin on Instagram @Robinkalota2000.
