During the whole of a dull, dark, soundless day in which nary a soulful ballad nor rhythmic melody could be heard, I had been passing alone, on horseback, past the singularly dreary Atlanta Braves stadium, and at length found myself within view of the melancholy-yet-sexy house of Usher. 

The rank gray sedges, rotting trees, and eerily still black tarn seemed to give off a poisonous vapor that clung to the air like a lady, all upon me, screaming, “Yeah!” 

Each element of the house – its vacant, eye-like windows, dreary walls, and greyscale color scheme – evoked in me an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. I assumed Usher had flown in a designer from New York City, where this sort of aesthetic was apparently all the rage.

Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. 

Its proprietor, Usher Raymond IV had been one of my boon companions in childhood. In the many elapsed years since our last meeting, he had become a celebrated musician in the style of Rhythm and Blues as well as an internationally renowned symbol of eros.

The letter I received from him expressed his desire for me to visit him in his “crib of doom,” as a means of palliating a nervous agitation that had befallen him after the conclusion of his tenure as a magistrate on “The Voice.” 

I made the sojourn forthwith in hopes that I might once more get to see his preternaturally chiseled abdominal muscles.

Upon my entrance, Usher rose from a zebra-patterned settee to greet me, his onyx eyes brimming with fathomless depths of sorrow and sensuality. The great entertainer stated that the gloom afflicting him stemmed from the grave illness of his sister Madeline — to whom he affectionately referred as “My Boo.” 

Usher lamented in his dulcet tenor: “Honey has a pallor like wow, wow, wow. Honey, she will soon be dead; pow, pow, pow.”

In the days that followed we did not utter Madeline’s name; even my alluding to fall’s increasingly short daylight hours painfully recalled to Usher his “shawty.”

One afternoon, apropos of nothing, Usher removed his muscle tunic. He confessed that one manifestation of his fraternal malaise was a peculiar condition that caused him to shed his shirt without warning.

News soon reached us of Madeline’s death. Usher responded by clutching his cross pendant and rending his leather motorcycle jacket – his malady appeared to be spreading to his outer garments as well.

We entombed his sister in a vault inside the mansion rather than give her a proper burial; an oddity I naively attributed to some unknown celebrity custom.

Usher insisted that he alone should carry the casket; to my amazement, he lifted it repeatedly over his head in lieu of his daily pushups. Usher’s solo cortege was accompanied by a brief spoken word eulogy courtesy of two bards, the esteemed C. Brian Bridges and A. Christian Pérez (their monikers were “Ludacris” and “Pitbull,” respectively).

Seven nights thereafter, a tempest gained in force outside, with winds that wailed in silky smooth falsetto notes. I beheld on the staircase a familiar moonwalking form, its diamond earrings glinting in the darkness: Usher!

He threw one of the casements freely open to the storm. With a beckoning of his finger and a swiveling of his hips, he crooned to me, “Come here baby and let daddy show you what it feels like.”

“The air is chilling and dangerous to you with your glorious torso exposed,” I cried – for he had once again denuded his top half. 

Whilst I slammed shut the casements, from deep within the house we heard a series of creaks, then a clangorous beat drop.  An ominous silhouette emerged at the opposite end of the room. I feared Usher would draw it to us with his irrepressible magnetism, as he had done so many times with women in the club.  

With the enshrouded figure approaching ever nearer, Usher turned to me and sighed, “I guess I gotta give you part two of my confessions.” 

He revealed that he had heard Madeline stirring in her coffin throughout the past week, but he willed himself to pay it no heed because he could not countenance the stinging remorse of having buried her alive; he was, verily, “thrown and didn’t know what to do.”

She loomed before us, bloodied and emaciated; she was like a zombie come back to life, back back to life. 

And then Madeline was upon him, and with the cry of the less successful sibling about to be avenged, felled him to the floor, whereupon they both expired as swiftly as Usher’s tryst with Monica.

Aghast, I fled from the house as it collapsed into the tarn. It had ripped into six perfectly defined pieces. I supposed Usher had missed his chance to be featured on MTV’s “Cribs.”

—–

Miriam Jayaratna is a clinical psychologist and writer based in New York City. Her humor writing has appeared in The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs, McSweeney’s, and Reductress, and her fiction has been published in Identity Theory and Defenestration.