Read Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 for Free Online Page A

and crowded up the stairs with much cursing and sloshing of drinks, the bacteria painting had run its course and died, leaving nothing but a black scum between the panes that represented nothing so much as a neglected bathtub ring.
    Despite his well-meaning friends, Rogers fell into deep depression from which he sent numerous letters to his father, forgetting, or ignoring, the man's death a year before. He also remained house- and studio-bound, during which time he presumably perfected new strains of bacteria, although he refused to share the results of his work with any visitors.
    One morning, five months after his ruined show, Rogers did not come to breakfast. His housekeeper, finding the door to his studio locked, called several of his friends to break it down. They discovered him lying supine, trails of dried blood oozing from his nose, ears, and eyes, dead from fever.
    Rainbow bacteria in dishes of agar cluttered every surface, alongside reams of cheap typing paper filled with handwritten notes. What portion of the notes was legible indicated that Rogers had denounced his chosen medium as “sadistically ephemeral,” and that he prayed he would be judged by his masterwork, an “ingenious illness” which dwelt in a stoppered vial of blue glass. His friends, though they did all to search but tear up the very floorboards, found no such vial.
    When the doctors removed Rogers's shirt for the autopsy, they found, imprinted in his flesh by colonies of colored bacteria that had gathered beneath the skin, a portrait. Under the examination lights, the portrait, an unidentified elderly man, grimaced, winced against the brightness, and dissolved into a flock of black teardrops that ran down beneath the skin in the channels of Rogers's ribcage.
    In the years after his death, artists visiting Baltimore took to honoring Rogers by kissing his tiny gravestone in the Lantern Hill Cemetery, which led to colorful lip rashes and the occasional visual hallucination.
    3. Of all failed Utopian societies, the most tragic was Symphony, New York. Its founding in 1900 came at the end of a decade-long struggle between composer Elijah Nile and his musical nemesis, New Orleans-born Clement Beauchamp.
    The rivalry between Nile and Beauchamp began in the mid 1880s, during their student days at Monadnock Conservatory in southern Vermont. Nile, studying composition under avant-garde marching band leader James Hannibal Orser, wrote a requiem, based upon the poetry of Sappho, to be sung pianissimo by a hundred-strong choir of quadruple basses. Nile's classmate Beauchamp, the son of a respected violin maker and a prodigy himself, on hearing that Nile's stunt composition was to be performed at the annual graduation recital, reputedly said, “He won't win her favor this night!” (The “her” in question was a young woman desired by both Nile and Beauchamp; brief notes in Nile's diary mention the double infatuation, her clothing and pistol of a “fantastical nature,” and that she was “tattooed like an island savage.") Beauchamp responded by writing his own recital piece, a nocturne, and inventing the only instrument on which it could be played, the 1,001-string Viola d'Arabia .
    Audience reaction ranged from befuddlement to anger, amusement to apathy. In the later recollection of both Nile and Beauchamp, it was during this concert that each became aware of the other as a mutually exclusive genius, touching off the most cutthroat feud in the musical history of New England.
    For several years the feud was limited to wild innovations in song structure and instrumentation. At first Beauchamp's concerts were showier than were Nile's; with a background in instrument making, Beauchamp had the upper hand in constructing such oddities as the Ether Lyre, which sat alone on a dramatically darkened stage playing melodies derived from the movements of the spheres, a multi-harped improvement on the piano forte called the forte forte forte, and the Tyrannophone,