Once Upon a Time:

Bone Dance's fan-run website says that the band came together at the Stone Soup Coffeehouse in Providence, RI, and then jelled over absinthe and acid jazz at various campus bars around Brown University. And that is true - technically speaking. But if you wanted to be more truthful you could say that the band's genesis dated back to an extreme case of true, young love gone horribly wrong.

Janet Pilcher was fifteen when she met Larry Sturtz in their high school's symphonic orchestra. He'd just moved to Providence from an extremely small town in Nebraska. He was shy, soft spoken, not very attractive and socially inept - just like her. But unlike Janet, who went into band because her parents made her, and slid by as best as she could on the oboe, Larry had a definite gift with the flute. The word prodigy was used more than once, in fact: a term that Larry always hated, since its' shadow made the other students pick on him all the more.

Larry and Janet got closer as the months and years went by, always stopping just short of really going out for one reason or another. She was afraid of dealing with his stern parents and he was too shy to say the words. But by the time they were both seniors, those reasons were all falling away.

One night, in Spring, they pledged one another eternal love, and kissed for the first time. Then they went off to their homes before their parents' curfew. And that - as far as mundane authorities were concerned, anyway - was the last time Janet was seen alive.

Janet's gruesomely mutilated body was found in a public park two days later, less than a mile from her house. Forensic tests confirmed that she'd died on the last night she'd been seen. Suspicion immediately fell on Larry, but he had an excellent alibi: his father had kept him up until two in the morning cleaning the garage for being one whole minute late coming in the door.

That didn't stop people from talking, though. Suddenly students who'd thought less than nothing about Janet before she died were calling him a murderer, or worse. So were his teachers, for that matter. The whole of Providence was convinced that Larry was a murderer, and treated him as such.

Larry couldn't even find support at home. Though his father had been watching him clean the grime from the concrete floor of the garage that whole night, Larry's parents were starting to wonder - aloud - if he hadn't had something to do with it.

One thing led to another: less than two weeks after Janet's funeral - which he was quite emphatically not invited to attend - Larry joined her in death. The police found a rambling and heartbroken suicide note by his father's gun, but it wasn't used. Larry was killed less three blocks from his home when a car, unable to stop for the rain, slid through an intersection and pulverized his waist.

It was a curious sort of death, but it was also a form of closure in a town with too many questions and not enough courage to seek the answers. Larry was buried in a quiet funeral, hardly attended, in the same cemetery as Janet. And that, as far as Providence was concerned, was the end of Janet and Larry...