Our Deepest Condolences.

It was hanging on the fridge.  Propped up on the kitchen counter and just above the sink next to the aloe plant.  Twice on the lid of the wine cellar in the foyer.  She sees it again amidst a stack of Hallmarks in the trash just before dumping the coffee filter onto them.  Everywhere within a twenty-foot radius, grief was an indefinite guest.  

It’s funny, thinks the widow, how the written voices of so many people she hadn’t heard from in ages were suddenly ringing all around her.  Cousins she hardly knew.  Neighbors she never even waved to.  Girls from high school she never liked or ever smiled at.  Even the goddamn caterer of their wedding sent a card.  Let us all and everywhere chime in to donate for you a lifetime supply of condolences to have on hand for whenever the nonlinear Grief Express comes barrelling through your station.  Feeling sad today?  There are some condolences next to the aloe plant.  Gut-punched by anguish while shaving your legs in the shower?  Just glance out toward the double vanity for a dose of “there, there” beside the toothbrush stand and Kleenex.  Lost in the fog of perdition while staring into the mailbox for the eighth time today?   Easy, just tilt your gaze at the front window where the last of the pink and black balloons can be seen sinking into the dining room floor.

It’s also funny, thinks the widow, just how accessible all this shorthand comfort is when all she really wants is a long-distance call from the hereafter.  Just two minutes of hearing his voice once more – his late evening voice when he started getting tired and sounded all sullen and sexy like an after hours poet.  She didn’t care if he was reading his favorite paragraph from East of Eden or just telling her over and over that he’d only ever fantasized about her even though it had been thirteen years since they’d first had the kind of wild, passionate sex that movies always get wrong.  She could hear it there, right there in his voice, what the truth really sounded like.  And that’s all she wanted anymore.  Come on, universe, just give me that.  Please just give me my one phone call from grief jail.  Very suddenly, the sting in her arm steals her focus.  She turns it over and has to stop herself – from laughing or crying? –  when she sees the five freshly round, wet indents there in her forearm.  Fingerprints.  Tiny fingerprints.  If only she had the strength or the will anymore to fight like that.

The widow makes coffee for the third time today.  Staring out the window into the backyard, the folding chairs from the gathering after the funeral are still there.  That was nine days ago.  A knock at the door.  Then another.  After a few minutes, it stops and she can hear the screen door whining, stopping short when it jams against the latest casserole dish Mrs. Winterich is leaving today.  At all the summer get-togethers, block parties, and neighborhood graduation celebrations, Mrs. Winterich’s casseroles were the belle of the ball.  If the widow didn’t mind getting fat on anything, it was those damn casseroles.  But since John died, there was nothing about that recipe that appealed to a single taste bud anymore.  Four casseroles were still in the fridge – just behind Laura Bingham’s card that read, “No words, just love” – and one was still festering in the trash, just beneath the coffee grinds and first wave of sympathy cards.    

Another sip of coffee, however, hits the spot.  The widow smiles just slightly when she realizes that she’s been drinking it black since pot number two.  That was new.  Coffee was hardly ever coffee anymore by the time she’d dumped all her brand-name creamers and sugar substitutes into it.  “Fatty wake-up water”, John had stamped it.

She should cry.  

I should cry, right?  Motherfucker, why can’t I cry?

Stepping away from the sink, the widow passes the kitchen counter where her phone starts ringing.  She taps the ignore icon as if she were sleepwalking and keeps on toward the family room, dropping herself into John’s favorite recliner.  Another sip of coffee.  Another.  Her eyes turn at a sound – Ophelia, their tortoiseshell kitty, leaps onto the table in front of their couch.  This is a no-no.  But this is one of John’s no-no’s.  She never cared if or when the cat did its thing, but John hated (fucking hated) the idea of cat hair being on anything above the beltline.  Ophelia sits, waiting for her reprimand or any attention at all.  Instead, another sip of coffee.  The widow swishes it around in her mouth, remembering a similar sound from the bathtub not long ago when she’d finally won the fight.

She pulls her heel beneath her other leg and sighs.  Coffee’s gone.  Why, she wonders, did she never start drinking booze?   Once in high school and then twice in college, but it never took.  It tastes like the flu, she remembers telling her roommate who sat on the bathroom floor with her after a night of binge-drinking during Greek Week.  Right now, though, maybe the flu would feel better than this…  this… void.  Or maybe not.  If she wanted a drink, she’d have to drive herself to the store, and that meant the likelihood of seeing someone – anyone - she didn’t want to see right now.  They’re all out there.  All those unfamiliars trying to be familiar through grief osmosis.  All those stunted smiles turned into pursed lips and bitten frowns.  They’d cruise by with their obligatory concern, slope their heads like they were daydreaming about sharing her pain, and then use the same voice they’d affect when calming their dog during a trip to the vet: It’s okay, buddy.  You’re okay.  We’ll be home soon.  Emotional tourists, she calls them.  Learned that the first day of grief counseling.  They’re all trying to care.  They all want to care.  They just don’t quite know how.  They only ever succeed at being awkward and unwittingly cruel.

The widow turns at another sound.  One of the sympathy cards has fallen from the refrigerator door.  And there it lay, dead on the floor with nothing more to say than what everyone else has already said time and time again.  So often, in fact, that the phrase didn’t even sound like words when it echoed in her ears anymore.  Just noise.  Ourdeepestcondolences.  Ardeepiscondolinziz.  Ophelia goes to inspect, eventually swiping the card into oblivion beneath the fridge.

The widow shifts in her seat, wiggling her toes over an invisible piano.  Black nail polish she received in a gift bag for being Classroom Mom last semester.  (Another attempt by the other moms to get her to let loose and to embrace her inner slut.  She couldn’t stand any of them with their fake eyelashes, fake smiles, fake tits, and fake lives.  She only lasted one semester, though she promised her daughter she’d try again.  Never again.)  The widow hardly ever painted her fingers or toes, but now she needed something to do while wide awake at 3 a.m., and black seems the only suitable color at that hour, she admits.  Sliding her other leg out from beneath her to align with the other, she can only laugh: she’s missed the pinkie toe on both feet .  It’s hard to focus on the task as a whole at 3 a.m.  Another thought snuck in with another laugh: One foot in the grave…  She holds her hand out to compare her fingers to her toes.  This right hand, her dominant, still shaky from the fight and pruned from the bathwater.    

Her head falls back, turning up at the ceiling.  A drip.  Then it’s gone.  Then it’s back.  It’s amazing, she thinks, of what you can hear through the ceiling, through the floorboards, through the pipes.  The residual haunting of previous lives.  Not to mention the lives lived and abbreviated here and now.  She adjusts in her seat to press her feet to the ground.  It’s funny how different her toes look from when they’re hanging over the couch to when they’re pressed to the floor.  Purpose fattens intention, she reminds herself.  A drop of water lands beside her on the couch.  Then another.

Back in the kitchen, the widows sees the chairs outside through the window and laughs to herself that they’ll never, ever be collected.  Forever and always they will be slain pawns in the game of ceremony.  She thinks about how John died in the hallway upstairs but that she felt whatever malevolence was coming for them all, however, would start in the backyard.  A sneak attack from suburbia, she thought, and then tittered to herself.  In through the patio where it would kill the plants and rust the windowsills before seeping in through the French doors and grabbing her firm by the brain.  But the patio rested in an autumn slumber.  The windowsills held only a few flakes of dust, some cat hair, and the speckled ash of crushed leaves.  The plants held with the posture of Marines.  Where was her backbone, she wondered.  Oh, that’s right.  The malevolence didn’t come from outside.

She sets the mug in the sink with the others.  Ophelia jumps out of the way as the widow walks by, crushing another card beneath her foot.  She whisks through the foyer, lets her hand caress the railing as she ascends the stairs, and closes her eyes when the sound of every other step creaks like the laugh of a baby witch.  

The sound of running water becomes clearer with every rising step.

Ophelia is a blur of fur grazing past the widow’s leg and down the hall where she stops at the bathroom to sniff at the wet floor.  She pats at the water before standing on her back legs to push the bathroom door open with her wet front paws – peeks inside, sniffs, then backs away warily until her tail taps the wall behind her.  Ophelia sits, turns her gaze on the widow, and stares unblinking.  

The widow’s bare feet stop at the doorway and she stands in the water.  She can see the lifeless toes of her daughter poking out from the tub.  No playful wiggling, no tapping at the surface.  My deepest condolences, she says, then bites her lip to keep from laughing.

It’s steamy in the bathroom and she’s grateful the mirror has fogged over so she doesn’t have to see herself as she walks by.  Another curtain of cold water curls over the side of the tub and covers her feet.  The widow slips out of her shirt, lets her pants drop into the wet, and she lowers her naked self into the tub.  She counts her daughter’s toes, looks back to the black polish on hers, then feels the alien giggle working its way up from her belly once more.  

Downstairs she hears another card fall from the fridge and land spinning over the kitchen tile.  Down the hall, Ophelia meows and races downstairs to inspect.  

Just as the giggle rises through her throat, she drops below the water and starts screaming.

The End.

“Que Syrah”

She leaves watery footprints from the shower to the closet.  Somewhere along the way her towel hit the floor and now lays over the carpet in a twisted cotton corpse.  She’s humming, and he can hear her from the bottom of the steps as it lifts and lulls and then rises again into a song she's making up as she goes.  It’s not that she isn’t a singer, she just doesn’t sing.  Not once did their home echo with any tune emanating from her, ever.  Aside from the birthday party at the Kayhill’s when they all drank too much and carried on, he never heard her sing or even saw her dance or even tip-toe.  And now she was naked and singing from the walk-in closet in their bedroom.  And for fuck’s sake, it was a Tuesday evening.

At the top of the stairs he stops to listen.  What was she even singing about, and more importantly, who was she singing about or to?  Surely his button-downs were a lame audience and the curtain of neckties she’d hung for him beside his belts never swayed to the melody of her sudden birdsong.  He remembers once watching her spread on silver eyeshadow while she sat topless on the stool in front of her mirror, the black and white strip of their photobooth candids from the first ever date night after Kelsey was born tucked into its wood trim.  That was perhaps the last time she had been so natural and free in that room, and that was…  three years ago this August.  And now she was naked and singing to or about a feeling that he had in no way inspired.

Before stepping toward the bedroom door, he stops to lick his teeth.   Something funny about the taste of suspicion.  Before craning his neck in to see if he can catch a glimpse of her, he swivels to scope for curious children.  The house hasn’t been this quiet since it was owned by the empty nesters they bought it from and even though he knew the place was essentially vacated until noon tomorrow when his in-laws return with the spawn, it always seemed to be crackling with their synergy.  Now though the quiet in the hallway was disorienting while the aria sneaking out of the bedroom closet swirled out above the bed and hung there in its orbit like an enchanted mist.  He leans in to hear it.  He leans in to listen.  She’s singing about eyelashes and sweet breath and toes wet from the kisses of a man who knows passion beyond duty.  Every lyric divined from some reverie she’d either discovered in the shower or while he’d been at work.  Until suddenly, as if she knows he’s listening, it stops.  He steps into the bedroom just as she emerges from the closet in a satin pajama top that rests low enough to hint ever so slightly at the matching thong.

“I didn’t know you sang.”

“Silly rabbit, I sing all the time.  It’s probably just too loud in this house for you to ever hear me.”

“Maybe that’s it.”

She raises an eyebrow and cranks her lip to the left before zig-zagging past him to plant herself on the stool across from the mirror.  He’s transfixed on this suddenly sexy, confident wife of his while she tilts her head, applying lotion.  Even she appears to be observing someone new in the mirror.  Whatever it is their both seeing, they’re seeing it both for the first time.

“I opened the Syrah thirty minutes ago.  Give it another twenty and she’ll be strutting her stuff.”

“I thought we were going out…?”

“We still can.”

“We kill that bottle and you and I both know that’s not going to happen.”  She slides the last bit of lotion along the bridge of her nose.

“So then we’re stuck at home.  Oh, damn.”

She catches his smirk in the reflection and her coquettish demeanor evaporates...

“I started my period this morning.”

He tries to play it cool, but no need to practice his Oscar speech.  He steps closer, stopping at the foot of the bed and then looking up toward the fan as if hunting for the echoes of the song she was singing only moments ago.

“We can still have fun.  I know you’ve been looking forward to this.”

“You haven’t?”

As if reading from a cue card: “Of course I have.”

“Bad luck, I guess.”

“Because I got my period?”

“Yeah.  I wanted tonight to be…  romantic.”

“So then we make it a British kind of evening,” she says, changing into a cockney accent: “A bloody romantic evening.”

It takes a moment, but he finds a smile.  She laughs in a way that resembles more of a hiccup than a laugh before dialing back into an acute study of her reflection.  He stands by the bed pretending not to pout, hoping she’ll come racing over to assuage his pride.

“Did you catch how my Dad kept hinting at buying a bigger house?”

He snaps out of his performance to face the music.

“He’s never been the sultan of subtlety.”

“Never ever.”  She brushes mascara into her lashes.  “Even as they were pulling out of the driveway, I could see him sizing up the house and shaking his head.  I swear, men just have no shame when it comes to theatrics.”

He stiffens his spine and sends lighting to his balls.  

“He wants more grandkids.  I can give him that.”

“Not tonight you can’t.”

She bats her eyes, seducing her reflection.  In a graceful turn, she lifts herself off the stool and cages his focus.  Her eyes barely graze his, narrowing  in on the pillow just beyond his shoulder.  She moves closer and he watches her ass pucker in the mirror.  Another bolt to the balls so she can feel his readiness when she brushes up to him.  He swallows hard, ready for her, and she slips past him and drops herself ass up on the bed, scooping the cell phone off her pillow, tapping into an app.  He can feel the lightning in his sack simmer into thunder and then wither away.

“Seventy-one and rain tomorrow.”  She scrolls with her thumb, “Won’t be nice again until Thursday.”

“I don’t need it to be nice,” he lays himself beside her on the bed to drag his hand up her thigh.  “Naughty works for me.”

She drops the cell phone back onto the pillow beside her head.

“Naughty Tuesday.  It’s got potential.”

They stare at one another, hungry for this potential.

“Tell me, love…  Who were you singing about?”

“Does it have to be a who?”

“Maybe it doesn’t have to be anything.  But you were singing.”

“Was I?”

She does a slow barrel roll off the side of the bed, walking over to where her towel still rests in peace on the carpet, and kicks it up into her arms.  She snaps it, presses it, goes to hang it over the rack in the adjoining bathroom.  Perplexed and dialing back into his performance, he pushes a smile and stomps into the bathroom where the steam has almost all faded off the mirror.

“Yes.  You were.  You were singing.”

“Then I was happy.”

“And you’re not now?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because you stopped singing just as I came into the bedroom.  And you’re being evasive.”  He pushes a smile again, this time fuller.

“I’m being evasive?  Because I’m getting ready for our date night and you’ve decided to intervene?”  She matches his fake smile.  “You wanna get out of this house, then you gotta give me time to get ready.”

“That’s what I was doing.  Until I heard you singing.”

“I see.”  She snags the brush off the counter and slips past him again, dropping back onto the stool before her mirror where she begins dragging the brush through her wet mane.

He stands alone in the bathroom, finally stepping over to the counter to press his index finger into the last remaining patch of steam on the mirror.  His finger drags through the wet steam until he stops himself abruptly and goes to stand behind her.  Just over her shoulder, his crotch bulges in the reflection.  With every brush stroke, she’s millimeters from stroking him. 

“Why are you teasing me?”

“I’m not teasing you.  You’re crowding me.”

“Maybe I want you.”

“Maybe?  That’s a terrible way to tell me what you want.”

“Who are you tonight?”

“I’m your missus.  Always and forever.”  She lays the brush down and plucks the strip of photobooth candids from the frame.  “This was such a fun night.  We ate well, we drank copious amounts of Riesling, and we finally told your Mom about the abortion.”

“A fun night?”

“Well… an adventure for sure - once we lost the map.”

He kneels to meet her eyes in the mirror and squeezes her shoulders.

“I always know my way home.”

“But this night…,” she slides the film around between her thumb and index finger, “We kind of ran away from home, didn’t we.  We had fun.”

“We did, yeah.  Until we crashed my Mom’s house after hours looking for leftover lasagna and Advil and wound up breaking the poor old woman’s heart.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.  Her heart had been broken for years by the time we burst through the patio door.”  She gazes longingly at the film…  “All we did was soak the broken parts in alcohol for her.”

“Completely erasing twelve years of sobriety, mind you.”

“Oh, don’t be coy, love.  That woman’s morning coffee had been coated with a layer of Irish muscle the moment your Father started chemo.  He had his medicine and she had hers.”

“You ladies and your secrets.”

“Well, that’s the difference between boys and girls.  Boys are full of secrets, but no mystery.”

His fingers loosen and he stands.  Over her shoulder she sees no discernible bulge, just a buckle.  He steps away into the closet where he begins shuffling through the button-downs for a clue. 

She can see him seething there in the reflection, pretending once again to be on a mission of vast importance.  She bites her lip to hide the smile, then tucks the film back into the mirror frame.  Her eyes slide from the pictures to her present reflection.  She tilts her head left-right to study herself.  She’s still gorgeous.  Despite having two kids, sagging breasts (“sad cobras,” she calls them)  and a quiet dependency on Chardonnay, she still had the eyes of a lioness and the cheekbones of old Hollywood.  Even wet, her hair still sparkled and would dry in a way that wisped from her scalp like a spray of lemon grass.

“The gray one I got you from the Banana Republic in Hilton Head.”  She pretends to massage her face, furtively wiping a tear from her right cheek.  “You look so handsome in that one.”

He stops flicking through his collection, heaves a slightly audible sigh, then starts snapping back through the shirts until he finds the gray Banana Republic button-down.  His eyes sink into the memory of it.

“Meet me downstairs in ten minutes.”

She lifts herself off the stool, snatches her cell phone off the pillow, and holsters it in the waistband of her thong before cruising out the bedroom door.

Unhooking the shirt, he swirls his thumb and index finger over the points of the collar.  He peels off his shirt and dips each arm into the sleeves of her favorite souvenir from her favorite vacation.  It was her favorite, he thought, because he let her wander the beach alone for hours, even after sunset.  She’d return, always, a little more distant and a lot less tense.  And she’d undress and shower and he’d watch her from the bed through the bathroom mirror, enchanted by her tan lines and curious about what was either a sunburn or a handprint on her lower back.  He was never sure and he never asked.  It was vacation, after all, and they had gotten away to reconnect and rekindle the flame that had long ago begun to ficker and sway in the gales of domestic bliss.

Walking to the mirror to button his shirt, he stops as his foot meets the wet footprint in the carpet.  He lifts his foot and pokes at the wet print with his toe.  From the kitchen below he hears the clinking of wine glasses and then the ecstatic double pour of Syrah.  

Who is she tonight?  He rests his foot beside the wet outline in the carpet.  Small, delicate feet with long toes perfect for balancing.  The broad shape and crude primitive features of his own beside it makes him laugh just slightly.  Just enough to appease the gods of mystery.

The End.

Whole centuries drifted past, threading my fingertips and toes as I pulled and kicked onward.  I felt them moving in the current and haunting the deep and pitch black.  Voices from the past screamed, whispered, and rattled as I splashed.  Their stories and pains so much greater than my own; the echoes of their anguish threatening to sink me there beneath the orange peel moon that hung so low in the end of summer sky.  My eyes hunted still for light on land…  or land, if any, at all.  I kicked and pulled my way forward through the darkness.

I listened again as my body lurched on in the thick waves.  So many had been here before me and my voice now, too, fell into their masses.  That end of summer sky was pitifully starless and my naked body swam alone under nothing.  No friend or passerby to hold my hand or any one thing to reach for.  Only the voices of long ago lovers skimming the waves for some untouchable melody…

I had come out this far and had stopped to think to myself if it was even far enough.  My pain was still new and invasive and was still only a hurt compared to what I was hearing from the voices therein the water.  Only just a hurt.  I had to consider that I had not yet known the true weight of this pain and that if I was going to, I had to swim out further, deeper.  Out to where there was even less light and so many more ghosts.  I hadn’t any real notion yet of what it was to be tortured.  But it was out there, just beyond the deep and pitch black.

I kicked and pulled myself further into the murk.  With each crawl through the waves I crept further into the nightmare that had been gifted to me by her, my once forever lover.  I was wading in her river of tears as my body struggled to stay afloat in the deluge.  It was always a struggle those days.  My promised life and love had been subtracted from me like an appendage and left me feeling as though that entire course of me had been nothing more than a dense chapter in a book I had read one long ago winter.  Nothing felt real about it anymore.  Alone was all I could ever feel each new day after.  I think I only kept swimming because I had convinced myself right then that somebody had to be there waiting for me on the other side.  To reach the shore and hold the hand of anyone at all would’ve meant my deliverance.

Yet still nothing out there, only whispers.  Long ago promises and far away cries of the ones who had fought and drowned out here so many times before me.  I was swimming in the tears given them by their own once forever lovers.  I was parting my way through the watery curtain that hid them all from the truth they had swum out here to evade, only to face it dead on.  Some voices told me the whole story.  Some were only anguished phrases diced into chunks by the sobbing and choking that dappled them.  I heard names and memories.  Songs and sonnets, too.  The bereft floated all around me and I knew the bodies that had once housed their voices were hanging below me on watery nooses.  

Where was I?  Out there, out somewhere beyond the grasp of anything I thought I knew; beyond the vast unknown of my own spirit somewhere in the empty universe of my soul.  No stars to wish upon or horizon to balance my gaze.  I swam and swam into the great prolonged nothingness and bathed in the detonating ballads of the watery ghosts all around me.  I never thought to stop and catch my breath as until my arms and legs were nearly limp from exhaustion.  Even then, I kept kicking, kept pulling myself…  I felt the pain then – the great physical pain – of soreness strangling my muscles and depression anchoring my bones.  I tasted the waters then as I dipped; took in a harsh drink of slicing cold clarity for just an instant; surging through my lungs like iced lightning, it shot me up through the surface and back into the air.   I gasped and bobbed, laying back to float and fighting so hard just to catch even the thinnest veil of black night air.  Out there along in the pitch I felt myself crying, choking, sinking, and dying.

The air eluded me altogether and I felt myself falling again below the surface under the sheer weight of infinite night and water.  My eyes glazed over by the frigid waves and I relinquished myself to the flavor of perdition that poured into me, gallon upon gallon in mere seconds.  I saw only liquid blackness that bubbled and moved like a sheath of embalming fluid over me.  

Sinking, I tried to move my arms and legs to no avail, succumbing to the cold dead embrace that had finally secured my shell.  It rolled and mummified me in the depths of the hollow river and I heard the voices of the past no more.  Not a sonnet nor a name of any lost once and forever lover.  No pathetic whimpers or cello chords of any one bleeding heart.  I heard nothing.

I lay in perfect stillness in my watery grave.  Though I had lost sight and sound of all things, my mind lay open still like a dance floor beckoning new enlightenment.  I knew I could not move, nor speak.  I, as I once knew, no longer lived.  

I knew not what was to become of me, if anything more at all, as I lay in suspended awareness with only the empty chambers of my mind at play…  

I thought first of sunlight.  It came to me from nowhere and everywhere all at once.  It was a beaming shaft of love that poked through the pitch and black for to spotlight a new and even path.  A road to redemption, perhaps?  I thought next of more light.  More path could be seen.  With each new notion of sunlight I could begin to see a way…  

The first thing I felt was the warm and silken skin of the tide.  I filled my hands with it and clenched so tightly that it was dry when I let it fall.  I felt each grain of sand for the first time and worked it within my fingers like it already knew me.  There was air to breathe!  I took in my first draw and filled my emptiness with a long, cool burst of new life.  It brought to me my eyes; clear, crisp eyes that shone a resolution that fed my core with Ambrosia.  I could see the shoreline.  I could see the sunlit path just beyond.  There was nothing, absolutely nothing behind me and all that ever could be again began stretching in wide and beautiful bliss before me.  The sunlight smacked off the tide and warmed my face with automatic love.  That same love moved onto the sandy path breaking free just beyond the shoreline and ignited trees with spring colors and a sky so enriched in blue that it was as if the Caribbean  had been hung there in its place.   And though I could not recognize a single sun, the light was ubiquitous and I felt how it warmed the water and the sand that weaved between my toes as I stood to be whole again in accord with the land.

I knew then (and now moreover) that only the sunlight mattered.  It lit for me a path on which to set my new legs and feet, and for the eyes that had opened there finally from within the river.  I saw ahead and began to walk.

Whiskey tastes best in the afternoon.  Irish whiskey, then, is soup of the day by 1pm, served in a lowball at room temperature straight no chaser while the sun shoves its way through the green windows.  The throat burns a hypnotic rage that shows itself in a hiss behind clenched teeth.  The jukebox, too, knows your name and it pumps in a perfect rhythm with your heart.  For now it’s James Tayor’s Handy Man.  In twenty minutes, after shot number four, it’ll be Joe Cocker’s High Time We Went.  Whiskey in the afternoon tends to manifest itself as testosterone in a good jukebox.  Later Bob Seger will wail Turn the Page and the Boss will howl his way through Glory Days just before shot number six leads to you punching in Folsom Prison Blues.  By 3:30 the Jameson will be ringing your gut and tightening your gaze on the dirty blonde just six stools down.  She’s a margarita girl, ripped around the edges like a puma; her green eyes either a genetic gift or simply the color of the cocktail she lives on.  Lunch time here during Happy Hour means she’ll chew her ice with a smile so you can imagine that tequila breath bouncing off your cheeks as she squeezes the back of your neck and squeezes your torso with her own.   Sex and whiskey in the afternoon is a holiday no calendar knows.

Sir Matthew, the hefty British bartender, catches your signal of bouncing eyebrows punctuated by a quick snap of the head in her direction and slides an upside-down shot glass in front of her: “He’s got your next one, lovely.”  She turns to size you up, chewing that ice and flashing those canines that catch the sunlight just right.  You raise your number whatever shot and drain it, never once blinking or taking your eyes off the prize.  No wincing from the fire singeing your barrel.  No watery eyes even.  Just a look to say it’s on.  She pinches her straw and lets her gaze volley to the reflection in the bar mirror as the Mexicali meds slither down her throat.  There she sees a pretty girl who could be beautiful if she wasn’t self medicating her afternoon bouts of existential milieu.  She sees a pretty girl who will be settling for a roguish stranger who won’t even get her name until he asks to call her again sometime.  Some afternoon in the very near future, most likely.

“Whiskey neat,” you say for the eleventeenth time.  Sir Matthew answers the call in style, long-pouring high above the bar without splashing a single pellet.  By now you’ve trained the glass to come to you and you raise it to the hairline while turning her way.  Flash her that smile that always gets you what you want.  Flash her that smile that will be the last thing she sees later today before dropping into a drunken coma face-first in the pillow atop her sheet-less mattress.  

“Up the field, young lady,” and you drain your shot.  No need to pretend it doesn’t burn as it sinks into the pit of a starving gut — your belly now the bottle from which the whiskey came.  She watches with a hunger in her eyes, biting her lip to keep from saying what her eyes already have.  Now’s the time to study yourself in the mirror and own the handsome warlock beaming therein the glass while Johnny Cash fades into the neon cage of this tipsy tavern and Tom Waits takes over to further bury the chances this afternoon ever had.

She slides her empty glass and token forward with a “yes, please” just as Sir Matthew ambles by on call.   Within seconds he’s double-fisted the Tequila and Triple Sec over his trusty silver shaker, then squashes a lime into a carcass before dropping it and a short pour of OJ into the stir.  One scoop of ice and he fits a pint glass into the shaker, rattling it just above his shoulder for a silent three-count.  He slides a fresh stemmed glass from its dangle above the register, rims it with salt, and fills it with the gold and green elixir she knows like the taste of her own spit and places it on the coaster before her: “That’s a beautiful thing.”

“The drink or the fact that it’s free?”  She howls with laughter and licks the salt to evoke her potential.  She knows you’re listening, and she knows your cock is watching.

The clack-clack-clack of the billiard balls snap you out of her trance and you remember before it’s too late to keep playing it cool.  With a finger, you bat your coaster and send it gliding down the bar where it stops just beside her in front of the open seat.  Because you’re a fucking stud and you’re magic like that.  Her eyebrows reach for the ceiling and she smirks, impressed.   You return the gesture as a validation stamp on your invite before finding your sleepy feet and swaggering on down to her.  

“Best seat in the house, young lady.  You must know people here.”

“First time, actually.  Considering the hospitality…,” she takes another sip, “it won’t be the last.”  You defile her with your eyes.  “Tell me, why is this the best seat in the house?  Some rich history I’m sittin’ on?”

“After today, yes.”  Sir Matthew puts an ice cold Heineken in your fist.  “That’s the best seat in the house because of what’s currently in it.”  You drink and never blink.

“Is that right?”

“It is…,” another drink, “because I am never wrong.”

“Me neither.  At least not until morning.”  Again, she fellates her straw.

Sir Matthew fakes a smile as he twists two dirty glasses over the wire brushes in the sink, then into the warm rinse water, then into the third sink sanitizer, standing them to drain and dry on the stainless steel.  The bar phone chirps behind him and he spins to answer it.

“Mansfield,” he declares.  His eyes float to the top shelf as he listens to the press of the acquainted voice on the other end.  “Haven’t seen him today, love,” he lies.  “Of course I will.  Cheers.”  He hangs up.

You’re inches away from her face, close enough to taste the tequila on her breath when Sir Matthew props his elbows onto the bar: “Twenty minutes.”

You know that warning like you know the alphabet.  A deep sigh and a long drink.  Your hand caresses the back of her head, falls into her hair and slides to the middle of her back and stops there: “You ready to get the fuck outta here and show me the best seat in your house?”

Sir Matthew tucks your tab beneath the coaster.

“Sure thing,” she admits.

You pluck the tab from beneath the coaster and feign disgust.  “Christ, did I break a window?!”  Sir Matthew pretends for the hundredth time that he’s never heard that one.

Folding three twenties around the check, you toss it onto the bar to free up your hand as it hangs between you and Sir Matthew: “I was never here.”

“Never ever,” he responds, swiping the cash off the bar.

“We’ll see you at the early show,” you say with a wink and a simper that reeks of old school.

Sir Matthew shuffles away to yank the cord on the nautical bell hanging above the register — waking the other drunks to the departure of a big tipper.

She slings the purse over her shoulder and her free arm around your waist, tucking her fingers into the waistband of your Chinos.  A sure thing, indeed.  

And just as Mr. Waits’ piano fades into the haze of the afternoon, Bruce Cockburn and his lions begin to play you out as Sir Matthew wipes his hands with a bar rag.  (After you leave, he’ll grab the jukebox remote and skip to the next song: Bartender’s Blues).  The old bastard at the end of the bar rubs his eyes and bitches about the volume.  The old bastard at the other end swirls his snifter of Grand Mariner and pokes his nose into the waft, basking in the sense memory of better days.  The echoing thud of the eight ball in a corner pocket drowns out the face palm of the old bastard who just lost his last chance at a free drink.  

The cash register dings and the drawer jabs at Sir Matthew’s belt.  He pays the piper and drops your hush money into the pitcher of presidential cabbage behind the till.  Turning back to the bar, he smiles at the half-drunken Heineken and emptied margarita left in your wake.  A shaft of afternoon sunshine surges through the window and twinkles in the wet rim of her glass.

“The early show, indeed.”