My Friends and I Page 5

  Frowning, she retreated into the meager shade offered by her rust-bucket Dodge and drank a bit of water from the bottle on the passenger seat. Glancing again to either direction up and down the road, she saw no prospects and decided it was safe to relax. Removing the thin jacket she wore, she turned the bottle on end over her head and let the water flow over her tawny hair, down her neck and shoulders and over the tattoos covering her arms from shoulder to wrist.

  To one familiar with body art, the tattoos were somewhat…crude and unrefined, with a look only slightly more proficient than the prison tats worn by countless other faceless and nameless women such as her. Thickly-drawn green vines wove around the muscles of her arms crossing and stretching downwards towards her wrists. At no less than two dozen points along those ink-drawn vines had been placed stylized roses. While the vine work had, obviously, been done by a single artist, each of the roses had a slightly different styling as if no two had been drawn by the same hand. In point of fact, they had not been. Refreshed, she replaced her jacket, concealing the artwork but not the memories of a time when she had not worn any such adornment on her thin body.

  She was not, actually, nameless. Her given name was Priscilla Jean though no one had called her by that name since the death of her mother some twenty years before. With her death, Priscilla Jean had been abandoned to the indifferent care of her father. A coarse, abusive and alcoholic sort, he was, nevertheless, not atypical of the men to be found in the flyspeck town of her birth, nestled deeply in the hardscrabble hill country of southern Arkansas.

  To him, she was of less use and, therefore, less interest than his old bluetick hound. At eight years of age she became solely responsible for keeping their ramshackle home clean, cooking to the extent she was able and performing whatever other…tasks he deemed necessary. It was him who had first dubbed her Poplar. As she was a rather plain-looking, quiet child he determined she was no more of note than any of the hundreds of trees that thickly dotted the countryside. As those individual trees had no claim to a proper name, so, he determined neither did she. And so, Poplar became her name to any and all with a reason to address her at all.

  She was, to her sire, useful only when he traded her in marriage for five acres of prime flatland and a good mule to a young man who neither loved nor respected her any more than had anyone in her brief, unhappy life. Treating her with no more care than he would her sylvan namesake he saw no problem with carving on her or beating her for the slightest perceived offense. She bore it in silence, accepting it as her lot in life, because she knew no other way. Until one night when, following an especially brutal beating, her tenuous hold on reality and sanity dissolved and she slit his throat with his own straight razor.

  She had walked away from all that she had known that night, his blood and her tears marking her and she had never looked back. In the two decades that followed that night, she’d travelled across the length and breadth of the great American land staying nowhere long and always moving onward.

  For each of those tattooed roses, more of the evil within her seemed to flow out into an inky reminder of the mutilated dead man each flower represented. Yet, though some of the evil flowed out of her, an endless wellspring within her always furnished more...a never-ending flood of anger, rage, abandonment and betrayal, swirling deep and bottomless.

  She was drawn out and away from her inner demons by the unmistakable sound of an approaching car. It was as if she donned a mask at that point and became not herself but a hapless, vulnerable female motorist…at the “mercy” of the big, strong man who would “rescue” her. She had played out this same scenario so many times before and in so many other places that she knew the script well. As it, almost, always had happened before, the sick twisted bastard would seek to take advantage of her…to exploit her…to prey upon her helplessness.

  She would have no choice but to defend herself against his untoward advances and it was then that her razor would appear and she would take his life in a mindless orgy of blood and gore.

  She forced a smile to her face as the car drew ever nearer, idly wondering of what color her newest rose should be. It didn’t really matter, she supposed, as long as the blackness in her soul took its rightful place on the outside of her and the ghosts had someone new to talk to.

  ********

  Jeffrey Hollar classifies himself as: an author/poet, father, husband and Klingon/Ferengi hybrid. He considers himself to be a writer without genre and a specialist in short fiction. His publishing credits include a handful of anthology and electronic magazine submissions as well as two books with more in the works. He posts nearly daily to his blog at: www.jeffreyhollar.com where you may also find more information regarding his available books.

  Twitter: @klingorengi

  DARK END OF THE BAR / Bob and Chandler

  DARK END OF THE BAR / Bradley Richter

  “Cripple scotch.”

  “Triple scotch?” the barmaid asked.

  “You heard me,” the old man mumbled.

  The barmaid sighed and fetched him a glass of scotch. When she set it down, her face passed behind a veil of shadow and he thought, She could easily be mine. My daughter.

  The lights had gone out at this end of the bar and no one had bothered to change them. Once the old man sat in the dim and dusty glow of an ancient bulb; now he sat in the dark.

  He handed her a tattered ten-dollar bill, one of the trillion papery shreds of the flag he’d fought to protect, the burial shroud where his manhood now rested while the shell of his broken body continued stalking the earth.

  His wife said sex wasn’t important. Kids weren’t important.

  He’d believed her. He wanted so badly to believe her, to believe anything again.

  And it worked—for a time. But one by one her sisters and then her friends all became mothers, and he watched as that key part of her withered and then died, that same key part of himself that had gushed out in a claret stream in a Vietnamese rice paddy. He watched her dry up, until the only moistness left was in her always leaking eyes. Then he watched as those became as barren as the rest of her, deserts in which he could no longer read the shifting sands. And then, just this morning, he’d watched the sun drift below the dunes and night fall in the Sahara she had become. Her soul had long since surrendered, but watching her body give up as well had driven him to the dark end of the bar for his last glass of scotch.

  She was still at home, in bed. But not sleeping.

  After this scotch, he’d load a single red shell into his shotgun, sit up in that very same bed, the same bed where they’d made love before the war and never again after it was over, take her cold and calcifying hand in his own, kiss not her but the cold and oily barrel of the gun, and then, with his free hand, pull the trigger and follow her wherever she had gone.

  He downed a mouthful of the fiery amber in his glass, wincing.

  The trade-off for taking children out of this world, he supposed, was that he could no longer bring them into it. He figured they went out the same way they came in: with blood and pain and screaming and tears. And the children he’d killed, the golden-skinned boys and girls he’d watched bleed out in the flickering light of burning villages, had been simultaneously born into his mind, where they lived out the rest of their tortured days under father’s watchful gaze.

  He shook his head, splattering tears, and took another sip of scotch. At the other end of the bar, the light end of the bar, the barmaid leaned over and whispered seductively into a young man’s ear. She had her bread and butter on display: bread, her left breast; butter, her right; and a long, thin knife of cleavage down the middle. When she poured the young man a beer, he tipped her generously as the young men always did.

  She came back to the dark end of the bar. “Another scotch?”

  “Nope.” The old man held up the thin, watery liquid. “This is my last.”

  She glanced at the clock on the wall. Bar time, always twenty minutes later than it r
eally was. Then she glanced back at the old man. “You sure? It’s only ten-thirty.”

  In the darkness, his eyes shimmered. “You got a family?”

  The muscles in her face relaxed and the old man thought, I’m seeing her for the first time right now.

  “Yeah,” she said, idly wiping the bar with her filthy rag.

  “Kids?”

  “One.”

  The old man finished his scotch at a go, choking down the remaining rocks. “What’s his name?”

  Some of her relaxed muscles tightened again. “What does it matter to you? You never asked before.”

  “What’s his name?”

  The barmaid sighed. “Her name is Emma.”

  “Emma,” the old man said under his scotch-breath. “A fine name.”

  “Thanks.” Her eyes met his. “How about you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Do you have a family? Kids?”

  The old man wished for another scotch, but he’d already tasted his last.

  “No,” he said, and there was no echo in the dead air of the bar. Even the jukebox held its breath. The only sound was the hollow thwack of darts, in sets of three, as the young man and his young friends passed their youth at the light end of the bar.

  “I’m dying tonight,” the old man said.

  She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be silly.”

  “My wife died this morning.”

  The barmaid’s rag went limp, lifeless. “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  The old man’s bony hand shot into his pants pocket and he pulled out a crisp, sealed envelope with nothing

  written on it. He passed it to the barmaid.

  She held it up. “What is it?”

  The old man cleared his throat, coal dust from an ancient mine. “Your inheritance.”

  “My what?”

  But the old man only smiled, rose from his barstool, and shrugged into his coat.

  “Don’t open it until tomorrow morning,” he said.

  Inside the envelope, he’d placed the key to his safety deposit box down at First National, along with a note explaining how to withdraw the childless sum of money he had amassed in that cold vault.

  On his way out into the frigid night, he thought of Emma.

  Emma in braces.

  Emma in glasses.

  Emma, well-fed and clothed in fine garments.

  Emma in college.

  Emma someday having children of her own.

  Always wanted great-grandkids, the old man thought, smiling. Wonder if I’ll be able to look down and see

  them. Wonder if that old story is true.

  At home, he climbed into bed with his wife.

  ********

  Bradley Richter has been writing since the fourth grade. His first story was about Don the Dime, who met Nancy the Nickel and fell madly in love; they later had three pennies and lived happily ever after. His latest story is about a dime who lost the ability to have pennies in Vietnam. Bradley is a bluegrass multi-instrumentalist and a yet-to-be-published novelist. He lives with his wife and dog in Felton, California.

  ‘Dark End of the Bar’