She was two bottom shelf bourbons away from Cheryl cutting her off and about thirty yards from the train tracks.
Strange that the vibrations from Queens of the Stone Age on the jukebox could mask a five hundred thousand ton train. Maybe it was how the bar was built. Maybe it was how her nerves, her senses were built.
Absorb the music, ignore the trains, the behemoths, the monoliths.
She rubbed her head through her knit hat.
Her father had taken her to see the Gateway Arch. She remembered nothing of the structure itself, and everything about the little boy with the port wine stain that crawled up his neck like a popsicle melting upside down.
The door to the bar was cracked open, not enough to see a face but to allow some of the smoke that wasn’t supposed to be smoked to escape the building.
Photo by Joost Crop on Unsplash
It was why Victoria drank here. She didn’t smoke herself, but the smoke-the real, toxic issuance of burning tobacco and additive-was far better than the diabetes-inducing sweetness of Mike’s vape apparatus, one of those units that looked like a ray gun from a so-bad-it’s-good fifties sci-fi movie.
In space. Those guns were always in space. Where the extras were blasted with an animated ray and fell, never to get up.
You didn’t know their names, you didn’t know their titles. They were just men who walked off a spaceship on to an alien planet and were destroyed.
She wished Mike’s death had been that clean, sterile, anonymous.
She wished that she had seen the structure, the substance, instead of being intrigued by the port wine stains, the melting popsicles of his ambitions.
She wished she had known the rage vented about a ’64 Falcon fan belt could soon be transferred to her when the honeymoon period devolved into the broken promise period.
Wait, she admonished herself, you did know that and chose to ignore it.
Victoria finished the bourbon, sucked a rock of ice, and pushed the glass into the well for a refill.
She smiled. Until you didn’t ignore it.
Until the last puke-smelling bottle of IPA smashed into her temple, a glancing blow but enough to draw blood, blood hidden by her hat but thinned by the bourbon, still trickling.
That pistol he took to the range, to prove his toughness…thanks for that, Mike, she thought.
She wished it could have been an animated ray, not a bullet. She wished he just had fallen, and the back of his torso not shredded, flinging bits against the refrigerator.
She wished she had been stronger, sooner.
But there was no real reason to beat herself up now, she had survived.
She always wondered about the boy at the arch with the port-wine stain. Did he have a happy life? Could they remove those things now?
Maybe she would see him one day.
She would not throw herself in front of a train.
She was going to buy a ticket, and board one.
Another great read!