Visions of Blood on the Ether

To my left my friend is talking fast and low and slow about seduction being the ultimate form of control and all I can think to myself is, Jesus Christ please shut up, but all I can manage to do is nod and sigh and take another shot of whiskey, or is it vodka, and rub my eyes and slam down the shot glass hard enough to get the bartender's attention.

I can still hear their voices in my head at the party, letting me smoke to calm my jangled nerves as they put their screws to my thumbs. Cops with pads and badges and guns, asking, What did you say to her? How did you know her? Did she say anything. Allegations of blackmail and other things that slid from my tired body like rainwater off of an oil slick.

I can still see her blood as it glimmered and then dissipated, drank in by the sand.

The bartender walks over and pours me another shot and I am about to take it, lifting my tired head slowly from the bar top when I catch sight of a dark stain on the gouged wooden floor. Is that, I swallow a cough of vomit. Is that blood?

Yea, he says, yea it is.

God, I say and slam down the shot, which might be rum or tequila, and look up at him. I can feel the contortions of my face but I have no idea if I am smiling or crying and he fills my shot glass again. How, how did it get there?

Forgot about my friend but he's listening to me and the bartender.

I killed a man here a week ago, the bartender says, and I look hard at him waiting for him to say something else, to smile or sigh. He looks completely serious and unaffected. Seriously?

Yea. He pulled a gun on me so I shot him down. By the time the cops were done the blood had sunk into the wood. Kind of a permanent reminder now.

I think of the blood on the sand, the complete mutability of the beach and how the sand would be clean away at high tide or swept clean by the wind. How lucky for me, I think, that I was just ancillary to the carnage. The stain on my soul will not last. The bartender, however, will always have that man's soul in his palm.

I think I need a bathroom, I say, and stand suddenly, the room tilting and twisting as I rush to the toilet and feel my body turn inside out, tears in my eyes as I vomit.

I wake up the next morning on in my own bed. In my pocket is a note which reads, If you need to talk, ring me - Aidan. The bartender, I think, clips of our conversation flooding back to me. I think I cried all night.

Drunk Driving For Beginners

Glass glitters on the pavement like stars in the sky and I can't help but think of glitter on the smooth curves of a stripper or the light show you get when someone punches you hard in the face. Eyes closed, pain rippling through your mind, and purple and white flashes against the screens of your eyelids.

I watched this all happen through whiskey spectacles and had to blink a thousand times to clear the noise from my mind. Metal and glass and flesh all screaming and twisting in horrible ways. A pedestrian disappearing as though they were an ant crushed by the finger of God.

One of the car doors opens and a man stumbles, legs working like a newborn deer. A blood-soaked doe crashing into a concrete meadow. He sits down and leans against the battered rear door of his ride and begins to laugh.

No one else in the crowd moves. Some people haven't even bothered to leave the bars that dot the road, just standing at the windows, drink in hand, wondering if its worth exiting to watch.

Questions rise from all around, What Happened? Did You See Anything?

Christ, I think, what a mess. Before long I'm wondering if this isn't some kind of delusion. No one seems to have seen anything.

I walk over to the man on the ground and kneel down, looking at him like a child does a frog, curious, unknowing.

-Are you ok, I ask him.

He spits blood like red mouthwash and begins laughing and I see that a few of his teeth are missing. I wonder if they are in that tidalpool of blood between his legs or if maybe he swallowed them. Maybe, I think, they are shoved up into his skull like some ghoulish teratoma.

-Hey, my calm disturbs me as I push the hair back from his eyes, my hand coming away red. Hey, man, can you hear me?

-You gotta light? he asks and pulls out a pack of fags from his pocket. You gotta light? I need a smoke something awful.

I shake my head and he fumbles a gold zippo from his pocket to strike his coffin nail alive.

Police sirens howling as wolves in the night, red and blue dancing in the distance. I stand up and look into the other car. No one in it. Driver's and passenger's side doors open. For some reason the windshield wipers are going at their fastest rate and I notice they are smearing someone's blood manicly. Children's hands playing with pasta sauce on their highchair tray.

-Fuck, I say as I lay down and look under the car and into the trembling eyes of the pedestrian. Can you hear me?

-Yes... they say in a soft whisper. I can't feel anything. Anything. I can't hear myself. They pause and then shout as loud as they can, I can't hear myself!

A man in the middle of an impact crater behind thick glass. I stand again and look at the crowd circled around me. Inextricably linked to the tragedy seemingly by my own sheer morbid curiosity. Did I think I could help these people?

At my feet the driver is coughing and I see the glass in his stomach. I could pluck it from him like a ruby from the earth. His cigarette butt is coated in blood. I think of the attractive women in the bars who pass cigarettes back and forth stained with lipstick.

Laying back down I look at the pedestrian and realize I can't tell if they are man or woman. Most of their hair has been torn off, exposing scalp and blood and bone. I wonder what forces of physics brought them under the car like that.

My own intoxication and shock makes everything seem more unreal. Oddly enough I feel no nausea. I stand just as the first cop arrives at the scene. Quickly I crouch down and look at the driver. No motion, coughing stopped, blood oozing from mouth and stomach wound. The cigarette in his lips is burning down, a length of gray ask like a dried worm ever growing. I quickly grab his gold zippo and stand up again, pocketing it as the cop approaches me.

-Hey, he says, were you involved? Did you see anything?

I saw everything. Every last damn thing. But I'm drunk and broken inside so I say, -No, sir, not a thing. I just wanted to see if I could help.

-Well get the fuck out of here, the paramedics are on their way.

-Yes, sir.

I do my best to walk away in a straight line. At my car I play with the lighter, wiping the bloody fingerprints from its smooth yellow surface. Once about seven cop cars and two ambulances are at the scene I open the door to my own car and take a deep, steadying breath before starting the engine.

I don't think about the missing driver from the other car. I was there when it all happened. They were just about to pull into the road when the now-dead driver of the other car swerved hard, cut three lanes of traffic and a median, and struck them head on.

Cheating death is an art, I think to myself. If you do something out of stupidity you'll be killed. That guy was a beginner. If you do something out of the thrill of the wrong, you'll make it ok. I'm an expert. An expert at the fuck-awful thrill that comes with risking it all for no purpose but to let fate deal you a hand. That's why I stole the lighter. That's why I stuck around and looked at everything so closely. That was my closest brush yet.

I replay the scene as I drive away from it all.

I remember when it first happened, how I had felt the seat belt tighten across my chest as my whole body slammed forward. -Jesus, I had said, turning to look at the girl who had picked me up at the bar. Did you run into something?

-No, she had said, dazed, pulling herself up from the airbag. No, I was waiting to pull out of the lot. There was that person crossing in front of us...

-What the fuck... I remember being shocked by the sight of the hood of our own car buckling into the windshield. Barely visible over it the shape of another car. Jesus Christ, I think someone ran into us.

I stepped out of the car. Glass on the pavement like stars in the sky. The brief hopeful idea that this might be a bad dream. The relief when I notice no one saw anything. No one saw me in the car.

Live to fight another day. The thrill of driving without consciousness kicking in when I make it home and have no recollection of driving beyond the parking lot.

Oceanside

And life is short, she told me while we sat on the edge of the beach and looked out at the ocean.

I remember nodding and dragging on my cigarette and doing my best to throw off the air of someone who was cooler than I was. Shoulders hunched forward, eyes cast to where sand meets water. Weight of the world on me like I know too much for my own good.

Before us the ocean glittered and shone under the moon and the cloudless sky.

She talked to me like I wasn't even there, espousing her theories on the world and life and music with the passion and earnestness of someone who only ever had once chance to say what she wanted to. I listened and nodded and only stole the occasional glance at her, but it was only to admire the tan on her thighs as the wind ruffles her skirt towards her hips.

She had this sad look in her eyes and when she spoke it sounded like her voice might break into tears. All I could think was that I might be able to exploit this to get some action.

In retrospect I was a bit of a jerk about the whole thing. No one at the party had ever met me, and in truth I wasn’t even sure why I was there. Dragged along by a friend who came out west a year ago and fell in with the hipsters.

She came up to me and asked if she’d ever met me before and when I said no she asked me to come outside.

It was clear she was trying to make a connection but I was too drunk to do anything but keep up the façade that I was just like everyone else. Any other day I might have genuinely been interested.

So as she spoke I pictured her naked and tried to remember her name and sipped my beer and pulled on my cigarette but really I couldn’t have cared less. All of her earnestness was just making me uncomfortable.

I wondered why she was telling me all this and what it mattered.

And life is short, she told me, turning to look at me and holding out her hand for the last few drags of my smoke. I handed it over and said, Yea, life is short.

No one wants to die a virgin, after all, she said to me, and I said, Yea, that would be a tragedy.

She nodded, finished the cigarette and dug it into the fine sand of the beach before grabbing me and kissing me.

We melted into one another and when it was over I lit two cigarettes and handed one to her and we sat in silence.

Satisfied and conscious of the fact that she was sitting naked and staring at the waves I stood and asked if she wanted anything from inside. She shook her head, didn’t say anything.

Inside some people clapped me on the back and told me Good Job because they could see the scene from the balcony and I just shrugged and told them to fuck off and I felt like a new man.

Suddenly my attitude had crystallized and I was the man I pretended to be earlier. Cocky, self-assured, but low key and not one for drawing attention to myself.

I grab a beer and pop it open when someone screams.

On the balcony I see the girl on the beach, laying down on her back. Two people are running towards her, moving in slow motion through the sand.

From her wrists the blood spreads and glistens like the ocean before being drawn into the warm, soft sand.

Bar Talk

“You get enough people to see things your way, could kill a man on a city street and no one could touch you.”

The man’s talk is making me nervous, but he’s just bought me another bourbon and the bar is almost closed up anyway, so I figure what the hell and set down on top of one of the beer coolers and look at him, urging him on with my eyes.

“When I was young, summer my fourteenth year, it was during the riots, group of people smash the windows of a car, drag this man out of it kicking and screaming. I seen them doing it, walk over, and the man, he’s bleeding and crying through broken teeth. I laid no hand to help him. I let my foot down on his face and crunched his nose up but good and didn’t stop ‘til the cops come round to scare us all off. They wouldn’t push no prosecution. They was as children among us. Our group had the power.”

As a bartender you hear a lot of things. In a rough bar those things can get pretty frightening. I sip my drink and let my eyes rest on his own and wonder why he has his hands off the countertop.

“Sometimes I remember that day, crushing a man’s skull underfoot, listening to him try to breath through broken equipment, and I revel in it. Memories come as thick as syrup. Gotta beat ‘em back with hands and arms.”

I sip the drink he’d laid his dime on for me and then kicked it all back. “I gotta close up, pal.”
“You remember your first fuck?”

I look the wrinkled old face over and find it hard to believe that he’s ever even known a woman’s touch out of kindness or freewill. “Sure do.”

“Never get that back, the full force of the pleasure of the new. The experience alien and beautiful to you. Sooner or later, becomes routine. Like brushing your teeth. Like the wind through the trees. Ice on a mountain.”

Now I am picking up my glass and washing it, nervousness like cold water on my back. “You’re already settled, just down your drink and scat, ok?”

“But we all have to keep trying, right? Chase it down and try to recapture that first, pure, unknown moment.”

He’s pulling something up from his waist and I have my hand on Pete’s old Browning that we keep under the bar. I level the pistol at him just as he raises his own and I fire. A sound like thunder as the gun bucks, the full weight of that man’s body dragging him off of his stool and down onto the ground.

“Got that right, brother,” I say to the empty stool.

I rest a moment, have another drink before calling the cops.