Leaning back against the roughly finished stucco wall in the courtyard of a downtown bar his heart was rain gear hanging in a warehouse on some beach in Alaska’s Shelikof. His hearing came and went with words like ‘200 in sales’, ‘killing it’, and ‘lucrative’. Surviving in a new part of town with his friend Jon, living with a roommate was not what got stuck in his craw, rather living with himself, and the adjacent conversations weren’t exactly remedial, as he’d hoped.
A crowd of men a few years his junior encircled one who spoke in narrative with an arm bent outward serving as a prop in certain parts of the story. “And so I’m fucking her right,” he overheard as the young gentleman’s volume knob crept obnoxiously clockwise. He hadn’t heard the context of this eloquence but judging by the eyes bugging, ashes flicking, flat billed hats re-adjusting till right above the eye brows, it was all sensationally titillating. “She stops me for a second and says she can hardly take it,” he does some nebulous gesture with his bent arm. He dodged the rest of this dialogue, less because it boiled blood more for the planks it turned in his own hollow eye sockets (like empty catchers mitts), more because of the personal malaise it framed, his own identity, different yet all together inglorious and he had no choice but to swallow it whole.
“You done with that?” he said to Jon, motioning with his own empty glass, with the pair he made his way down a corridor swelling with attractive women all dressed in varying shades of black and white. They seemed to communicate a trilogy of postmodern epiphany- ‘I have so much money’ and ‘I don’t need money’, and ‘I’ve never seen a dollar’. And he knew like Elie Wiesel's boyish arms knew no one familiar on a nazi-poland bound cattle car that though their eyes and smiles were fixed so contentedly, their perfect feet could hardly bear the weight from having to carry the entirety of that image.
A band, equally skilled at noise and not practicing piped up the second he opened the door to head inside. He careened toward the bar to close out and threw a few darts as he awaited his bill. “Thanks man, really good times,” he told the bartender as he signed away his twelve dollars. That’s an hour of patching dry wall he thought pushing the pen and receipt back toward the man.
He met Jon and Yoni out front and there they three stood for a bit shooting shit about food-trucks and Yoni pitched a line about the previous night he had spent with a friend, "and the new guy she’s with.”
His neck craned back, like blue jay did with bull ant that morning (only minus the Marlboro this time), and he stayed his eyes on a big ficus strewn with an angled array of street light strays. He tried to picture her face in the light and dark leaves of the tree’s canopy. He smiled and near cracked a button sized laugh when he found himself, in that instance, incapable of recalling her appearance. He thought it was sort of unlike himself to forget a face, especially one he had once found mesmerizing, but he stopped shy of remorse, and though it seemed pharisaic, he chalked up ficus leaves as a very good omen.
