Each night after dinner he goes to the bar. To get to the one he likes he has to pass by his apartment, has to contemplate the steps and what is hidden from the streets behind the door. For the first few months he hesitated but that stage too has passed and now he walks by, glancing only to see if the lights are on inside. At the bar, he falls into the dark of it, sits in the corner with a book or the paper and many drinks and pretends to read until he is too drunk to care if people notice that he is drunk. In the corner his head lolls slightly and his eyes droop as behind them the same scene plays over and over as though somewhere in his mind he pressed “repeat.” His mind fogs like frozen-over glass and his body floats through soft black space, a dark room crowded and smoky and filled with chatter so voluminous that it comes like the crashing of waves, him holding a glass and Dan an old friend, Dan slapping his arm hard and yelling in his ear, he still remembers this, has never forgotten it, yelling “...They were ugly though, like Oh God man.” Half asleep now each night in the back of the bar he feels the slap on his arm like a sting and still Dan’s words echoing, though he did not think he was listening to him when Dan said them. A beat, and suddenly the room quiet, the waves hushed to the patter of soft light rain, and the room not dark anymore but light, or a corner of it light, and him drifting towards the light of the corner until he is at it and staring down at a pale face fringed in dark black hair, the eyes too dark and traced so heavily with liner that they seemed drawn on, with him staring down and imaging the lashes hard like the teeth of a comb and seeing the raw red edge of them. A word, Ella, and it comes to him not as a name but as “girl,” with the ls said like js, and he thinks now of his sister and mother and the large family he left in Texas, the tongue he thought he had cut off upon moving north. Then he is running out in the rain, in his mind no mother or sister or family or anything but the small cold hand in his; a beat; and now he sees the pale body glow iridescent beneath him upon the dark bed like a blue flame.
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