Pall

Pall

Mark Coleman

  I sat there nodding agreement to I know not what in my drunkenness. My chin would drop to my chest then the whole works would shoot upright again. Like a marionette controlled by a palsied hand, I struggled to retain consciousness. The banter that flowed from one end of the barroom to the other staggered me in its wake. My slanted eyes would struggle to make out an accusation or invitation before the lids would again descend to pall a troubled dream.

  A nameless old-timer approached the perch on which I contemplated the endless night within. I jostled up and out at him. A moment of lucidity that nevertheless barred words. How could one explain the starless void in which I swam, however intermittently?  His gray eyes communicated something vaguely akin to concern. They sent a few tracers down my spine, and I strove fruitlessly to readjust my frameless glasses somewhat further up my nose. My index finger slid up and down it as though rubbing away an itch, unable to find and hook its target.

  I’m sure all this would seem rather comical in one of those blasé dives where youths rendezvous out of boredom rather than desperation. Here there was finality to even the most platitudinous of the regulars’ movements and occasional bits of broken speech. This was an end-of-the-road sort of establishment. A place in which to drink until you keeled over, and the Devil came with his ice wagon and an order for collection rather than delivery.

  The wizened barfly stood in front of me with his mottled flesh losing its fight with gravity. He stooped so far into his glass of ale that you thought he’d drop in like a quarter, and never surface. His lips drew back from his rotted teeth in some simian attempt at humanity. “Shot,” he barked out as much to me as the bartender. It was not a question, but an unquestionable demand. The man thus addressed finished a few drinks as spiked as iron maidens for patrons at the bar proper before retrieving the spigot-less well. The nonchalance with which I threw back my shot convinced the man of some sort of mettle and right, and he moved on. His eyes trailing behind him like smoke.

  The nod resumed in earnest. Disappearing at every sign of the glimmering of a fish’s scales. Back up, each time, with nothing but a lingering aftertaste in the beak. French-inhales and German billows dividing the room in two. A warring of nationality and ideas. Here where the bucolic meets the bacchant in lackadaisical droop. The bleating and the whines everywhere at once.  A massive evisceration. The insides spread out like a lifetime of passed-down china, polished and prepared for entertainment purposes. The guests with their breath fogging over glasses of mirthful self-destruction. Eyes lowered to the head that sits in eager anticipation, clouding the gold beneath. Duckweed floating over everything, webbing vision and dragging mind.

  A cackle from the adjacent table. A middle aged cad pondering the gem his hands had fallen upon. Up the skirt where they found no resistance. The moan in mid-sentence from a pair of dreary, painted lips that part with the creak of those floorboards in haunted mansions and their suburban models. Hangings and stabbings and shootings and screaming cancers that eat away facial features and youthful beauty. Bed ridden patients with portacaths and photo albums that seem better than mirrors given the circumstances. Patched over bullet holes in bathroom ceilings and plastic pints in water tanks.

  Meandering staircases often mistaken for Jacob’s Ladders in the anxiousness to reconnect. Dreams not just un-realized but wholly forgotten beneath the weight of sorrow and the never ending funeral preparations, some of which are for those still technically alive. Bar stools with casters for the valetudinary tipplers and dipsos. Cherubs strangulated with their own haloes, asphyxiated by their twice-earned wreaths of laurel. There are tears of blood on the cheeks of the statue of the Mother Mary.

  Leaning on the oak and looking for reflections where there are only deflections. Barkeeps with one good eye out of two to take in your sulking, pathetic form as you draw the bones out for the bottle. Genies on hiatus and sprites weeping over each other’s bodies in the thickset brush of forest and restive, tender rugs of sward. Black processions that suck the color from the already fair complexions within them. Skullcaps solemnly worn and night caps hastily taken.

  Anxiously surveying the dwindling alcohol supply. The wrenching pains beginning in the stomach, throwing their contortions to the face. Not enough for the night. Not enough for the morning. And then there are the days beyond. They stand with their impish grins and sharpened pitchforks. Their tails laid out at your feet like red carpets to Hell.