"Supposing truth is a woman- what then?"
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
The Queen's Cunt Bar and Grill has one phone booth. Sahr waited impatiently to use it. He'd be kicking low at the glass door on a glistening crack. He had this crazy look when he waits. In the meantime, he observed someone literally trash the 8-ball. That he found amusing. Darts miss the board. He was in hysterics about that, too.
Disintegration by The Cure played in the jukebox. Its opening instrumentals glazed over the sober and the drunken, and the divine mothers in drag with ice-cold drinks occupying both hands. It even had those little tropical umbrellas leaning on fogged up rims. These women or men, human or other, began sensually tripping with each lethargic sway. Sahr was awstruck by how unapologetic lady liberty is, as her articles of shame falls off piece by piece.
Amidst sardine packed bar tables, a divorcee raised her gin-soaked palms for refills. At one end, the bar tender pops a fifty-year-old champagne, hitting the overhead lights on its protective shield. Making a throng of lovely ladies with sunset lips and bodies all done up, move wildly off their stools. Their skinny arms were raised up high, as nonexistent shards showers. As their pinball eyes searched, and their shrill voices asked no one in particular: Where the heck did it go? The cork just rolled underneath something or other, the bartender would say, assuredly.
Across the tiredly lit floor, a herd of white men talked in Vietnamese, scaring off a retired veteran, scouting for another lonely seat. Small lines formed by the gender-neutral bathroom's cement hallway. Each were exchanging the most subtle meanness and misplacing suspicious glances upon their fellow brethren. The commonalities of having full bladders weren't typically a launching pad for long-term companionships. So, they remained mostly to themselves.
Sahr quickly got bored of the sights. So, he tapped his uncut fingernails manically at the glass. A middle-aged woman in a homemade white dress holds up two fingers. Indicating that our hero waits two more minutes. Either that, or Sahr was told to shove it! Just then, this ghost bride threatens to hit Sahr with the phone. Anger was a good look on her. The sudden contact stimulated something funny inside him. Just then, her verbal assaults for the inaudible recipient at the other end reached its operatic conclusion. The door slides open as if kissed by a hurricane, and she'd bump shoulders with Sahr as if they were old pals, long-time cell mates who wouldn't hold a grudge as to understand.
"It's all yours... bastard," the woman would say to Sahr, before regurgitated by an orgy of hungry shadows.
Sahr walks inside the phone booth, a little hard from that woman's last departing words. A barfly came in too. The right hand swats away, while the left punched the numbers, afterwards, he took an iron pause to contemplate if they were the correct ones. It came through. Each heavenly ring chases the peace away.
The fly had other agendas. It lands on his knuckles nonchalantly. Wanting to kill the tiny intruder, his hand opens like a dying star, provoking its retreat into the blackness. But immediately, its flight pattern changes, landing on our hero's knees.
The call is received and breathing on the other end offends his contrived sigh. Sahr straightens his shoulders and tucks his hair from receding forehead, into his army cap. He'd sit comfortably back, as if most wonderfully awaiting to surrender to rented jaws.
Watching people through the glass calmed him down, some. While he fingers the file cabinets of his mind for introductory words of care and sympathy. One of purest sincerity, if he must. It was a scheduled call with his scheduled father.
"Hello, Sahr, can you hear me clear?" Roman always began his usual way.
"Hmm," Sahr said appropriately.
