It’s Friday, 6 PM, and Joe-Behind-the-Bar has your seat reserved and your drink ready. it’s been your seat for at least 20 years. All the regulars sit anywhere but there.
You exhale onto the stool, and Joe-Behind-the-Bar nods. It’s been a longer work week in decades of long work weeks. You don’t hate your job anymore, you survive it. You reward yourself with an almost-weekend drink or four. You sip slowly, relishing the bittersweet taste of a wasted life until last call.
Joe-Behind-the-Bar calls a taxi company to take you home. He knows I worry. He helps you shuffle outside, and pours you into the back seat.
You call me on the drive home. You know I wait on the sofa for you.
The racket of smashed steel and glass pierces my ears. fractures my heart. The last chord of your last call.
If you had known you would die tonight, love, what would you have changed?
published in Alien Buddha Zine #61, April 2024, republished in Write Under the Moon
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