Happy Hour's Over

Our calm was washed out to sea by the anger surging across her face. His eyes reflected a tired shadow cast from broken windows; jagged remnants of demon teeth in his brain. I'd been drunk since clocks forgot how to tick and was itching severely from Sebhoritic Dermatitis. She clicked her heels three times, mentally, trying to rid herself of the fantasy world we all seemed to dwell in. His rectum clenched, preparing for the inevitable harbingers of metaphorical stormy seas; doomsday-tsunami tombs. I loosed a river of vodka down my throat, burning, yearning for something insufferable and insoluble (perhaps ineffable as well). Her machete gaze readied on the back-swing, poised to unleash heads - spurts of emotive arterial spray. His watch hadn't worked in months, but he glanced at it anyway. I leaned my head into my hands, a ruse to dispel any notions that my ears were, at that moment, stretching ever closer to their auditory inferno. That I was, in effect, pulling up an eavesdropping stool. Her teeth grimaced almost individually as her jaw ground back and forth. Her eyes quivered sullenly, pretending to forget everything they'd been privy to. He slid his self-deprecating shield into place and readied his facetious foil, yet remained there, poised above his defeatist dagger. I sucked fire through paper-rolled tobacco, abetting the smoggy ambiance while fluffing at my short-long (now far less business in the front than party in the rear). I motioned surreptitiously to the embroiled, bartender. He slid anxiously down the bar, as though I had asked him a huge favor. She wavered above that razor's edge of the moment, hovering like a swaying cobra's hood, as he recoiled in de facto horror. And I sat there, erect, at new-Army-recruit attention (a feat mimicked by other bystanders). Her imminent strike held us white-knuckled, clutching our respective pints, shots or carafes for dear life. Then, in an appropriate anti-climax, she sighed - a sound far bleaker than an sub-arctic winter morning, plodding out the door with a squeaky clank.

I dare say we all felt deflated as we returned to our drinks; the remote twang of honky-tonk on the jukebox trickling across the suddenly lunar landscape.