Storied By Josh

The floor was worn into a rut and the floorboard creak noise was nearly constant as patrons, drunks, and whorish men and women walked the same track to the beat up bar. They queued politely and sometimes not to order meals and drinks but mostly drinks.

He sat there holding his beer in the dusty air and singing a song from the old country. He always did this and even though his grey beard was unkempt, even though his shirt was dirty, beer stained and sometimes holey, even though he was heavy and life had shown him the best days in years past…his voice was neat as a soprano in an opera house. So we let him sing there on Wednesdays because our lives were feeling a bit over in those months before the war took our very brightest and very poor and killed them on fields and mountains. It killed them in dunes and sand. It killed them in the ocean and in the sky. We knew this would happen soon but not to us. Our countries looked us over and told us we were better off in this pub drinking and watching what remained of our health drain slowly away like the alcohol in our glass. I broke mine when I saw myself in it.

She sat in the corner today. I pretended I didn’t see her but I was surprised. She didn’t come here anymore. Not like when we were in young and in love, when we knew each other. She didn’t know me, I didn’t know her…we didn’t really know ourselves or this world that was soon to be changed, maybe forever, maybe it would be a burning skeleton like the buildings in the hills that surrounded us. They were left over from the old days, stone and rotting. Ten years ago a few good men who were learned began to dig them out of the ground in the name of science, but they had given up when people decided that they’d had enough of getting along.

They quit science when people decided it was time to kill each other. Humans do this after things have been too easy for a while. They self-destruct. It is a consequence of sentience in a sub-intelligent species. We pretend we are all so smart and that yes here I am with it all together. Silently in the cracks of the facade we break down and you can see it if you really want to. Men who have dared go insane. Some commit suicide and sometimes when the bottle isn’t enough I think that a chambered round at the beginning of a barrel might be. I, however, am a coward.

The bottle will do then.

The dirty man with the clean voice finishes his song and slumps into his chair. His chin hits his chest. She looks at him. I ignore her looking fair there in the dull light of the pub. I ignore her hair that falls past her chin and curls sometimes. I ignore how her bangs fall past an eye. The hair is a little grey now. She has a healthy lump of fat around her stomach I used to feel in the night. I ignore it too. She reaches toward the man with her perfect fingers that now are a little dirty and tobacco stained. She says something about him being dead. I ignore her perfect voice. The bartender tells her he will call an ambulance. I drink from my glass as they bring in a stretcher. I drink from my glass as they roll the dirty man on it.

I am very sad that I will never hear the man’s song again.

I look at the rut in the floor. I step into it and order another drink. Bartender says a price and I give him half. He takes it. His drinks are only half alcohol after all.

The government in all their wisdom outlawed cigarettes a few years ago. I pull one out of the pack and it burns the tumor in my lungs. I go to treatment for it now and then when the hospital has the drugs it needs. It is a lonely place where people once went to live. Now we mostly go to die. My doctor is a vegan, or would be if he could find some vegetables but the governments have rationed them. So he eats pig and cow now sometimes. Mostly like me, he eats potatoes and bread. He is very skinny and his clothes are expensive but old. They are threadbare and his eyes are sunken into his skull. He is tired. His grand father lived through the USSR and he told me in confidence over one of my illegal cigarettes that communism was like this just before the end. But then, he said, “everyone was out of money. Right now there is much but only for the few.” I coughed up some blood and he asked how long that had happened. I tell him a few months now. “You’ll probably die this year.” He told me. I replied to him that everyone will be dead in twenty years. He took a long drag of the cigarette and then looked away.

Sitting there in that pub I watch as a hooker goes to a skinny man with a long beard. She tells him her price and he shakes his head. She comes to me and I tell her I have no money. I heard you have cigarettes she says and I say yes. She tells me what that will get. Whatthehell. I think and acquiesce.
In the hall after we are done I give her a cigarette and she offers to share it with me. I tell her okay and that I will buy her a drink. She is ugly but so am I. Ugly people are the most interesting company anyway. We sit and I order her a drink. The bartender says I owe him for the last one and I tell him if he doesn’t give me one I’ll piss on his dog. He brings the bottle and places it harshly on the table. I tell him thank you. She cheers with me and downs the cheap vodka in a single gulp. Gets the taste out she says winking at me. Then she gets up. I ask her not to leave but she says she needs to work. Don’t you work? She asks. I feel my bad knee acting up whenever anyone brings up employment.

Only to get out of it. I answer and she kisses my head. Then she leaves the door. A man coming in squeezes her flat ass and she slaps him across the face. He laughs and continues to the bar. Heat wave coming he informs no one in the bar. In the old days the heat waves weren’t so bad. Now when they come people die. I hope the hooker will be okay. I remember one of the old days.

“Let’s go to the beach.” She says to me.
“There is no beach.” I inform her. It doesn’t matter. She is already wearing a bikini and so we walk down from our little hovel to where the grass is dying. We watch the ocean break against the bluff that used to border the beach. There are more dead fish today I say as I watch them being picked at by skinny birds. She says to ignore it and focus on the sun. I do and we lie there until it is dark. We make love in that dead grass near the dead fish and feel alive. Two days later she finds a spot on her skin and the same doctor who is skinny now tells her it is skin cancer. We don’t go outside nearly as much after that.

She got better but we got worse. We pulled apart and she found herself in love with a boy who sang better than me. He loved life like she did and I knew she had found someone who was better at everything I was bad at. I let her go and moved in with a gay man. He had lymphoma and needed someone to take care of him so I did. After he died he left me his apartment, so I live there now with his ashes on the table. It seemed everyone my age these days had some sort of cancer. In the days before the news was censored and controlled the scientists would tell us it was our own fault. They would say it would get worse before it got better. Money began to disappear and so did the rich. There’s rumors they’re all holed up somewhere underground. They wait for the day when the fish stop dying and the people stop getting sick.

I heard once that some of the poor stumbled on one of their bunkers. In a fury they attacked the bunker, broke the door down and burned everyone in there alive, then they ate them. That didn’t make sense to me. If they had only killed and didn’t burn the bunker they could have lived the life of luxury. These days though things don’t really make sense.

A young man who smells of disinfectant and who wears a badge comes in looking for the hooker. The skinny man points to me and the badge asks me where she is. I tell him she left for Manchester. He slaps me a little and I force a cough up. Blood comes out and he backs up. He tells me I smell like cigarettes. I tell him no shit and my forced cough becomes a real one. I lean over as I cough. It hurts to breathe. I have to breathe. I cough and cough. He backs up some more and says something about fucking these people and leaves. Once I stop coughing I start laughing. The bartender looks my way and kicks out the skinny man. Then he gives me a napkin. You have blood on your chin he says. I take it and wipe. I notice that she is standing over there and she is looking at me with fear. She comes over and puts her hand on my shoulder.
“You’re sick.” She says.
“I know.” I tell her and her grey hair smells so wonderful.
“You should see a doctor.”
“I did. He says it’ll pass.”
“You’re lying to me. I can tell.”
“So what.” I ask
She frowns that frown of disappoint and it’s just like it was at the end. I am passively angry at her but not invested enough to car about it.
“Drink with me anyway.” I tell her. She says she will. We finish the bottle of vodka and don’t talk much, only in quick bursts. I learn about the boy she loves, that he is probably going to go fight in the war. I say I’m sorry and she shrugs. “You always loved a martyr.” I tell her.
“Then why did I love you?” She asks.
“Because I fooled you into thinking I was.” I forget about the chambered round at the beginning of the barrel when I look into her eyes and swim in them. Oh I can swim with her in them forever if she would just let me again. I’ll even hold my breath and go under with her like when I was young. She smiles a little, probably remembering and I’m okay now. I’m okay. We sit there for a little. She begins to tell me about her parents. They are doing fine, they are trying to start a commune to grow food for everyone.
“They’ll probably be the last generation on this earth to reach their eighties,” I say to her. “And the better for it.”
“Probably.” We sit for a while and we talk. I finally tell her that I am probably going to only last til the winter. She sits for a moment and then begins to cry. I pull her over and let her cry into my chest. I feel her warmth. I feel her.

I feel her.

She kisses me long. And we kiss. I miss you. I miss you. She stops and adjusts herself. She pulls away and looks toward the past. It must be, because the future isn’t there, really.
“Bob died.” She says.
“Who’s Bob?” I ask
“The old man who sings.”
“Oh.” I am quiet for a beat. “Yeah I saw.”
“He had such a beautiful voice.”
“All beautiful things seem to end these days.”
“I liked him very much.”
“You like everything very much.”
“I’m going to miss him.”
“I liked his songs.”
“I miss how you used to sing.” She says.
“You always miss and like things.” I say, exasperated. “What else do you miss?”

“I miss going to the beach with you,” she says after a pause. She looks into me again and I am swimming alongside the girl with the sun kissed hair.
“There was never a beach.” But it doesn’t matter. I reach out and take her hand in mine. Her’s clenches then it begins to relax. Her fingers spread and feel the grooves of the skin in my old hands. They find the spaces and we fit better than we did, I feel. I stare at the floor and the rut seems to grow. She offers me a cigarette. I don’t feel the tumor.

We sit there late into the night until we hear the sounds of planes coming and then the long song of sirens.