Weblog entry:
- In progress
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"Get rid of her, come back home with us, and we’ll talk about the loan then."
He looked down the length of the bar, not quite focusing clearly. A lover’s quarrel of some sort, tall redhead sitting across from a squat man, her lips purs—
No, that wasn’t right. He shook his head as though to clear it, then looked back down at the table. Eye-traced the line of one especially purple vein along the back of his right hand. His nails were saw-toothed, broken, and he used one to gently poke the empty pint glass in front of him. He closed his eyes, gently pinched the bridge of his nose, sighed, and then glanced sidelong down the bar again.
A kid — hell, must’ve been twenty, twenty-one — wearing an orange hoodie. He’d worked up quite a pile of cigarette butts in the ashtray; his hand shook slightly as he tapped the next one out of its pack.
"So does that mean you’ll loan me the money, or not?"
The small woman (older, librarian’s glasses, black hair salted with flecks of white) across from the kid starts smiles weakly, then thinks better of it. She looks down at her hands briefly, then looks back at him.
"Not."
Back at the bar, he shook his head again. After a few minutes of silence, he kicked away from the bar, stumbled toward the door, and walked blinking into the afternoon sunlight.
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- 31st day of March 2004.
- Filed under Story, Fiction.
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