She drank as much as any man there. More than most, I would guess. Must have drowned the sorrows of twelve men one night. But I had never seen her there before. She was a young girl – must have been nineteen, by my guess – but she sat on her barstool, drooping like the rest of us. I asked the bartender about her, but he waved me away. “We’ve all got problems,” he said, “That I trust.”

She kept coming. All those nights I saw her there, and even when I wasn’t there, so the others said. She would sit there, taking her own, all in long, cool draughts, and staggering home through the dark, to one bed or another.

And this one night, this guy, he played the piano some; then they put on the jukebox for a while. And some came up and talked to her.

“Come dance with me hon,” I heard them say. “Come dance.” And she didn’t for a little bit, but they knew she would in a while. Then this other, he played his blues-harp, and she kind of perked up, pushed herself up on the style. She looked at me kind of slowly, strangely, and she played with her hair, a tangled blond mane.

Suddenly she said, “Hey man, let’s dance the blues. It’s getting closer to midnight." 

So I got up, and danced with her, and she laughed a little. She was kind of pretty, but maybe too young. “Nineteen’s a little young to be drunk,” I said. But she giggled a little, stumbled a little, danced around me some, like she was telling me no one should be living this way.

“We’re all trying to get lost, kill ourselves,” she slurred. And we would stop for a while; drink more for a time, while they played the piano and harp for a while. “We’re all dying.”

“I guess we’ve got nothing to lose,” I shrugged.

“Yeah, that. And everything else.”

Next night I came, she wasn’t there. She never came back. I didn’t ask what became of her.

But the bartender knows. I know. Whatever. It’s always whenever, not where they go. But her, I remember. She was less transparent than the others, the girl that was too young – she was more there than the rest that go there to drown and smother.

The man still plays the piano some nights, and the other, with the blues-harp. And I still hear her, when the lights are dim. She’s saying, “Hey man, let’s dance the blues. It’s getting closer to midnight, and I feel like dancing to some blues.”

Author guidance for This story

The prose form of a song I recently wrote.

updated Feb 3 '11 by Lyre