There was a hint of victim-less tragedy in the parched air as Samuel Prig huddled near a sallow window-sill and drank his liver to tatters. Victim-less not in the sense that a vulnerable piece of nine year old flesh was being violated three doors over under a splintered UV light by the gooseflesh hands of a used-car salesman, but more in the sense that Prig wouldn’t mind either way. It was blunt tragedy, advertised by seraphim from the swill of drained bottles.
Still, the fractured bits of saxophone maritime bliss that fluctuated from the undertones of a negro-packed joint across the way blustered in the poor Irishman’s pub each time the door opened and another hopeless bit of trash staggered in with heaps on each shoulder and a chunk of regret to drown. Luckily it was a nickel to an ale and a dime to the liquor, keeping the flow of grizzle-patched soldiers of misfortune frequent. Prig noticed nothing in the first few months, tired of fretting over profit returns, revenue functions, and delineation curves that swerved through his brain and rattled his dreams with the fervor of a torched crucifix waking up a parishioner.
His eyes grumbled in the form of the twin dioceses leading the procession of broken-hearted infant men that trooped in with cavalry sized hungers for self-effacement and a blinding urge to sink into the nearest nook and dissolve. Frayed knuckles bled into yellowing nails that flowed into an outcrop of distilled froth bubbling into stomachs. Smoke blistered in fractal trails across dart-board intimations and struck his corneas with the force of the twin speaks shattering.
An excuse for flattery earned him a hard-wood flooring kit and weeks of unchecked passion for rolled-sleeves and mid-afternoon beer breaks. The bathroom’s stalls sometimes overrode the water supply and chucked heaps of man-spirit and gin excess in dregs to be mopped by calloused hands. It was a maxim of his forefathers to forgo drink at work but his work was drink and he lavished in a hard day’s night.
The occasional winking from a flowery persona directly across the cobble-dirt street earned a month’s worth of filthy strokes in his creaking bed just up the stairs, that inhaled the scent of the amassed sense of regret that spewed from each patron like a repackaging of cognitive desiccation.
Barely woken by the devil’s mix of brandy and bilked coffee that rested under his brimmed nostrils and vaporized with the speed of quicksilver, he sleepily dreamed mirrors were shattering just outside the veranda of an ethnic pavilion under the breaking of a rosy dawn. A final splintering of glass shard marshaled itself into the area between his eyes just as he coughed back into reality and noticed the shapely damsel hustling in the entrance like a penny that knew its shine.
Stepping on each spot of cleaned vomit with the grace of a forsaken olympian, the buxom, shaded woman appeared near the dusty counter as smoothly as if she were drawn in for the very purpose of enhancing the altitude of pant-suits.
Her eyes were the color of sapphire jewels stolen under a pale, xerox light, and they beckoned his attention with a mere flitting of lashes. More character was etched into each swiveling of carved wrinkles around her mouth than could be mustered from the entirety of seamed peanut shells that crusted the perimeter of the stool-seating.
“And you, I suppose, are Prig,” she exhaled, with the sensitivity of speech that accompanies any lady of poise.
Interpreting when was a comfortable time to begin speaking was a moot point for Samuel, as he stumbled through thoughts in the way of a tender whose only interaction with women has been mawkishly holding hair back and trying to catch scents of rose-petal perfume in between wafts of vinaigrette vomit puree.
“I..I don’t believe I know you madame, or missus, whichever you prefer, if you don’t mind me choosing,” he sloppily blustered from the center of wildly trembling lips, eyes darting from each slope of her body to the strikingly white dress draped lightly on top of her sun-kissed skin.
Their diametric approaches to conversation would have been comical if Prig hadn’t been shuddering under the azure gaze of that now-florid woman, blushing with the knowledge that she’d hurdled another man’s speech. She still wasn’t quite used to the sensation, which Samuel noticed, giving credence to the idea that she hadn’t always appeared as a stunning temptress in white skulking through whisperingly ladled lower-Village pubs in the stark breach of the near-corrosive sun.
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