This place is dark and full of blues; the air is thick with smoke and ruin. How did I get so lost out here? I don’t even remember why I ran. It was either too long ago or too forgettable. All I’m left with is the feeling of pain and every new emotion is just a twist to the blade already set so deep it could be mistaken for bone. Who could I give this broken heart to? And why would I?
Each tap behind the bar is poison and I drink until I am full and as it filters through me, I can hear it in my blood. And I stumble again, and I fall and the words fall out of me onto the floor and scatter in a disgusting mess. And nobody pays me any mind as I kneel there, wondering where it all came from. And then where I came from and then I try to remember where I was supposed to be heading in the first place. But I don’t remember and all I can think about is that, at some point in time, I stepped off the road, tripped over the verge and plummeted down a hill of dead sticks and thorns. Mushrooms blasted to pieces as my limp body tumbled across them and I landed in a heap of myself at the bottom.
Quietly, without fuss, I dusted myself off and kept going, not even realising that I was misplaced and I thought as I followed her that she was an angel leading the way. An angel that beat and tormented me and I lapped it up and denied that I was accurately off target.
A boy I thought I knew with a spring in his step picks me up.
I don’t recognise him anymore but he says his name is Rabbit and he asks me why I haven’t gone home but he says it with a grin that I don’t trust and I am helpless as he leads me to a booth that feels familiar and small. The music never stops and my heart still aches. I raise my hand and feel the hilt of the knife still protruding from my chest, not quite enough to get a grip of but enough to bury it further, if I chose to do it or if I let them do it, and I always let them. And then on the wall opposite I notice a list carved into a slab of thick dark wood and painted white.
Four truths:
One: The first cut is the deepest.
The boy rings a bell and whilst we wait he tells me that I am beautiful and I blush and I look away and I want to feel good. I almost stop doubting myself but that is quickly overwhelmed by a dusky anxiety with a bully’s glare. The boy brushes his hair out of his face and he clicks his tongue. He sniffs the air, like he is hunting, His eyes are piercingly blue and they reflect the sparkling lights of the silent, candy coloured jukebox behind me. He tells me, unblinking, well-practiced, that he only wants what was best for me and I realise that even if we had met before that I never really known him. All that is certain is that that he is lying and that he lied before, that every syllable was a calculated formula for control. And I know all this because the second rule on the list tells me so.
Two: The boy always lies.
The waitress arrives at our booth carrying an empty tray smeared with old liquid and she has a black eye that she smiles through and she is pleasant and she is sweet but she doesn’t say a single word to us without crying and she pretends that it isn’t happening and everybody else ignores it. The boy asks her to dim the light and as she reaches up to turn down the gas her dress lifts and I see her thighs covered in a razor’s sadness and I try to feel sorry for her but I’m too absorbed in myself. The man in the bowler hat on the double bass steps up the tempo and thumbs out a gypsy beat as she wanders away, tapping her feet, knowing that she is getting closer to the edge. Just like everybody else in here.
The bar is saturated in mist and it hides everything from view except the flash of spoons. The faces of the wallflower strangers are visible in the glow of their cellular phones and they speak together in silence as they judge everybody who moves and hope that nobody looks at them too closely. Their skin is torn and hollow. The boy looks bored now and disinterested, his eyes flirt with the room and his tongue is on fire as he catches the stare of anybody foolish enough to look up and I know that I am in the wrong place. Still lost.
I try to give my goodbyes but my teeth won’t cooperate and rather than give him the satisfaction of my lust, I step away and disappear into the crowd, like a snowflake on the ice or a drop of rain in the river. Because that is what my life is: a pinprick of dying light in the vast galaxy of stars and I can’t even identify myself in the clusterfuck of shining balls of gas that pepper the blackness. So much nothingness and I still don’t know how to find my way back. I’m ready to go home now if they’ll have me. I’m not so sure that they would. I’ve been gone too long and too far.
The door squeaks shut and the noise of the hedonists dulls. I can hear crickets and owls and smell the breeze and the time that was racing stalls and allows me to make a choice in a moment of vivid clarity. A single path runs away from the door and splits left and right in an identical fashion and without much deliberation I choose left because I remembered the third rule and it doesn’t seem to make much difference where you go when you’re not trying to get anywhere.
Three: Nowhere is home. Stop being somewhere.
I walk through the forest and I tread softly, my bare feet leave prints in the dirt and sometimes leaves crunch underfoot and I realise that it must be autumn. I am more lost now than I was before, and the stars are brighter. I wish I could read them but the secrets they are whispering are in a lost tongue or a magical script and I am alone in a world full of voices.
I desperately want to feel safe. Safe and happy. Or at least, just good enough to take the noose from around my neck. The rope follows me like a tail and it erases the footsteps I have taken so I can never return to where I have been and when I stop, the other end attaches to any tree I am stood under and the goblins behind my eyes dare me to do it.
Four: No matter the method. It’s never pretty.
A crow lands on a branch and eyes me up. He cries out at me and it is definitely a threat. I nod my head, almost a bow and I walk on.
Don’t mind me Mister Gloom, I am only traveling through.
Peter Eldritch is a British born writer currently spilling his guts (and those of his fictional victims) on the page. His shorts mainly focus on strange horror and weird fiction and his other pieces are peculiar too.