Uncle Empire

I woke up too late to go to work and put on all the denim I could find. I was going to need it. Then I walked around the apartment, which was far nicer than I deserved – having walls and heat and a refrigerator with an automatic icemaker – looking for a six shooter or some other sort of weapon. I'd keep it on the desk in the off chance that someone tried to sneak up on me and break my neck before I got to wherever it was I was going. Where I wasn't even sure. Probably a long, rambling road to some highway tourist trap, where they want your last ten dollars for a coonskin cap, and you give it to them and lay down underneath a plastic horse, hoping someone will feed it a quarter.

Last night, I went to hear the blues. Beers were taxed. A bad tip on two of them showed what kind of peasant I was to the initially pretty bartender. Everyone else in there was from far away and they moved in weird jerks, clapping polka rhythms that just didn't fit. Deer people from fjords saying things like "that is quite certain."

I left and gave one last look to the bartender to thank her for trying to make me feel impotent. She looked at me with a face like a sick lemon. She didn't care about me, and I didn't care. All the moths in my wallet couldn't get her what she needed, but she didn't know what that was anyway. Loveless, bloodless. She probably fucked like a snow bank.

Outside the pavement was cold and black, slick with ice. Snow blew like bees and wet sand. I walked around the park that was lit up like a military compound, trying to salvage something that was unsalvageable, and then took the train home.

The next morning, I woke up and put on all the denim I could find.

I knew a guy once who waited for years in the wings, in the folds of the curtains, and in the backs of photographs, patiently waiting with a screw turning darker inside of him. He'd say you can't make things happen, you gotta let them happen. He's still waiting, turning darker and colder and older, a bullet rusted in the muzzle.
-BF