“Sometimes the embers are better than the campfire.”
―Stephen King, The Green Mile
The Bartender is one of my favorite ambiguous sci-fi shorts, deliberately what I would call microstory although it’s probably technically too long for that even at its tiny ~180 words. Flash fiction is something I haven’t striven for, but things sometimes come out that way. Often I think there’s potential for a work to be longer, but often not. As I mentioned in my last post, and as King has written about at length, you kind of get what you get when you take your creative fishing boat out. Some stories are minnows, like The Bartender.
Trunk Stories is deliberately for some of these odds and ends. The embers.
The Bartender got found by me on the dream roadside, and then composted for a while, in Natalie Goldberg’s terminology. If we could go back in time, that would only be a slip knot, a brief touch. You can’t unstir the cream from the coffee, is how physics seems to work. My protagonist found a slip knot. What’s it like to love across time? To lose, and promise yourself you’ll come back?
Sean Carroll’s work and lectures on the physics of time are awesome. They do not support my fictional premise.
THE BARTENDER
Tommy, the bartender. The sweet card he got for me. We listen to our moonlight together, sip each from his flask, hands clasped. This moment. This kiss. Cut-hay scent, worked meadow and warm skin.
Tonight is my last. Last times come before you wish they would, and time’s arrow aims only forward. I can visit but I cannot stay.
I tally the count; seconds, minutes, years. His fingers drop as I enter coordinates, leaving warm traces. Will my own warmth remain when I depart, echoing here.
What does it look like for you when I go, is it a fading out? Am I thin now, insubstantial and simultaneous as you are to me, a map of us together in probability?
Can you still hear me?
A horn sounds on the street. Today breath rushes through me, the crisp, chill wind of God’s dice passing. They tumbled us so far apart, a century in an instant. Your lips still taste on mine.
You can’t hear me now.
Goodbye Tom. I’ll be back one day.