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The International Writers Magazine: Dreamscapes
• John Traynor
I’m a twenty four year old alcoholic. And like all cute hoors for the craic, I live above a pub and nightclub. I awoke at 11 pm, half drunk, half hungover, and heard the pubs persistent vibrations calling me down, the songs melody’s didn’t have ta ask twice. Paddy and Mick stood above me bed, clutching naggin’s to their chests. Paddy handed me one, seal cracked n all. We counted down from ten in German, and necked the naggin’s in one raw gulp.
I took a sup of orange juice to cool the coarse burning in my bald mouth. I stuck me head out the window, bloodshot eyes, bright and teary. A Saturday night, balmy breeze blowing up all the girls keen dresses. All piling into the pub for happy hour. Drowsy red neon’s ignite their tiny faces, and they fondle my molten motives, and I sincerely wonder why everyone isn’t an alcoholic. The words danced with the music, and that’s when my mind danced with drink.
I saw a mysterious silhouette. She stood alone, beneath a summer streetlight across the road, having a sly herbal smoke. The joint tip brightened to an elongated sizzling red. Her shadowed lips, jutting, exhaling a silent, smoky jilt of jargon. She threw away the receded roach. Smoke arose around her hair, and she emerged into the beer garden, black knee socks needling the starlit night. She bowed her head into the chilly pub strobes. The bouncers gawked at her tiny ass, twist and tease.
We poured cans of carling into three empty pint glasses, and floated downstairs.
“What will yee have?” Margo asked.
“Shots” I said “kill me conscience. And with tequila I say farewell to the unwanted coward.”
“Hello to the fool, sitting on the stool.”
“Hello to the slut, soon to be sitting on my cock.” She didn’t like that one. We never did get those shots. That didn’t matter. We took turns refilling the pint glasses with tins from my room.
When sober I’m frightened of life, and when twisted, life is frightened of me.
We lost Mick, as per fuckin usual. He lay sprawled across the bar, top-less and dreamy-eyed, chatting up two terrified milfs.
A lad I knew by face, not by name, dribbled into a mirror, and burst into belly aching laughter “I’ll have what he’s having.”
“Death. You’ll have death so.” Said Paddy.
“I’ll have a cigarette, is what I’ll have. Let’s head outside.”
Three girls danced deliriously outside in the beer garden. Paddy wrapped his arm around the two hefty girls, unsure of which easy virtue to choose. He talked in sensual torrents, heavy and slow, fast and light, eyes wide and only aware of the two girls, turning his back to me, igniting their minds with silly one-liners he learnt off the internet.
The petit one did not speak. She was spaced-out, silently she eventually tilted her fine face into the moonlight, narrowing her green eyes on me. I lost my heart in the rich ringlets of her brown russet hair, which curled into a delicate halo terra, eager ethereal eyes, and full firm body. We looked at each other as if we were the song. Ah, love, so simple at times.
She wiped her nose in one exaggerated gesture, nearly pushing the nostrils up to her fringe. Then she smiled into a memory. That far slung smile only seen from someone on weed. She borrowed a smile that suggested a secretive loneliness. I saw that smile every morning in the mirror. And she knew that too. So we both went back for seconds, then thirds, until we were constantly talking about nothing in particular.
“I like that tune. Do you?” I asked.
“Well, let’s like it together then, forever.” Youth in her smiley cheeks, old age in her sad eyes. Irish strangers, we seem to know one another from rich itchy memories.
I laughed. “You look like a girl that could destroy both of us.”
“Danger is no fun alone.” She tried to say the sentence evenly, yet her accent accentuated a lofty eloquence.
A lamplight from an upstairs window across the road swung a weary passage of light over the beer gardens breath. I saw a male’s profile, dexterously scribbling at a desk.
The girl pensively paused, gazed, and withdrew into a dreamy daze. Then suddenly, with a resurgence of sagely seduction, she said “I’ve got this problem with life, I don’t love it. But I do love your fantastic flaming soul.” She saw something that nobody else saw in me, she saw the true me, and I’ve never even met him yet. We often mistake a look of pity for the look of love. Mistaken or not, that night we made the small mistake of falling in love.
Her eyes were so black and deep, I couldn’t reach in and grab her heart, and run like hell. So I stopped. Stood. Listened. And whispered a kiss that silenced the lively night. They all saw us kiss. I saw none of them. I think I musta loved her, loved her for letting me escape life’s boredom. Arms wrapped around her ripe hips, that dewy pulse of youthful heartbeat jumping with a sparkle, like a wet flower budding in the pale sun.
Talking to her alone, I quickly realized her beauty and intelligence were streaked with rage and madness. But I was fond of that power in her problematic personality which was a right turn-on, a massive attraction of erupted, soothed lust. She reeked of sin. I loved it. We all love it, cos deep down we all seek sin.
Speaking softly, she had a gentle tear in her tiny throat, caused by smoking spliffs and constantly talking above the nightclub noise. So instead of talking, she decided to tease out her hair that fondled her forehead. This mesmorised me more than any poetic words she produced. She sparked up a joint, silently sliding by my side, we stood shoulder to shoulder, gazing at nothing, almost grasping everything. She handed me the joint. I let her love me cos she was standing there asking to be loved, and I never say no cos I’m forever a soul-slut.
Paddy was getting stuck into one of the fat ones, and her best friend sat sobbing on the window sill. Little did she know, she was the lucky one. The music stopped. We passed Mick passed-out in a bush. And I wondered, why do we always walk passed good friends and fall into the love of a stranger? I had no verbal answer. She held my hand. That was enough for now. The silver sips of stars suspended in the deep sky, preparing to peel a serene kiss over the narrow Kilkenny streets. Her long brown hair appeared black in the dark night. Our eyes met in a memory of a kiss. And I like to think I knew what she was thinking, but of course, in all honesty, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was thinking.
And as always, I had a severe feeling of sadness as we fled the nightclub. That sadness soon disappeared as she slowly stripped in the pale patterns of my apartment moonshine.
We closed our eyes and threw caution to the vulnerable. I let her little arms and hands dictate the blind direction, and melted into her candid emotion. Her slow cold lips followed by hot beer breaths, followed by a fine womanly moan coming up her thin lithe throat. She jumped up on top, all knees and all knee socks, seizing cute control.
She fucked me like no women could contemplate. I think she was a fella with a fanny. My body was like a river about to flood, and she the little droplets of rain, insistent and insane. There was no hope for me this time, I had given the girl a spunky flavored facial, and I could still sense that solitude of unwavering romance.
There was love in her eyes.
“Shit” I thought “I fear a war a war on the horizon.”
She propped her elbows up on my sweaty chest. And she sparked up yet another spliff, the smoke lifting to the moons cloud-meshed shore, the radios melody consuming our souls, I lay and watched nothingness wilt into everything. That’s how the devil lures ya in, he gives ya everything in a place where there is nothing to be had.
© John Traynor October 2014
traynorjohn04@gmail.com
