The amber liquid slid out, tantalizingly laborious, in in slow, short, sudden, drops. One, two, three: to top off the glass. There had been drunkenness in the past and then there was this. There had been abject misery in the past and then there was this. There had been everything, and everyone – and now, there was this. It would have been alright, if he could have deciphered why. Why had it come to this? He just didn’t know. God knew, he just didn’t remember – and he would be damned for it if he didn’t admit he’d tried to make it so. He’d succeed, too. The world was so deadpan and dull – like a muffled speaker just thrumming against him just as a restless tide would upon a ravaged shore. He was the shore, now, and his life the endless tide.
For tonight, he stopped the tide with his own swell of liquid. Amber. Straight. To the top of the glass. Then back. All of it at once. And oh, didn’t it burn? Not even a good burn. It didn’t satisfy. It just was. Three and four times, times a hundred times he did this until the bottles were all gone and rum was the next solace, good enough to scald the hurt inside out and so bottles of that would follow. He’d stopped the merriment, seeing fit that as his own was so gone, gone, gone … no one else could have it either. The bar was emptied. The restaurant left deserted. The doors were open but closing time had come and gone. And here he sat, twenty-two years old: Elijah Nathaniel Krum. A cigarette to his lower lip, burning itself to its blunt end, a glass in his hand, and a guitar in his lap.
The cigarette hissed as it was extinguished, thrown into an ashtray with a dribble of whisky in the bottom. He took a long slug of his drink, liquid spilling past his lips and down his neck to stain his skin beneath the collar of his shirt. He’d pulled it open as far as he could remember to, two buttons keeping it together at the end. His tie was, well, long gone now. Rage had filled the bar with glass and had overturned tables in the restaurant. Now, underfoot, the floor was sticky with mingling alcohol and sharp with glass to be trodden in and found to cut the foot of an unwitting woman who could no longer toddle in her heels in the days to come. Blind rage had destroyed the immaterial and the arbitrary and here he was: sat on a low sofa, his feet on a coffee table covered in glasses, alcohol and cigarettes … his old friends. Merlin, how things did not change.
Pushing the guitar away, Elijah barely registered the thud and twang of it hitting the floor. He kicked it away from him and his blind, imprecise hands found the bottle and with the same accuracy he sloshed its contents half onto the table, half into his glass. It would do. His tongue wrapped around the neck to lick clear the mouth of its stray juices and with a resounding slam he put the bottle back down before scattering up into his hands the glass, sending waves of rum across the lip of the glass, God only knew where. He made to bring the glass to him, to bring the liquid to taste. In the last breath his arm whipped out and he threw it, the piece sailing across the room. Its smash heralded its landing and heralded his, too. Firmly on this earth, here he was trapped. Left. Forgotten about. Alone.
by 
