Dig Me Out by Amy Lee Lillard

Author:Amy Lee Lillard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atelier26 Books
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

3.

I’m still alive, the American tourist says, to herself, to Dublin.

After the museums, she wanders, drunk on time. She chooses a pub that advertises a fish and chips deal. Her fellow eaters are Americans and Canadians and Dutch and French. Her food is cardboard, her beer water.

She wanders again, following the curving streets. It’s Saturday night, nearing eight, and crowds are starting to gather around doorways leading to lights and thumps. There’s a quiet curve she makes, and a tiny pub tucked in the corner. Just like the best bars, the crappy ones, the live ones, back home. The real Chicago.

Inside, the bar stretches long, the tables low to the ground and the stools lower. Men occupy all the seats, and stand where there are none. A man plays guitar in the far back, and a few capped men her fathers’ age line booths nearby and sing along.

She orders Harp, two in one go. She drinks the first fast and sips the second. Her head is cotton bulbs, no longer servant to gravity.

Men are looking at her in this bar. Two Harps in, she wonders what it would be like to take a stranger back to her hotel.

She orders her third beer, and the man standing next to her says hello. He asks if she’s waiting for someone. Here we go, she thinks, noting his white-blonde hair (too bad he’s not ginger), his height equal to hers (too bad he’s not the kind that could throw her around), his age (too bad he’s at least ten years older).

It’s just no one comes here alone, he says. Women, I mean.

There’s no mistaking the pity. She drinks her Harp fast. Her head is no longer filled with fluff, but gradually emptying. She grabs the wood lip of the bar.

The life around her is morphing, along with the bright evening light. The men that fill the bar seem frozen, pinioned under glass like specimens. The American tourist stumbles, her knees failing her. The Irish man holds out a hand. She slaps it away, and strides out of the bar into the street.

Around another corner, she finds a church, tall and steepled in the way of Europe, architecture striving to reach heaven. She knows there’s no heaven to reach, knows that the men guarding this church may have scarred altar boys and parish kids under the word of their god. She still admires the gusto that built these structures, the bombastic way they declared themselves holy, an appreciation perhaps purely American.

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