Road Seven by Keith Rosson

Author:Keith Rosson [Rosson, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: Meerkat Press, LLC
Published: 2020-01-09T18:32:32+00:00

2

A few hours later he found himself at the bar next door. One of those hip-shit joints full of reclaimed steel buttresses and type trays inset into the walls, a place where the servers wore fedoras and had handlebar mustaches and sleeve tattoos. Drill. He ordered a cocktail and the bartender served it to him with a charred pinecone kind of rammed onto the lip of the glass. Sandoval sat down on a barstool and scratched his nose and looked at his cell phone for a minute.

He sent Viv a text message. A terrible, mean-spirited message. He realized only after he sent it that it was full of typos.

It was a weeknight and the place was dim and mostly quiet. A few couples sat at tiny tables along the wall, leaning close together. Everyone seemed very beautiful, enmeshed in their private lives. He set his pinecone on his napkin, and then lifted it, smelled it. It smelled like alcohol and a forest fire. How, he wondered, did they char the pinecones? A blowtorch? On a stove? He watched the bartender make drinks, and when his cocktail was finished, he put up a hand. The bartender came over, a blue sparrow on his throat, and raised his eyebrows.

“Another one, please,” Sandoval said, concentrating on his posture, his words. He’d lost track of the amount of wine he’d drank at the White Bird.

The bartender seemed to think about it but took the bill Sandoval pushed across the bar. A minute later his drink appeared, with another burnt pinecone that he smelled and once more set carefully on a napkin. He nodded in time to the music piping softly through the speakers. The wine and cocktails sang in his blood, heavy, heavy. He gazed at the deep gloss of the bar, the lacquer liquid and gleaming in the light. Someone at a little table in the back had a laugh that ran along his nerves like a broken bottle down a silk sheet.

He texted another terrible thing to Viv, something lewd and cruel and shitty, his heart like a cinder inside his chest, beneath his ribbons of scars. No, he thought. Actually, his heart was like a blackened pinecone. Ha. That was it. He sipped his drink and his teeth knocked against the glass. Viv’s text said she would call the police if he sent her a message again. Everything roiled inside him, outside him, he felt like destroying the bar and sliding down to the floor and weeping, and grabbing the bartender by the neck and holding onto him like a brother and also ramming his face into the gleaming bar top.

He drained his new drink, the dregs burning the back of his throat. He set his glass down loud on the bar, loud enough to be heard over the Appalachian hillbilly shit they were now playing over the speakers. Loud enough to turn some heads, and to send the bartender toward him with a look on his face that said No more.

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