Cityscapes

explores her purse. She finds her ID and bag of drugs. She enters the bar.

Inside is something of a fevered dream, half a hundred bodies soak up underneath the artificial light. The place is made to look like sand, and once this place may have been refreshing but now the space is some cruel joke on its namesake. The girl takes an apercu and flashes her ID at the bouncer. The walls are painted with crude games of hockey, players are etched in uninteresting positions. VLCS line the back where broken women sit thwapping endlessly at buttons, waiting. In another corner two men play shuffleboard. One of them slides a biscuit along the deck for a clean ten. He rewards himself a mighty drink of beer.

All TVs glow, the Raptors trail on every screen. All in all half a hundred creatures are in here soaking, drying. The girl oscillates her vision and spots Yosh, a kind of friend, sitting in the farthest corner.

Yosh rests lizard-­‐like, a fixture half in shadows. He watches nothing at all. He’s pale and sickly and as the girl nears he lets crack a smile. It’s a sick sight to the girl.

She removes her coat and shakes it making rain. The girl spreads the fabric neatly along a chair and now uncloaked becomes of a sudden radiance, a pristine sight in this cave.

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