In This Black Twilight

In the town of dust and fog, the bartenders are demigods. In the town of dust and fog, there is a drink they call the rising sun. Why they call this drink the rising sun, I do not know. The men who have imbibed this drink, they say it glitters like gold in the belly. But the men who have imbibed this drink, they sweat and spit and pick the lint from their bellybuttons as their tired, tired eyes fight and fight and fight against the darkness of the corner in the bar where they waste away their days, hearing the same songs of the same black-vested piano-man night after night after night after night. Their wives will tell you that they are mad, and their wives have given up on them. If you look carefully enough, you might see the gold-minted coins that glint from their breast-pockets, and each day they decrease their numbers. If you look carefully enough, you might see the pupils of the husbands of the rising sun shrink, shrivel, and eventually be lost in the wide, wide white of their eyes. The husbands of the rising sun come and go, and always their drink is the same, and always and everywhere they live and live and live and live until their eyes burst in a black rainbow of blood and iris. There is no noise. There is no death. Always, they are still. Always, they are the same and their drink is the same. If you are wary, by night you might see the eyeless men, who crouch by threes in the dust of the bar's doorway, and three always will pass between themselves the single, last gold-minted coin. In that dusty shuffle, the lipless, nocturnal interchange from soul to soul, you may see the holder of the coin, and you may see his lip-pursed grin, like a single tooth biting its way across a blood-burned crescent moon. The men of the rising sun never smile. The men of the rising sun never change. They drink by night, and by night the bartenders of the town of dust and fog are demigods, and their single, shining eye is a pearl that pierces the darkness, and they are the servants of all and they serve for all. And by night the men of the rising sun are masters of all things and they do not dream. They never sleep. They say that they will never die.