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.
Copyright © Natsirt Nav Neram | Year Posted 2007
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