The usual crowd was there; the drunks, the after work crowd, the coke hounds. The girls that worked the massage parlour across the street had piled in & found their places in the sea of meat & the one that I talked to from time to time sat next to me.

"You're one of those guys that's not here," she said.

"What?"

She sipped her drink & pulled out a cigarette, looked at me, like they do.

I lit it & she took a long pull off the thing, leaned back. I looked at her neck.

"One of those guys that tells Brenda, you're not here if anyone calls."

"That's what he is," Brenda said as she walked by getting drinks. "I sometimes have a whole bar of guys that aren't here."

I asked Brenda to get me another beer & lit a smoke.

"You got a girlfriend, right?"

"Yeah."

"That's okay, honey. People need a place to unwind. I have a boyfriend who hates what I do but I love him, right?"

"Sure."

"I can't go home till I wash the garbage of work off me," she said.

"Exactly."

She fidgeted with her pack of smokes & asked Brenda for another drink. She sighed.

"I feel so ugly," she said.

"You're not ugly."

I didn't know how anyone did it. The world was filled with hate & war & never-ending boot on neck to make a dollar to survive. It was tearing people apart.

"What?" she said.

"I'm going crazy."

She pulled another cigarette out of her pack & looked around, then put it down, patted my arm & walked over to the jukebox. Good walk.

Louis Armstrong started singing, �What a Wonderful World�.

I had heard it before but hadn't been paying much attention. I looked over & saw her talking to some guy & felt jealous for some reason.

I saw Louie's face in my mind, that huge smiling beaming face. The pure joy in it & tried to imagine how he managed to put all that suffering, that you could surely hear, into that joyful face, into such a beautiful song.

"Where'd your friend go?" I asked when she came back.

"Oh, god. People."

She lit another cigarette & sipped her drink.

"I'm not gonna make it," she said.

When the song came on again, I didn't ask why she played it twice.

Mike Boyle lives & works in Harrisburg, PA, USA. Recent work has appeared in Year of the Thief, Art Crimes & AntiMuse. To read Mike�s story, �The House of the Rising Sun� on the showcase section of this site, click here or to visit Mike blog, click here

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.