"Sour Times"

 

"I often wonder," he said to the bartender, who looked young, even in the bar light, "who it was that first came up with the idea to put lemons in water."

"Really? Do you really often wonder that?" she asked. Her eyebrows were doing as much of the asking as her voice and her words were.

"I'm very drunk," he said, sipping the water. 

"I know," she said. She smiled at him. "What I like to think," she said, tapping the bar counter, "and this is by no means historically true, but what I like to think is that someone decided to take all the goodness of water and add something sour to it, so that whenever someone drank it, the water tasted so much better whenever you got a taste of it through all that sourness." She dropped her bar rag onto the counter with a sodden slap and wiped away a pool of nearly melted ice. "Sounds like I'm a romantic or something, huh," she said. "But I think that sounds better than saying people did it so they wouldn't get scurvy, don't you think?"

He looked down at his glass. He wanted to ask what she could possibly know. But by the time he looked up again, she was at the other end of the bar, pouring whiskey for someone with a face even older than his.

"Closing Time"

 

"It just..." The butterfly heaved and sighed. It folded its wings together and then let them lay flat above its body in defeat. "It just feels like everything's changing so fast sometimes, you know? I mean, I know change is part of life, but..."

"Sweetie," the flower said, gently, "it's almost nighttime. You know the drill. You don't have go to the underside of that tree branch..."

"...but I can't stay here," the butterfly finished. It wished so badly that it could mistake the closing of the flower's petals, the brushing of those petals against its legs, for the start of some kind of embrace.

"Save Yourself"

 

The faerie coughed and spluttered and shook out her wings. She grasped the straw and began pulling herself up, as if she were a victim of a shipwreck, saved from the sea by a rope ladder. The man watched her through the sides of the pint glass while she hoisted herself toward standing. "You saved me," he heard her say from inside the tumbler. "I never could swim. If it hadn't been for you...."

"No one's going to believe this," the man said. 

"What? That faeries are real?"

"That I did something useful," he replied as he dropped his head between his knees, reached for the potted plant in the corner near his table, and expelled from his stomach the Long Island Iced Tea that he had downed only moments before.

"Dive In"

 

The drink she poured herself got taller with each night she spent stuck in the long, echoing, after-dinner darkness, until finally she just dived in, and her hair got tangled, and her skin got cold, and she realized despite its depth that the pool she had dug herself to swim in was very small after all.

[Written after reading this amazing poem by James Wright: "In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia Has Been Condemned"]