2024, 2014 | I’VE GOT A MESSAGE TENTH ANNIVERSARY | FictioN, EXCERPT
ONE EVENING during the last month of his life, Charles Buccleuch exited his apartment on W Clay St to walk the six or so blocks to the bar on W Grace St. He shut the door behind him and used the key with its green plastic rim to turn the bolt. As the bolt slid into place, Charles thought once more about the woman who worked in the kitchen of the bar on W Grace St. Charles was a young man, and he happened to fancy the woman who worked in the kitchen of the bar on W Grace St. He happened to fancy her a lot. Charles happened to find the woman in the kitchen of the bar on W Grace St unnervingly attractive. He had said as much to his friends and to Mateo, that she was smoking, that her presence caused like this real heavy feeling to take shape inside of him.
At the same time, her presence paralyzed him with fear. For this reason, the woman in the kitchen of the bar on W Grace St had become Charles’s least favorite thing about going to the bar. Which meant Charles was conflicted. The bar on W Grace St was someplace he liked to be — his favorite place to be, in fact, aside from his apartment. And Charles got on famously with most everyone who worked there. Also, the patrons were not bad, although every now and again a real fuckhead came into the place, or maybe a party of fuckheads. But a bar is a bar and so it goes.
As for the woman in the kitchen of the bar, he wanted desperately to be comfortable around her. Yet whenever she walked by him, or perhaps grabbed the seat beside him after her shift, try though he might, Charles could not manage to manufacture rudimentary sounds. Normally, he knew how to use language, but the presence of this woman took his language away. It was pathetic, Charles told himself. And also there was this: She was at work, right? The bar on W Grace St was her place of work. Who wants to deal with a guy like that while at work? It all seemed pretty awful.
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