Hooch & Holler

Astrid woke with a start. The sun was just barely peering through the 1 inch slit in her drawn black out curtains. The sliver of light gave no indication of time but her stomach angrily grumbled for food, so she guessed it must be afternoon. Stretching long, taut legs, Astrid unfurled like a spider and glided along the edge of her room searching for her phone. She found it dead and discarded by the bathroom. “Of course,” she muttered to herself, frustrated at her own laziness. The clock read 3:00 pm and she had nowhere to be. She had quit her job at the Hooch & Holler out on Eden Rd at the end of a final straw in a stack of straws of abuse. Tim Jaffrey had brushed up against her for the last time. She was not a toy to be played with but a person to be respected. She had practiced saying that in the mirror thirty times while clenching her fists so tight, her nails made little half moons in her palms.

Astrid stood at her kitchen counter half heartedly eating a slightly mealy apple and replaying last night over in her head. Four years at the Hooch & Holler thrown away in one triumphant moment of Tim grabbing her waist and Astrid yelling, “I am a person!”across a crowded bar with no context. Everyone turned to face them like watching a car wreck and Tim told Astrid to clock out through clenched teeth in a beet red face. She cashed out her last table quickly and told Tammy, the bartender, to grab her tips to bring to her later on.

The Hooch & Holler was the main dive bar for her small east coast town. It was always busy because it had a prime location by the water so all the local boat riffraff drank there regularly and it pulled in all the tourists. With the sunsets exploding in riotous purples and fiery orange over the water that gently crashed below the balcony, it was easy to get distracted and ignore the worn, faded booths and scratched up wooden floors. The food was good. It was your typical American style with a heavy dose of seafood pulled straight from the water. They were in just the right spot to be able to offer crabs at a lower market price and Lawrence, the cook, steamed them in his secret recipe that included a heavy dose of beer and Old Bay. Astrid was going to miss the smell of the air off the water, her regulars with salt scrubbed faces smelling of fish and foam, and the old building itself as soft and as worn as a seashell.

Astrid didn’t know what to do with herself. She supposed she would have to eventually search for a new job but for today she woke up tired and sore. Her skin felt heavy and she didn’t know why. Perhaps four years of back-to-back shifts carrying trays and changing kegs was finally starting to catch up to her. She wandered around her empty house like a ghost stopping in each room and then forgetting why she had walked in there in the first place.

There was a banging at her door. Tammy peered through the glass frantic, her face stained with tears. What was wrong? Astrid rushed to the door she thought, but by the time she got there, Tammy had walked back to her car. She was on the phone calling someone. Astrid needed to tell her her cell was dead but she was right here. She tried to open the door but it stuck. She kept pulling the knob as Tammy got in her car and drove away.

Astrid felt dizzy. She retraced her steps to the bedroom noticing she was leaving wet footprints everywhere she paced. She must have left a window open or the heat on. “Was it muggy in here?”, she thought. “Why are my floors wet?” She went back to check the phone she had placed on the charger and found it still dead and now waterlogged. She hadn’t noticed the small corner of condensation when she woke up. “How did my phone get wet?” Astrid forced herself to think. She was overcome with the sense that this was all wrong. Now that she was thinking about it, she couldn’t remember much beyond leaving the bar. She didn’t remember getting home and she would remember dropping her phone in water. There was nothing but black when she tried to force a picture into her head. She felt cold.

The room seemed to spin around her. Astrid reached out to steady herself and found herself suddenly sitting in her bed. The sun poked through at the same angle as before and she looked around her room confused and afraid. She started choking as her throat filled with water. Frantic, she clawed at her neck and tried to suck in air. All she could taste was water. Astrid panicked as her skin seemed to swell, getting wrinkled, like someone soaking in a bathtub. What was happening to her? She fought to remember. She was forgetting something important.

Suddenly, Astrid could see herself walking to her car in the parking lot of the Hooch & Holler. The sky was cold and clear and she could see one bright light she couldn’t tell if it was a satellite or a star. She closed her eyes and wished on it anyway as the water crashed in the distance and she whispered, “I am a person.” The blow was so fast, she never saw where it came from. She only knew the force sparked a million stars behind her eyes. She braced herself for the next blow, wishing a million wishes. Tim was there, angrier than she had ever seen him. “You embarrassed me,” he said as he dragged Astrid by the hair towards the edge of the parking lot where it drops off into the water. “Nobody wants you anyway!”he growled in her ear.

Astrid tried to fight, her heels scraping uselessly at pavement. She scratched at what she could but he was too strong. She felt weightless as the wharf disappeared beneath her. For a moment, nothing mattered but the endless sky above her and the crashing waves below. When her body hit the water, she felt nothing but surrounded by darkness. It was silent and comforting to be held by so much emptiness. Then it crushed her with all its heaviness and she was gone.