Drinks with the Prince

There are more bars per square mile in Gloucester City, New Jersey than any where else in the United States. Heck found the emptiest, shittiest one and sat by himself with is back to the door.

He's been told over and over to never sit with his back to the door, but he didn't care; hence the shitty bar in the shitty town.

Heck took off his shiny green featureless mask that kept his anonymity in tact and put it on the empty stool to his left. He took off his ratty green flannel jacket that made little metallic tinkles from all the novelty enamel pins holding it together and at the same time stressed out the fabric from the weight. He hung it from a small hook under the bar and ordered a scotch and soda.

It wasn't until his third scotch and soda that he realized he hated both scotch and soda exclusively and combined they made something even worse. A forth and fifth scotch and soda were ordered because this drinking binge wasn't going to be about enjoyment. Heck needed to maximize his current discomfort. If everything was going to be terrible, at least he was going to choose this particular terrible. It was an act of self loathing akin to pressing on a bruise or tongue fondling a chancre sore; it hurts, but we choose it so that makes it better some how. Heck named his forth and fifth drinks Terry and Lance respectively.

The door swung opened hard and slammed against the door jam. Heck got startled and spilled Terry all over the bar. Lance was visibly upset but Heck couldn't read if it was because he missed Terry or because this meant his time was coming sooner than expected. A brown mottled barn owl padded into the bar on small taloned feet. It wore a crown of rough cut rose quartz bound with copper wire on its head that almost fell off when the owl beat its wings and lofted onto the stool to Heck's right.

It clicked its talons three times on the wooden stool and turned its head, just its head, and looked at Heck.

"You're clutching that straight razor pretty hard. You nervous or something?" said the owl. Its Bostonian accent was so thick it made Heck nauseous.

He wasn't sure what the owl was getting at. He did have his pearl handled, brass pinned, Damascus steel little beauty couched in his left hand, but fuck you, his razor is his business. This is America.

"When I was in high school I went on a camping trip with my cousin Tracy and her awful roommate. On our last night there and owl flew in out of no where and bit her clitoris clean off. It kind of ruined the whole trip," said Heck. The story wasn't quite true, but he was pretty sure this wasn't the same owl and would have no basis to call him out.

"Your cousin's clitoris or her roommate's?"

Heck thought for a second. "I don't remember."

"Typical," the owl snorted.

Heck side eyed the owl as hard as he could. The owl just stood on the stool tapping out a 4:4 beat on the wood. Heck put his index finger on the lever of the straight razor and popped the blade from the handle just a little. The blade was room temperature, just how he liked it. The skin on is arms got goosebumps, his nipples got hard.

"Somebody is dying tonight," Heck thought to himself, "and I don't care who." He said the last part out loud.

The owl turned and caught Heck's side eyeing. Its irises were the color of molten honey but way angrier. Its pupils were pin pricks of void space that grew and grew until they swallowed up everything.

Its pupils were deep black. the deepest, blackest black that ever was. Its pupils were nothingness. They were deep space nothingness that you find about a quarter mile past the last galaxy in the known universe. Beyond the nothingness you find in the Space Between Spaces, where the old things that we don't think about anymore but still know are there like to hang out. They were preexistence nothingness. They were pre-preexistence nothingness. Its pupils were the nothingness that was no less than two but no more than ninety three universes back; that were born, grew and died before this universe.

"Anything more than 93 universes back wouldn't really make a whole lot of sense," Heck's disembodied consciousness thought as his being broke apart into smaller and small pieces. Like the cheap balsa wood Russian nesting dolls his auntie had in that weird room nobody was supposed to sit in. They sat on a round coffee table with a mirror top and covered with grey crushed velvet. Why did she have those dolls? That lying bitch never went to Russia.

Heck was able to latch onto that thought and ride it all the way back to reality that made sense. Soon it was just him, the owl, the bar, Lance, the straight razor, and the memory of a human clitoris long digested and expelled from the innards of different owl.

Heck and the owl looked at each other for too long.

"Did you hear what I said?" asked the owl, breaking the silence.

"No, sorry," Heck replied.

"Do you want to buy some weed?"

"Yeah."