April Flash #14

based on prompts by:

Amygdala: step on a crack; swallowing swords; I knew the waitress there

Haredawg: Beer for the horses, whiskey for the men; he drew the short straw

Silverstar46: a glass of wine and a good book; hopscotch

“Step on a crack and you’ll break your mother’s back” the taunt came as I played an impromptu game of hopscotch across the sidewalk on the way to the bar downtown to meet up with friends. I’d heard it all before, and truth was – I think it was already broken. Besides, the cracks in the sidewalk were too plentiful here to hope to avoid completely. It was the way things were. Really, Jay should be driving tonight but he drew the short straw and had to play the game the way we wanted him to, and not the way he would have liked. It’s how we ended up at the downtown bar in the first place, instead of one of our normal haunts – I knew the waitress there, anyway, and I’m pretty sure she would have been down for anything, regardless. So we scrambled to the bar in a makeshift game of pick up sticks, dropping toothpicks and playing cards on the dirty floor, laughing all the while. It’s like we were drunk already. An old country song was playing on a ragtag jukebox in the corner – something about Beer for the Horses and Whiskey for the men – I wasn’t paying attention, really. But that’s not what tonight was about. Tonight was about removing ourselves from our joint yet separate hermitude, venturing out in public, whether intoxicated or not, instead of curling up at home like we might have normally preferred with a glass of wine and a good book. This was about escaping the norm, bursting your comfort bubble and expanding your horizons.

So we rolled loaded die across the bar, betting on who’s cheating would win out over the others. We played Euchre and two-handed solitaire under the watchful gaze of the waitress. I tried to impress with card tricks that failed miserably the more I drank. At some point we switched from whiskey to Tequilla – some top shelf stuff, which made the edges of the room blurry, and every tidbit of a normally awkward social situation more funny and tolerable than not. I knew in the morning that my throat would feel like I had been swallowing swords like some radical circus performer, but I didn’t care. If life is what happened when you were making other plans, then I was in the midst of it, now, living for all it was worth and creating a memory that would carry onward, despite anything in my path. This is what it was all about, here in these stolen moments which were extra-ordinary, stolen from the roadmap of every day life and brought to a sharp contrast with the void.

new prompts: midnight temptress; temper trap; water for the raindrops