A Bar, One Evening

A Bar, One Evening
(February 2006)
Josh MacLeod

His left index finger trailed the rim of the shot glass once, then twice. Halfway through the third revolution he took notice of it and his hand dropped to his side. "I was thirteen years old when I ceased to exist."

Daniel looked up from the glass, his grey eyes haunted. "We all do stupid things when we're angry. I've never done it like that since; it was probably the first time I did it."

"Ceased to exist, you mean?" Gil Cooper aid, helping herself to some more peanuts.

He nodded, his eyes dropping down to the table as if studying old stains for some mysterious clue. He raised them, not quite meeting her gaze. "Have you ever woken up and not been the person you were before that day? In a way so fundamental no one who knew you knows you anymore?"

"Yes," Gil said shortly. He waited: she didn't elaborate.

"This was worse." Daniel paused to look outside at the streetlights and shivered. "Maybe worse. I don't know your story. I don't need to." He stared at the empty glass but made no move to order another. Gil's cigarette smoke curled around his face, making his already gaunt features look almost ethereal.

"I was angry at my family. I don't know why anymore. I'm not sure I ever did: it doesn't take much to set kids off. So I wished, really hard, with the kind of intensity only youth has, that they'd all forget me, that I'd cease to exist, and then they'd be sorry. I woke up the nest morning to my sister screaming about Goldilocks being some guy and sleeping in the spare room.

"The police were called. I thought it was some big joke, that my parents had overheard me and - well, it wasn't. No one knew me, no one remembered me. They'd stare at pictures of me and just - just not make any connection. I'd run away, or something, and someone else snuck into the house."

He picked up the shot glass slowly and breathed on it, running his fingers over it. "No prints. I don't have them, unless I want to. Sometimes it works better, sometimes worse. But all it means if that people can't find me if I don't want to be found. They'll walk right by me, see someone else, get distracted. Not make connections."

Daniel set the glass down slowly then met Gil's gaze and smiled crookedly. "It could be useful, if I'd wanted a life of crime, or to be a serial killer or something. I didn't. I just wanted my family back, and I couldn't have them."

"We make our choices. Sometimes they're made for us. Sometimes there is no difference," Gil said quietly, shaking ashes off her fingers and onto the table. "It was a rule our family lived by. It's better to do things than have them done to you."

Daniel took some peanuts. "I never wanted it."

"Sometimes we get what we don't need." Gil laughed, her voice low and husky. "Life's a bitch, Danny boy. Then it has puppies and runs off with some brush salesman and demands alimony and hates your guts but you can't ever forget each other."

"What?"

"Life isn't fair. We're in the fucking wrong universe for fair. We just get dealt a handful of shitty cards and expected to play them as if they were a full house and we can bluff the dealer. Sometimes we even bluff ourselves."

"Sometimes we get jokers," Daniel said dryly.

"And sometimes we're just jokes." Gil lit another cigarette. "I am a cynical bitch. Sometimes it's a problem. Cynicism is a good hobby; bad lifestyle. There's lots of ways to destroy ourselves without adding a realist worldview to the mix."

"Like smoking?"

"Choice, again. At least destroying ourselves through physical means is honest. I'd rather be betrayed by something I understand than something I don't. Cancer's fine; my own mind, no thanks." She took a deep puff. "It started when I killed the cat."

"You don't have to tell me anything."

"Shut up. I don't like being condescended to, Danny."

"Daniel. And I wasn't."

"Shut up anyway. They'll be after you, too."

"They?"

"I wasn't hitching rides at truck stops for fun," she snapped, then softened. "It's never been like this before."

"Like what?"

"Having someone else here, in danger. Staying." She shrugged. "I'm not sure it's worth it."

"Most things are worth a little fear," he said softly.



"I'm not afraid," Gil has said in the truck stop, where they'd met at the only free table. 'Not of anyone. Do you know what that's like?"

Daniel has taken in her sweat, the slightly wild look in her eyes, and smiled his crooked smiled. "Maybe."

It had been enough to intrigue her and now, two days later, they were in a small-town all night diner, waiting for something. She hadn't told him what, but he didn't look worried. She hadn't seen anything really worry him in two days, and has resisted the urge to hit him in order to disturb his disjointed serenity.

"They aren't any anyone," she said quietly, her voice low even to her ears. "I think the cat made them. Or maybe I do, or my brother, or something else altogether. I call them Mooneyes."

Daniel said nothing, picking up enough of her nervousness to scan the windows.

He'd hit them both, somehow, but she doubted it would last forever. They'd find her. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow. Gil palmed another aspirin, swallowing it without water even if, for the first time in a month, she didn't have a headache. There were worse things to be addicted to, after all.

"My family has luck," she said, taking the glass from him and setting it on an adjacent table. "We always have. If we want things to happen, then generally do happen. Everyone has luck, we just know how strong it is and how to tweak it. Always have. We never called it a talent, or thought it magical. It was just something we did, something we were."

She paused to watch the sliver of the moon break through grey clouds, then looked back at Daniel, who hadn't moved. He was an eerily good listener. Most people waited to talk; he actually heard you, made a place for his words inside you. Gil hoped he wasn't falling in love with her; all the nice guys did.

"I was thirteen. Lucky thirteen, maybe. my friend Cinnamon has borrowed her brother's BB Gun and she and Kris were shooting at a cat. Just to prove they could be tough. It was that kind of town; if you managed it, it was a signal you didn't like boys. I needed to do it. I shot the cat, right though the eye. Instant kill."

She took a longer puff, letting it out slowly. "About a week later things began to go wrong. People got hurt around me. I got angry, and things broke. People started to notice me, and our family. They never had before. I left when I was sixteen."

"Nothing kept you there?" Daniel asked.

"No. Kris and I broke up a few months earlier. She left me for Jesus."

"So she was bi then," Daniel said with a quick smile.

Gil laughed, surprised. "That's good. But it was Jesus because she was scared. Breaking pencils. Rocks. Balls. A car door, once." Gil held the cigarette in her hand absently, then dropped a handful of ashes onto the table. "I break things, now. Sometimes when I want to. Sometimes when I don't.

"It would be useful, if it didn't hurt."

"We can't hide here forever," Daniel said, brushing the ashes off the table.

Gil opened her mouth to ask why not, given the nature of his talent, but closed her mouth on the words, leaving them unsaid. She hadn't been raised to be mean, and she knew what he meant under the words.

"I'm not hiding," she said, to be sure he knew. "I'm taking a break from running."

"From them?"

"No." Gil smiled, but didn't think it reached her eyes. "What does anyone run from but themselves?

Daniel smiled slightly in return, his looking a lot like hers felt. "Some of us run to ourselves, I imagine." He looked out the window. "Something is there. Trying to find us. I don't know why: I never felt anything like it. It's like there are searchlights looking for me, but no one is there. I've never felt anything like it, but I've never tried to hide anyone else before either."

Gil nodded and stood abruptly, dropping a twenty on the table. "There's worse things, if you stay the course."

Daniel stared at her, his expression searching hers for something. He must have found it, since he returned her nod and stood, standing as well.

Gil walked outside, the night air cool and refreshing. She breathed in deep, smelling nothing more rotten than a coming storm and threw her senses open wide.

Daniel was solid behind her, transparent rock, invisible but unmoving. Ahead of her nine shapes moved from the shadows of parked cars, coming across the parking lot haltingly like drunken spastic ballet dancers There were nine this time, and Gil knew there would be thirteen next time.

"I call them Mooneyes," she said softly, not turning around as the door closed, the bang causing her to jump a moment.

The Mooneyes were thin and big, like two-dimenional figures from one angle, three from another Blurred and twisted, with bright silver-blue eyes that reminded her of moons or crystal quartz, sharp teeth on mouths that moved around, sometimes visible and othertimes not. The claws remains, small and sharp, like doctor needles with strange formulas gleaming a sickly green somewhere deep inside their hands and whatever passed for bodies.

They moved slowly in a silence devoid of all sound, and the other shadows seemed pale and silly things next to them as they moved between shadows in the places where dreams and fuzzy logic lay. She remained free of them, with Daniel beside her.

He was whispering the twenty-third psalm quietly, without conscious knowledge, and she drew some strength from his fear, and more from his presence.

She reached, in a way that wasn't reaching, and the Power rushed through her in a wave, leaving a hollowness behind it and a stabbing pain behind her left eye. She waved her hand, the gesture curt and angry, and the nine shadows tore apart like cardboard left out in a storm.

"Break," she said, her voice soft and deep, and pain hammered a greeting inside her head, and further in. She ignored it, shoving it aside for later. There was always a later, or they was not and the pain didn't matter.

"There's something else," Daniel said, his voice cracking slightly.

Gil turned, staring at him, then followed his gaze to her right.

The man standing silhouetted by passing cars on the other side of the road cast no shadow, or at least not anywhere Gil could see.

"Revenant," she said.

"What?"

"Dead body."

"You sure you just killed a cat?" Daniel demanded.

"I'm not sure there's such a thing as just a cat," Gil said. "I can't hurt it. It's dead. There's nothing to break."

Daniel stared as the corpse waited at the crosswalk and than began to cross the road, the actions terrifyingly normal.

"Now what?"

"We run," Gil said, not moving. Her voice was pale, and her face matched it.

"If being lucky never hurt, why does being unlucky?"

"Pardon?"

Daniel stepped past her, walking towards the man. "Blame is okay, it's guilt that's bad. I know that." He didn't turn around. "I have too much of it. So much I can never say, too many things I can't make right, because there is no way to fix them. You could. Destruction is a creative act, after all. Hiding things isn't."

"Daniel!" She said sharply. It came out of her, with the words, lashing at him, but he didn't move, wasn't there for a brief moment, hanging suspended in her mind between memory and dream.

"All I can do is hide," Daniel said, touching the creature, who has stopped moving, watching him. "Even when I don't want to. It leads to doors I can't open, jobs I lose, people that don't know me, invalid IDs.... I'm tired of it, Gil. This isn't your fault. I was looking for an excuse."

It moved, though Gil was never sure if it meant to push him aside or step around him, but Daniel leapt at it, ploughing into it with a vicious right hook she wouldn't have attributed to him had she not seen it. The creature reeled, moved, and stumbled, unable to see him, but bows connected with flesh regardless.

Daniel hit it again, and then again, and finally dropped to his knees and screamed. The scream hit Gil like a freight train, thrusting past paralysis, but he was on the ground and not moving by the time she managed to spot him again. The creature was gone, and Daniel simply - faded, from the world if not her memory.

She didn't ask why. She didn't scream, or call him a bastard. She just drew out another cigarette and lit it slowly, her gaze still and quiet.



The bartender never understood why the woman cried when he came out with her change, saying she had paid too much for her single drink. Nor did he understand why he was glad to see her go, but he closed up early, saying something about a meeting, and went home to call his ex-wife who he hadn't thought of in a week and ask if his daughter wouldn't mind visiting her father.

The parking lot was never haunted, though some drunks sobered quicker outside than they normally would, and one cancer patient, once, bled and found his cancer gone, but he was wise enough to never tell anyone, and the little magic left behind never went away.