He was drinking a light beer, and he looked like he wanted to kill me.

I’d been sitting there for two hours, watching folks come in, wondering about ‘their deals,’ throwing back howdies and waiting for the sun to do something pretty out the window.

Then he showed up. Sat at the bar, not six feet away, and ordered a Magnolia Light. 3.3 ABV, 40 calories, and all the flavor of that dry grey shit at the bottom of your grandmother’s 1930 eau de parfum spritzer. Then he looked at me, and in his eyes I saw my own throat slit, my eyes plunged into by greasy thumbs, my stomach bitten by caried teeth. What the hell?

I figured it was nothing, just a bit of my own paranoia rearing its fugly head. But a half-hour passed, the sun did nothing pretty, the music got louder and dirtier, and I looked back over at him.

He was still looking at me. The can he’d been drinking was crushed, there by his elbow on the bar, along with a second. He held a third, was sipping from it luxuriantly. Was looking at me like each silky smooth gulp was another reason to shoot me in the temple.

I’d had enough.

“What’s your problem, man?”

His muscles tensed and relaxed like an ocean swelling. I thought he wouldn’t reply. Then, he said: “You look like my brother.”

“What?”

“You look like my fucking brother, and I hate you for it.” And there was nothing I could say to that.

* * *

A half-hour later, still disturbed by the light-beer-drinker’s comments and my own cowed silence, I’d left the mid-back, unupholstered chair by the window and waddled outside. There was a little shelf out there, made of sheet metal and square beams of some sort, so you could stand out there and have a place to put your beer. I set a sweaty glass of Jack and ginger atop it and watched the clouds, waiting for the coloration to give meaning to my fucking miserable life.

See, I’d recently divorced. Things had swung in my favor—as far as the house and dog were concerned—but I couldn’t get her voice out of my head, telling me that I was a sad man, telling me that I had to solve these problems before they solved me.

By problems, of course, I mean depression. By solved, of course, I mean suicide. This was the nature of things.

She was right, of course, and for that, I didn’t blame her. But boy did I hate her. I lit a cigarette and watched the clouds move like fat slobs rolling across an Alaska King on TLC. I’m 340 and no better, weight-wise. But not bedridden. Just divorced.

I inhaled like my life depended on it—it did, in a roundabout way—and pretended the humidity wasn’t destroying me, drop by sweaty drop. My pits were the Okefenokee and my loosely boxered prick was a baby alligator rolling in grass-stippled mud—if I had a lady, if she had fucking stayed, I’d bathe. I’d eat better. I’d go on walks and watch sappy movies and listen. I’d listen. Like I hadn’t. When will the sky change? When will the air feel like I’m good again?

“Sorry about earlier.”

I turned and there was that guy. Right there. At the other end of this weird little shelf. “It’s okay,” I said, even though it was weird as shit.

“He slept with my wife.”

I paused mid-cigarette-draw. “Your brother?” He nodded.

“And he looked like me?” He nodded again.

“Sorry to hear that man. Really.”

He said nothing. Sipped more light beer. Looked like his fourth. Maybe fifth. I waited for some time, took another draw, then said, “Is your wife pretty?”

He nodded. I looked down at myself. “Then how the fuck did he get her?”

He looked at me in a sidelong way, then his throat broke with a loud barking sound, then his face split in a smile, and he laughed, and he laughed like he had nothing to lose.

* * *

Two hours later, we were at the bar. I was many shots deep, he was still drinking Magnolia Lights. I’d brought my cigarette inside—after ten, they don’t really care if you smoke the place up, everyone there is as degenerate as everyone else—and he’d gone piss maybe 13 times.

“I’m just curious,” I said, or I thought I said—syllables were easily reordered and rearranged by that point, and the word ‘curious’ was about as likely as ‘Cleveland’ to come out my stinking mouth—“how’d you find out?”

The guy took another piss-flavored gulp and laughed. He was a laugher, I’d found, once you broke through the surface. “I walked in on them.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. Or maybe ‘Bird flipping.’ Either was possible. Both meant the same thing in the end.

He nodded. “She was upside down.” “Like…”

“Like a trapeze artist.”

My eyes widened like a dog’s.

“She was flipping around and he was moving her, looked like a goddamned circus routine.”

“So that’s how he got her,” I said. “Yeah,” he laughed again, “I hope so.”

* * *

Two hours later, we were in the parking lot, pretty much plastered. No, beyond plastered. I’d reached another level of consciousness. I’d gotten past the ‘I’m gonna hurl’ phase with flying colors, and now directed the alcohol-saturated cocktail running through my veins toward my heart in such a way that my body could, momentarily, adjust to the chaos of alternate-substance functionality and abandon its preconceived notions of oxygenation and viscosity.

My limbs were tentacles. My jaw was an iron hinge. My eyes were billiard balls, ready to roll and clap against the great pool-cue of the optic nerve. My digestive system was a goddamned Chinese finger trap, waiting for something exciting to enter either end and find itself in an unexpected paradise.

“You know,” I somehow said, dancing there in the lot behind the bar. “If you really think I look like your brother…”

“What?” he said, a curious look on his face as he crushed a can in one hand and let it drop like a chick tract onto the pavement.

“You can just kill me.” He said nothing.

“I’m not sure it matters anymore, whether I’m here or not,” I said, danced, as the slick-planes of my skin seeped Everclear. “I’m not sure I need to wake up tomorrow. I’m not sure,” I spat and smiled, “whether looking like your brother is the last and most important thing I could ever do.”

He stood, silent. Then after a moment, he smiled and nodded.

* * *

The next morning, my eyelids wouldn’t shut. Took me a moment—only a moment—to figure out why. Rolling my eyes upward, I saw the hooks, the things that had punctured them and held them now, the line that affixed them in taut beams to the wall.

Pain came like water soaking a paper towel held just so on the surface of a bowl, and I went to scream.

I couldn’t, sadly, a can of Magnolia Light having been stuck into my mouth with such certainty that I could do nothing. Closing my jaw tighter felt like screwing bolts into my face, opening felt like ripping my cheek bones from my neck bones in a way that probably wasn’t sustainable, and pushing it out with my tongue just cut my tongue. The top of the can had been shredded open like a star.

I could not tell you precisely what was happening to my body—the rest of it—other than that the pain was emanating from all places, and in all ways. There was an ache, and not just an ache, but an ache like a semi-truck’s roll. And not just an ache, but a sharp bleeding, as if a scalpel had been taken between the dermis and the epidermis of your upper thigh, so that air and liquid might flow freely through and somehow purify it. And not just a sharpness, but a burning, like a car console cigarette lighter glowing yellow had been tied to the top of your big toe, left to burn until the meat smelled like burnt ends. All these things at once, and more. Enough that, were I in an episode of Criminal Minds, I would have reason enough to believe I had made it into a season finale.

Seeing that I was awake, he took the opportunity to push the can down further, to send the star shards into the back of my throat, so I could feel bright slicing pain in the general location of my soft palate and uvula, which were suddenly much lower and many-edged than they previously had been.

He was above me. Beside me. Pushing, smiling, teeth and eyes as white and colorful as the gleaming, glowing sun, finally doing something even a little goddamned pretty.

Benjamin’s prose and poetry appears in X-R-A-Y, BULL, Revolution John, Roi Fainéant, and other journals and anthologies, and his debut short fiction collection, MEDIAC, was published in 2025 by Anxiety Press. He lives with his wife in Athens, Georgia where he works in digital marketing, is writing a novel or two, and writes arts and culture criticism when he has the inkling.