Last Cup of Sorrow
By
Jeffrey Thomas
Looking out his bedroom window, from the elevated perspective of his second-floor apartment, Suit saw two glass dogs moving along the edge of the empty lot across the street, in their typical slow-motion gallop.
The low-slung gold of early morning light glowed through their transparent bodies, picking out the dense networks of green and orange veins bundled within their supple outlines.
The pair seemed intent on getting somewhere, but who was he or anyone else to attempt to ascertain such a somewhere?
Their destination, and their motivation for reaching it?
The dogs were, and always had been, their own inscrutable species.
One of the two bore a greenish light inside its body, mostly concentrated in the torso but fading out into the head and limbs.
The glass dogs were called such because in a general way they resembled that material and that shape.
Well, actual dogs came in many breeds, many shapes and sizes, of course – from poodle to Great Dane – and adult glass dogs came in just the one.
They were rather dog-like in general outline, then, if the dog in question was large and without a tail, without ears, mouth, or eyes.
Within their bodies, only those green and orange tangles of veins (or nerves...
or…?) showed through. No bones, no organs, no brain could be discerned.
Maybe all of those things were distributed evenly throughout that complex web of green and orange filaments, the patterns of which were never the same from one otherwise identical beast to the next.
Well, Suit saw them most every day, didn’t he – the glass dogs?
Like the summer moths and beetles that clung to the tightly-meshed screens over his windows, wanting to get into his apartment, thirsty for light.
Like the silhouetted black birds that dotted the power lines strung along his street, as if they were notes marked on a scale, composing a song of indecipherable squawks.
The two crooked-legged quadrupeds loped along in their slowed-down manner like creatures trotting at the crushing bottom of the ocean, weighed down by the great depth.
One might think they were accustomed to another density of atmosphere, a different measure of gravity, but what an absurd thought to occur to him.
They were as native to his world as he was.
True, he didn’t recall them from his childhood, but when he’d mentioned this to people they’d explained that the creatures were more plentiful now than they once had been.
The encroachment of civilization had driven them out of their previously untouched environments. He supposed that made sense.
Suit watched the pair until they reached the end of the street, veered sharply to the left, and were taken from view.
Why did he continue to watch after them when they’d already gone?
He didn’t know...wouldn't have been able to articulate it.
It was like watching clouds borne away by the wind.
The leaves of trees, resuming their stillness after having been stirred in green waves by a breeze.
Random observations of nature made when one was lost in thought, or vacant of thought.
Nothing more out of the ordinary than that.
The dogs’ blunt-nosed, eyeless, mouthless heads had uttered no audible sounds, but Suit had still heard them, if heard was the right word – as the pair had scampered around that corner laid out carefully if arbitrarily by human beings long dead before him, in this unremarkable town he’d lived in most his life – until he couldn’t see the dogs anymore.
A vibration lingered, only briefly, in his skull, like the fading metallic trill of a cicada.
Sometimes, when Suit brought a steaming mug of pre-work coffee out onto the warped front porch of the aged house that contained his apartment, he would sit in a cheap white plastic chair with spiderwebs strung underneath its seat, brown egg sacs anchored within it like dirty pearls, and he would sip that coffee and stare at the communication towers that loomed in the cracked, weed-overgrown lot across the street.
Two decades-old towers, formed of black metal like the scorched skeletons of some type of leviathan rooted headfirst in the earth, the top of one of the aging towers having collapsed so that it had folded down upon itself.
Suit wondered if that crumpled tower transmitted into its own ear, this looping feedback multiplied, amplified, distorted.
Howls layered upon howls, like the unheard cries of the glass dogs – maybe hunting cries, maybe the cries of the people they transformed inside them.
***
“That’s a nice suit,” the woman on the next stool told him, fingering the lapel of his jacket.
She had said she was originally from Taiwan but had renamed herself Judy; he’d already forgotten the intimate revelation of her birth name.
Jui-Yu, had it been? Long black hair streamed from half her head, the other side shaved down to stubble.
She’d said her mother would have hated that look.
Judy said she had “reinvented” herself upon coming to the United States.
Reinventing yourself...what a concept. “Isn’t that something only the glass dogs can do to us? ” he had joked to her.
“Wow,” she continued now, huskily, smiling a big lopsided smile. “Hot.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I got it at, ah…” But he forgot where he had bought his office attire. The dirty martini he was drinking didn’t help, the two of them pressed to the edge of the bar as if to the side of a lifeboat bearing them both along through a sea of vodka.
His jacket and matching trousers were a kind of reddish mud-brown, like clay baked in a kiln, a dried and finished color.
Judy’s skin, though, was a smooth human mesh of cells, moist and brown in a more natural and alive way, an accidental miracle of creation.
Suit wanted to trace that miracle with his fingertips and tongue.
It was ultimately beyond charting, though, wasn’t it?
What a torment, Judy’s – or any woman’s – material existence.
One could breathe in the loose and floating molecules of another’s physical manifestation – the flesh smell, the pussy’s aroma, its hair odor and urine tang and musk; that animal scent, that quintessential human fragrance – so that those particles were trapped by nose hairs and lingered within and became a part of oneself, and still it would never seem enough of a connection, enough of an absorption or reconciliation.
They were propped unsteadily at the sticky boundary of the bar, Suit and Judy.
Behind the bar: bottles barely real in his compromised perception, glass glinting hard yet fuzzy, wavering in their tapered contours.
His own contours felt as if they were being emptied out slowly and refilled with something toxic.
The bar’s light splintered off the rim of his martini glass in an infinity of directions.
An olive stuffed with jalapeno and blue cheese was a whole planet, tasty but doomed to consumption.
“Buy you another drink?” Suit slurred. He might despair of ever experiencing this Judy woman in the wholeness of her human quiddity, but that didn’t mean he didn’t aspire to such a delusion.
“Nooo, thanks,” she drawled in her accented voice. “This is my last cup of sorrow.” She blurted a loud, startling laugh. He didn’t get the reference.
“You have a great laugh,” he told her, but then he looked up and saw her eyes shimmering wetly like the inside of his glass. Judy’s eyes suddenly seemed too close, however beautiful. Too close, even the most beautiful of eyes could be terribly disturbing.
“You know why I came here tonight?” Judy said to him.
“Today when I got in my car to go to work, I saw an old woman wandering around in my building’s parking lot, like she was lost. She was wearing a dirty old nightgown, with...
like...stains around the butt. Y’know?” Judy gestured backward toward her own posterior.
“I was embarrassed for her, and worried about her, so I started to go over to see if she needed help. Then she looked up at me, and I saw her face. She was Asian, like me. But it was more than that.”
“Yeah?” Suit said, weaving blearily on his stool.
“I recognized her. She looked like she could be my mom, or my mom’s mom, but my mom’s been dead for two years and my grandma longer than that.
I realized she was my baby sister, Pin-Yu.
I could tell, even though this woman looked like she was seventy, at least.” Judy gasped back a sob, but struggled along.
“Pin-Yu disappeared four years ago. She was eleven, then. She went outside to play...she liked to skateboard.” An agonized fond chuckle. “And she never came back.”
“I’m sorry,” Suit said. “So you think...you think a dog got a hold of her?”
“Of course they did.”
“What did you do? Did you…” But Suit didn’t want to ask more; didn’t want Judy to feel guilty, because drunk or not, he already guessed the answer.
“I just looked at her,” Judy sobbed. Her bright crooked smile was gone, her face twisted like something crushed and wrung in one’s fist. “I couldn’t...
I couldn’t. She didn’t recognize me, even though she looked right in my eyes.
Then she walked out of the parking lot, and I didn’t see her anymore.
I just stood there, until she was gone. I couldn’t say anything.
I couldn’t follow her.” Her sobbing intensified.
“But why was she there? Was she looking for me? She looked like she was senile, she seemed so confused, but did part of her remember?”
Suit put his hand on Judy’s forearm without lust. He said, “I understand.”
Judy had been staring at herself in the mirror behind the bar as she related her story, but now swiveled on her stool to face Suit more directly. “You do?”