Last Cup of Sorrow #2
“About a year ago,” Suit admitted, “I got grabbed, too. I was twenty-eight. I was walking back to my apartment from a convenience store down the street. I never saw the thing come up behind me. I woke up in a vacant lot. I was, like, curled up in a ball on the ground...you know how it is. But at least I remembered where I lived...right across the street. At least I remembered my name.”
“Ohhh, wow,” Judy said sympathetically, laying a hand on his terra cotta-colored sleeve. “How old are you now?”
“I don’t know. In my late forties, I’d say. Maybe early fifties.”
“Ohhh, no, not early fifties,” Judy said, maybe only to make him feel better. “You look too good for that. Okay, maybe late forties,” she admitted.
“Thanks,” he told her. He supposed he believed her, because she did seem to be flirting with him, after all. Then again, she was very drunk.
“What do they get out of it?” Judy asked him bitterly, eyebrows gathered in a knot.
“I guess they get our...juice.”
“Fuck them,” she hissed. “Fuck them. We should catch them all and kill them. Shoot them on sight!”
“We can’t...you can get in a lot of trouble. It’s against the law.”
“But why? Why would we ever make a law like that?”
“They’re, ah...like...a protected species.”
Judy leaned closer to him. Those beautiful, disquieting eyes even closer. She hissed, “They don’t belong here. They just make us think that.”
“What do you...what do you mean?”
“They weren’t always here!” she all but shouted, causing him to flinch.
The bartender glanced over at the pair, but then looked back to the TV suspended over the bar. A nature program was on. A lion lay in tall grass with a zebra’s throat clamped in its jaws, as it waited out the death of its prey. The zebra could only stare off to the side and wait, too.
This was a Chinese restaurant. Taiwanese Judy glared at the bartender for having looked over at her. “Fuck you,” she whispered. “I hate you, too.”
Judy had declined Suit’s proffered drink, but he caught the bartender’s attention and ordered another for himself. “One more cup of sorrow,” he said, for Judy’s benefit.
“Dirty martini?” the man asked.
“Dirtier than your ass,” Judy barked, her grin tortured, tears still making her smooth brown cheeks glossy.
“Hey,” the bartender warned her.
“Hay is for horses,” she said.
The bartender slid to Suit a martini glass wherein was speared a pair of olive planets, resting cheek to cheek as if the inhabitants of one might easily migrate to the other.
At some point Suit lifted his heavy and aching head from drooping close to the bar and saw that the stool beside him was unoccupied.
Not so much as a single molecule of her remained lodged against a nostril hair.
Had he only imagined that woman...a thing called Judy?
Might as well have. He ached for the loss of her intimate tears. The dreamed-of smell of her sex.
Suit stumbled out into the parking lot, invasive weeds jutting through cracks in the pavement, living blades blanched by moonlight. Had the bartender, or he himself, ordered him out of the establishment?
Suit saw his dingy used car near the edge of the lot, the strutted shadow of a black communication tower sketched across its bonnet by the orange-pink glow of a street light.
Toward the top of the tower, just below the smallish dish cocked like a listening ear toward unseen stars, three translucent loops were strung.
He needn’t worry about these creatures, though: they were larval glass dogs, not yet having developed limbs.
They were like beads on an abacus that formed some seemingly simple but in fact impenetrable equation.
Larval glass dogs always formed upon the communication towers... everyone knew that.
Suit staggered toward his car, jerking unsteadily to one side but catching himself. “Whoa,” he laughed. “Easy there, buddy. What’s the matter with you lately, anyway? You can’t control yourself? You can’t...you can’t...control?”
It had been air conditioned in the bar but the summer night was sultry, stifling, and he didn’t need to impress Judy with his suit anymore, so he paused on his way to his car to wrestle himself out of his jacket and sling it over one shoulder.
Suit left his jacket draped there while he rolled up one shirt sleeve, then the other, and during this process a peripheral movement caught his eye. He looked over, then up, at what the dim orange-pink radiance revealed.
A tenement building stood at the far end of the parking lot.
A figure was crawling headfirst like an insect down the building’s brick face, from where a third floor window stood open.
The window either had no screen covering it or the screen had been dislodged.
The glow of the sodium streetlamps glistened on the descending figure, as if Suit needed those wet-looking glints and glimmers to hint at what he was seeing.
He muttered to himself and started toward his car again, hoping the thing wouldn’t see him or hear him.
Well, how could it do either? But surely it would be capable of sensing him.
He was drunk...he was being irrational. He didn’t really have to hurry or even be stealthy, did he? For clearly, the dog had already chosen its prey. Was already feeding, if feeding was what this was.
When it had reached the bottom of the vertical brick surface and crawled forward onto the parking lot a few feet, the dog became motionless. It went down onto its belly with its head raised up, like some kind of sphinx carved from crystal, and waited.
Suit detected the faintest buzz, like that of night insects, inside his head. Low and contented, not like the more noticeable vibration when a pair of dogs were in communication with each other.
Despite the creature being preoccupied with this act of maybe-feeding, Suit still glanced over at it anxiously several times before he reached his car, got its door open, and locked himself inside.
He didn’t turn on the engine, the headlights.
He sat there in the dark and stared through his windshield and watched.
He’d never actually witnessed this process before...besides having gone through it himself. He supposed that with the dogs said to be more plentiful these days, it had only been a matter of time before he did.
He had always been wary when he was outside and spotted one or more of them.
Once, while crossing the parking lot from his car to his office building to start his workday, a pack of four of them had cut across a corner of the lot, bursting from one section of the bordering woods and plunging into another.
His heart had rocketed for an instant, but after they’d vanished he’d calmed down and resumed walking.
Despite their actions, they were just another part of nature, like sharks and lightning bolts.
You just had to be careful, as with those other things.
No, he’d never actually felt terrified of the glass dogs before this night, this experience.
Obviously, catching this creature feeding mostly accounted for that...
but he figured it might also be the story Judy had told him, and recounting his own story, that had put him in this state.
And remembering Judy’s words: “They weren’t always here!”
There was a dark shape within the dog’s outlines, an opaque core that looked to be making up for its lack of a skeleton and organs.
A dark head within its own encasing head, dark limbs filling its own four limbs, making them thicker than they normally would be, stretching out its transparent flesh.
From here, and in this insufficient light, Suit couldn’t make out fine details but he didn’t need to.
It was the occupant from that third floor flat.
He imagined they’d been asleep, and vulnerable.
Suit had heard of the dogs actually stealing inside homes before.
Minutes passed. He was tempted to just drive away, go home before a passing police car caught him lingering here and he was tested for alcohol. He almost nodded off once, too, but his head snapped upright in alarm.
Then, the glass dog gathered itself up and slowly rose on its four weirdly-bent legs.
It pulled away from the human body with some resistance, a kind of elastic stickiness, but as the dog rose up the human body remained lying on the pavement.
One would think the dog’s substance was gelatinous in consistency rather than tough and rubbery.
Finally it stood over the figure, which now – seen somewhat more clearly – appeared to be a man in a t-shirt and sweatpants.
The dog stepped away from the man, leaving him there, and his body – not yet conscious – reflexively drew itself into a tight fetal position as if he had been reborn.
Though it had shed the man’s body – or he had shed it – the glass dog still retained something of him. It now bore, in place of his body, a greenish glowing light that extended into its blunt head, its long crooked limbs. Suit knew this stolen light would gradually fade over a matter of hours.
Thunder rumbled threateningly, at the fringe of town. A light pattering of rain started pinging against Suit’s windshield.
He thought he would wait until the dog moved along, then get out of his car, go to the man, try to rouse him and get him walking so he could be returned to his apartment. But just then, the green-glowing glass dog froze in its tracks and jerked its blind head in his direction.
Suit started his car, turned on his windshield wipers, the blaze of his headlights starkly picking out the unconscious man in the parking lot and the body of the glass dog, gleaming like the hard-but-fuzzy bottles had done back in the restaurant’s bar.
Somewhat sobered, Suit got his car moving. He had the fleeting impulse to stamp down hard on the gas pedal and point the grille of his car toward the dog...plummet into it.
Protected species. Who had decreed such a thing?
Instead, Suit whipped his car in another direction, pointed it back toward his home.