Member-only story
Banishment’s Better Half
And so I went to The Comstock Saloon and sat down in a booth by myself feeling all miserable and lost, and I leaned back and I watched the ceiling fans slowly spin like the arms of maimed centaurs, and it wasn’t late enough to be too crowded in there, and the waiters were spry and attentive and spiffy in their attire, and I didn’t have a wife anymore for the first time in many years, and the whole world was slightly tweaked and askew and crammed with crumbling artifacts of who I used to be, and I sat there in the booth and watched the ceiling fans go about their business of slicing slow and deliberate and calm through the stuffy air, and I didn’t have anywhere to be for the foreseeable future, and this was a small wondrous thing that I didn’t want to let got of, and nobody was cursing my name just then over runny eggs and burnt toast or to the harsh tinny sound of dropped silverware, and soon I had a cocktail in hand and was feeling miles better about myself.
Some wizened bastard with a wilted carnation in his topcoat’s buttonhole came over and sat across from me. There was some commotion of his person, a staggering flourish of indecipherable semaphores and jousts of limbs, and then a flowery suggestion, “You don’t come here quite often enough, do you?”
“Not for my liking.”
“But to everyone else’s.”
