Where We Go From Here

Marlene stands with her back to the bar because her miniskirt won’t zip. She can feel the place just below her waist where the metal teeth split into a y, the clasp digging. Dead, and still trying to suck it in. Dead, and still caring what size she is. Well, maybe the real question is: Why is she any size at all now? She takes a sip from the amber-colored liquid in her glass–Paper Plane–maybe the last thing she drank before she…? Maybe the first? Briefly panics that she can’t remember and wonders if she’s already losing herself, a losing that happens slow and then all at once. But then, it comes to her.

Amaretto sour.

Takes another sip and frowns, the taste of rye shifting to the taste of almond. Strange place, the afterlife.

 Makes her uneasy. Makes her distrustful.

The dance floor looks like it’s bathed in navy velvet from the moonlight, white folds and fuzzed shadow sheen. Bodies sway. A disco ball descends and then it’s all Donna Summers and Madonna, and she wonders if they pick the music based on which generation is in the majority. It does not make her want to dance, so she drinks instead.

There’s another woman at the bar, much older, with gray ringlets. Her dress, Marlene notices, is zipped up to mid back.

“I hear it doesn’t count when you’re dead,” this mystery woman says.

“What doesn’t?”

She raises her eyebrows, nods at someone young, probably one of the 27s in his wide-legged pants, lurking at the edge of the dance floor. He doesn’t know how to move to the music and instead of endearing, it just makes Marlene feel old. Sad.

“Not for me,” Marlene says, and the woman shimmies off.

She looks down at her glass, thick and beveled with rounded lumps. At her hand wrapped around it. There’s a ring there and she remembers when Dave gave it to her, on the pier in Santa Monica. Hears the waves crash and a seagull and there’s something close to a keening in her chest, something she can’t verbalize. She looks for the exit.

“Who makes a nightclub without exits?” she says to herself.

The claustrophobia sets into her bones, the back of her molars. She notices the rising temperature escaping in steam off the not-yet-cold bodies, pressed together.

Thinks that even now, especially now, her ideal night out would be rotting on the couch, Dave’s feet set on her lap, or his head pressed against her arm. She presses it then against the bar but it’s too hard, too cold, too solid. Remembers, briefly, a fairytale about shoes danced to pieces. The music switches to something older, something Cohen. It’s brief, his croon, because then an alarm sounds, rain prickling across her skin.

The sprinklers, she thinks.

Health and safety, she thinks.

Water streams over her eyelids, blurring vision, and she wonders,

Where can we even go from here?