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I was drinking with an old skeleton at the bar last Saturday when she found me. “Come,” She ordered, grabbing my collar. I left my beer on a napkin and let her drag me to a shadowed concrete room in the back, a place covered with soot marks in the shapes of hands and faces. The reek of fuel oil there nearly choked me.
When she lit me I blazed like a flare. Smoke billowed from my throat as I howled and twisted in agony, throwing myself at the cement. But there was nothing left to scrape or bruise. Heat consumed me and my embers scattered to the floor.
The procedure was over quickly. With a yellow whisk she swept my ashes into the wastebasket as I fidgeted awkwardly with the remains of my hands. I suddenly noticed the new smell and the new stains upon the walls - my smell, my stains. The place where I had last hit the cement bore a perfect ashen outline of my pelvis. I wanted to talk to her, but her duty was done. She didn’t even look at me when she finally said, “You’re dismissed.”
At the bar I sat back down to my beer but I didn’t bother trying to drink it. Mingled with the ashes of my mouth, I knew it would it would taste foul. So I sat and tipped my mug until the beer had run over my bony fingers and soaked into the napkin below. It washed some of the back room’s vile soot from my bones. I smeared what was left onto the thick glass. The skeleton next to me, the one I’d been talking to before, snapped his teeth together loudly and asked, “What keeps you coming back?”
My beer foamed impotently. It looked exactly like fire retardant. I put my skull down in my hands and sighed.
