Farther in the distance, a range of question marks. And farther still, faint ellipses. What could be worse? Open my eyes and fix my gaze onto the girl buoyant over the stage, knowing full well she can never be mine? Or shut them off and just listen, just listen to the song majestically woven by her adroit lips that has flung freely across the sweaty atmosphere of this crappy, crumbling space, and eventually lose my grip of my sanity with the risk of unrestrainable public masturbation?

“If you don’t mind asking, why are you here?”

Why am I here?

There’s no why. Just a flock of crows sweeping across the roofless sky like a large black car swooshing past the open windows ravaging the curtains.

“Sorry?”

“No. Nothing. You seem spaced out. Are you drunk already?”

This slut doesn’t know the difference between getting drunk and spacing out. The hell. If you were not only hot I would have never paid you even a cent. Caw, caw, caw… the shrilling of the imaginary crows echoed like a one-way boomerang. That sound coming from somewhere made me worry about Kafka. Is she alright parked alone at the alley nearby? This place is sorry, it doesn’t even have parking for four-wheeled vehicles, let alone motorcycles. The sound, that high-pitched and piercing sound, so annoying, can’t help the urge to pick up this glass of liquor and repetitively bang this halfwit’s head until bloodbath.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t touch the glass. I crept my hand down her skirt and up her mushy legs, then she grabbed my arm and fought it from going where it craved to venture. But I’d had enough of her nonsense, and business is business. I paid her to let me touch her. She grunted and swallowed an invisible spider. I proceeded. Underneath her lingerie, I found the glorious hole and before I could stick and fiddle my middle finger through, I had noticed it was already moist down there. Whoa, this bitch likes me. Then she loosened her grip and slowly fell on my shoulder. I seized what was hers that was temporarily mine at that moment. She jerked. That was when she whispered.

Feed me to your crows.

I suddenly felt a sensation as if I’d instantly got riddled with pinpricks. Everything else seemed normal though as far as my eye could see. Then hollow footsteps echoed against the clammy walls of the bar, surfaces of which had been stained by nasty bodily fluids imaginable. That’s the moment I had caught the last image of the girl on the stage before she finally disappeared as if she had never existed. Her afterimage lingered, hovered before my eyes for a few seconds, then afterward not a slightest trace had been left. I kept recalling what she looked like but in vain. But I knew, I had seen her somewhere before. I knew her.

If death ever had a voice, would it have gone on stage, rock the crowd and wreck everybody’s souls? Was that a premonition that this girl is going to die or has she been long dead?

As soon as my eyes grew used to the fledgling darkness, where my eyes had laid left me no time for thinking that everyone at the bar had fallen asleep. Including this girl on my shoulder, lifeless, cumdrunk.

It’s about fucking time to go home.

The room had no other doors, except for the one I had entered.