“...so she’s sitting right over there, right at that end of the bar, hair piled up on top of her head like a splatter cone volcano. Her hoop skirt’s half charred through to the skeleton, but she’s just ordering her fifth drink like she doesn’t give a damn-” says the woman balanced uneasily on the seat next to you. She looks like she’s on at least her fifth drink herself. You’ve seen her down at least three since you made the mistake of sitting next to her. The bar in front of her is littered with maraschino cherry stems and snapped cocktail umbrellas. She’s wearing what must have once been a fashionable outfit for a night out, but her pink cocktail dress is pocked with chemical burns and her perfectly matched lipstick is smudged across her cheek.
“so I say to Baz,” she slurs “I say ‘who the hell is she, that girl down at the end of the bar?’ and he says ‘Woah Angie, you don’t want to get in involved, she’s an Etherite’-” (she punctuates this point by snapping the sixth cocktail umbrella) “and so I say ‘Lemur? But I hardly know ‘er!” Ha HA!” She elbows you a little bit too hard and almost falls off of her chair. You laugh politely. “Of course Baz tries to stop me, so I tell him that I pay him to steal me uranium, not to give me relationship advice, and I walk right up to her and I say ‘Hey babe, did you fall from heaven? Because you sure look like the sun burnt your wings off’ and she looks me up and down and says “It was a zeppelin this time. But don’t blame the sun, it was just in self defense, I was trying to burn it out of the sky too,” and I say “so you want to get out of this maze and go back to my place’?”
She smiles down at her glass. “Man, that was a night. I’d never met anyone quite like her, she had this taste like ozone and cloves and chapstick and..., well-” she tries to wink but mostly slurs a sleepy blink. “Well, we broke up after 8 months. And you know what did it? A goddamn fight about ether drag. She forgave me for every Martian and sentient fungus I hooked up with at her best friend’s parties, and I even shrugged it off when she forgot my birthday because the Gregorian calendar offended her. I didn’t even mind when she blew up my apartment and half of the rest of the building trying to kitbash my toaster into a time machine, and it was the goddamn ether drag that did us in. One minute we’re making pillow talk about the Michaleson-Morely experiment and the next? It’s like I never even existed. She ignores my texts, ignores my letters. I try to send her the clothes she left at my place and she sends them back along with a letter saying I must be mistaking her for someone else, as it is a logical impossibility that she could have ever loved someone so mistaken about the nature of the ether. Orphaned a few of her wonders in my new apartment too when she left, and now I can’t get one of the little buggers out of the air ducts...” a few locks of hair fall into her drink as she slumps over on the bar and the glass pipette she’s got jammed through her tangle of a bun slips out and clatters noisily to the floor.
Whoops, wrote and illustrated a bit of flash fiction in the Genius: The Transgression universe. Set at the Error Bar, a tavern for Mad Scientists to come and relax after their master plans inevitably blow up in their faces.
