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Grief

Remembering the Dead and Hating Them for It

By KenziePublished 5 years ago 5 min read
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Cheap whiskey splashed into a slightly less than sparkling tumbler. The glass met the table with uncertainty and a wobble. Then it came back up again to meet the slurring lips of a woman whose eyes were red with tears and one too many cheap whiskeys prior to this very moment.

The group at the table collectively sighed. The brief reprieve as she ordered her eighth drink was over. Back to garbled grieving.

"It's a shame... y'know. I—I—what did we ever do for her? Love her? Support her? And she—she went to the needle..." Whiskey sloshed over the scummy lip of its glass. "It's a fuckin' shame."

The glass slammed down onto the table as the hand wrapped around it came crashing down from its incredulous position in the air.

"She did always seem to have a hard time in life..." The man seated at the far end of the table offered his words as everyone else stared into their own drinks. He shrugged, but his eyes were teary.

"Hard time?!" Whiskey woman's red-rimmed eyes flashed bright with anger. "What fuckin' hard times? She was ni—nineteen!"

Somehow, her drink stayed on the table as she staggered off the chair and to her feet. Her mouth opened silently for several seconds before a new voice emerged. It was louder, squeaky, and sounded as if it might burst open any second. She was talking over a lump in her throat.

"Two parents, always there. Great school, tons of friends, college acceptance letters every day... Me! She had a support system that we could only dream of! At her age I was living on my own, dead parents, flipping burgers at two different fast food joints, just t-tryin' to m-make it..." Hiccups cut her off.

The patrons along the bar at the opposite end of the room had all stopped visiting with the bartenders; both parties had now been staring at the woman for several minutes. Her hiccups abated but as she launched into an even louder soliloquy a rattling smoker's cough filled her throat. She continued around the cough, "I swear! I don't understand the people in this world today—ungrateful! She chose this—ch-chose this—life..."

The last word seemed to jump out of its own sentence and slap the woman across her face. She straightened her shoulders and swiped her drink up off the table. After a long, noisy guzzle, the empty glass clinked back down. She sat down slowly. The bartenders went back to work and soon the room was filled with chatter and sounds of clinking glass again.

Around the table, the woman's friends and acquaintances began to talk nervously to each other. Someone launched into a long story about her latest ski trip. Words tossed around her head, but the woman couldn't pay attention. Her stomach felt warm, her lips numb. No one cares.

She knew she'd just made everyone uncomfortable. But who cares? They should be uncomfortable, she thought. Her left ring finger reached out absentmindedly to trace the rim of her whiskey glass. The lump in her throat from just minutes ago had left and instead, she was filled with fiery sadness, angry grief.

The damn needle. The woman had always suspected something like this would happen to Manda. She was a reckless girl and apparently thought of herself as invincible. And honestly, no one bothered to tell her otherwise. They just let her "live her life" and carry on with scumbag friends and parties every night. Even her parents were clueless; they always blathered on about how she was a "free spirit" who couldn't be tied down, no matter how much they tried.

And now look what happened.

The woman sighed heavily, cleared her throat, and stood up. She excused herself to the bathroom but no one heard her. She shuffled to the back of the bar and pushed open the squeaky door to the one stall bathroom. Her nose wrinkled at the smell of sickly sweet air freshener coupled with mildew and drunken toilet stains, but she held her breath and looked at herself in the mirror. Long black hair, matted down around her hairline with sweat, and thin black brows, a result of high school trends followed to the extreme. She looks just like me.

No. She sighed again and gripped the counter with her palms, nails scratching at nothing. She looked just like me.

Before she knew it, her palm closed into a fist and was flying through the air.

The teary-eyed man from the woman's table started in his chair. He couldn't be sure, but he thought he'd just heard the tinkling sounds of breaking glass. He looked at the woman's empty chair and started to get up from his own. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a very drunk blonde woman teetering toward him, smiling from ear to ear.

"Come dance!" she called, closing her eyes and throwing her hands in the air. The man looked in the direction of the bathroom but saw no one. He turned back to the blonde and let her grab his arm, leading him toward the middle of the bar where a couple people had pushed apart the tables for a makeshift dance floor. Why not? He never danced, wasn't very good at it.

But Manda would want me to.

With that lone thought tumbling around in his brain, he stumbled along toward the dance floor, completely forgetting the sound he'd just heard.

literature
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About the Creator

Kenzie

I'm a writer because it's too cold where I live to do anything else.

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