Hootie needed to be alone to think. She locked herself into the women’s bathroom—two stalls, one with a door that squeaked and one that did not. It was overdue for a cleaning—her responsibility, as the only woman who worked at the bar. Not that it mattered now. This would be her last night here. Hootie chose the stall that did not squeak.
Breathing was unsettling; she was too aware of her organs contracting. From the toilet, she stared at her white-turned-desert-red sneakers. The desert was consuming her: the bar was just a stomach, churning with slow-burning acid, dissolving her feet-first. A small lizard scurried under the stall and back out again. Carl was still dead in his truck. “This is my life,” Hootie said. The lines crossing over her palm were deep. When she was a young child, her grandmother had told her this was a sign of an old soul, a spirit that had lived many lives before this one. A soul that was closer to something. “Closer to what?” Hootie asked her hands. Was it so easy to fall out of time? To stumble out of one’s own life?
A noise cut through the clamor of the wind and the rain and the thunder. Hootie left the bathroom. The last of the evening light had faded into the torrential night. A frantic, brief sound. It happened again. Again. Again. “What is that?”
Manny left his barstool, strode over to the door. He rested his hand on the knob. They heard the noise again. Hootie couldn’t make sense of it. Carl? Risen from the dead?
“Open it,” Hootie said. When Manny’s hand floundered, slipped off the knob, she insisted: “Open it!”
The door blew open, clapping against the wall. Wind and cold water. And from the darkness, a creature, a beast, something terrible scampered into the bar. Manny leapt back. Hootie reached for a chair. It came into the candlelight.
It was Penny.
“Carl inherited this place from his mother, who bought it cheap, foreclosed. She fixed it up. That was when this road was still trafficked though, so I think this place did well…”
“Did you know that when he was in high school, he was in love with this his best friend? And he never told him. He told me that night those guys stopped in on their way to elope…”
“Remember the time that dickhead—oh, what was his name? That guy with the buzzed head who was only here for a few weeks who was stealing cash from Carl’s office—”
“—and pouring vodka into his water bottle—”
“And Carl made me fire him? I kind of liked it…”
“One time, when I got the flu, Carl brought me tea every single hour on the hour. He said he set an alarm. I had to pee like a hundred times.”
“I remember that. He took me swimming one time.”
“Swimming? Where?”
“There’s a river with a waterfall pool like twenty minutes from here.”
“Carl? Swimming?”
“Believe it or not.”
Remember? Remember? That one time? That other time? All the time? And now?
“What do you think happens next?”
“To the bar?”
“To us.”