1 by luis silva
Kids
They drank and talked of revolution like two kids eating ice cream and complaining about bedtimes. They talked of corporate greed and how the hell they could get things done. Benny ranted about willful ignorance, but Lauren interrupted and sneered at them for being so fucking boring. Jake looked around at the crowd pushing against them, embarrassed that they might be thinking the same. He suggested a round of shots with a placating look at his girlfriend and a pat on Benny’s shoulder. They weaved through the crowd towards the suspended kitchen light. They spilled out from the dark and into the eddy of bodies huddled around a plywood bar that tilted precariously and would topple by the end of the night in a shattering of shot glasses with college witticisms and martini glasses shaped like alien genitalia. The only thing left unscathed would be the plastic handles of vodka that Jake started pouring. There was a click of glass, and the liquor went down with the sting of an open wound. Lauren called for a larger round, and as the shots were poured, she pulled friends out of the amorphous mob because the prevailing wisdom in those days required the drinking of ten dollar paint thinner to include the maximum amount of people available, all wailing something resembling a war cry, with something approaching religious fervor. Their faces imploded in strange patterns then dissipated back into the dark side of the room, still chanting: shots, shots, shots. The girlfriend was led away by the hand of a friend while Benny watched her round denim shorts fade away. The guys were left standing beneath the naked bulb that swung to the vibrations of a subwoofer shuddering against a nearby wall. They talked of what happened last night and what they hoped would happen tonight, how bad they felt this morning and how they’d keep it all down this time, what they remembered and how much they had forgotten. Having too much of last night in black, Benny didn’t want to stay to hear it filled in, so he took advantage of the girlfriend coming back to make a blind exit. Outside, he paused to look at the tumultuous crowd of debauchery prowling Del Playa, and it seemed to him, they all had somewhere to go. Some lucky few had even found their party on the street. These were the screamers, the most inebriated, perhaps, the best pretenders. Moving as a herd under a sepia filter of streetlights and the ubiquitous but ignored supervision of a police patrol, they were separated into the two lanes of traffic, not by the ranch hands with guns, but some innate urge for order. And as they crossed paths they studied each other, envious of what they may be missing, disguising their insecurity through smirks they hoped would say, “You fools are going the wrong way. The real party is this way.” Benny began walking through the penumbra of the burnt yellow street, passing by windows bursting popsicle purple to the pulse of a techno monotony. He separated himself from the auspicious in space and thought, walking without their smirk or the sense that they shared his strong desire to feel nothing. |
LUIS SILVA is the editor of Electric Cereal. His fiction is forthcoming in Luna Luna and his work as a translator has been featured in Adult Mag.
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