The Drunk
No.495 in 'A Story a Day for a Year - and then some!'
THE DRUNK
He once told me he could fly. We were three sheets to the wind, an empty bourbon bottle laid down at our feet and it was so late the stars were winking in the ink-spill sky and foxes were barking somewhere in the black wood. He said he could fly as easy as a bird. He described what it was like, just letting the air support him, and moving was an adjustment of his arms and a shifting of his weight. I’d had such dreams and so it was easy to believe.
Said he could walk on water too and it wasn’t so hard really. He said it was only a matter of balance and laying your feet full flat on the surface of still water – breathless still and all of nature hushed. He lifted his arms out from his sides and walked on the very edge of the pavement, like it was a tightrope, each step slow and careful and perfectly balanced.
Said he’d touched the moon once, just with the points of his fingers and just for the briefest of moments. It was so cold it burned, he said, and he showed me the scars on his fingertips polished smooth like smears of mother-of-pearl.
He was a fantastic liar and believing in him was a better life than not. That’s what I thought. At least that’s what I thought at the start, when he was always kissing me and touching me – to make sure I was real and not just something he dreamed… that’s what he said. Who wouldn’t want that from a man?
He kept saying my name, over and over, like a prayer or a newly discovered holy truth he was committing to memory. I felt lifted up and like I was flying, like the whole world was breathless still and whispering. I was both balanced and unbalanced at the same time. I reached up for the moon but it was a long way off. It would have been easy to lie and to say I’d touched the moon, like he had, but the words stuck in my mouth.
Then one day it all came crashing down. He was drunk again and this time I was not, ice in his bourbon, hot and cold both at the same time. He was late to my door and laid out on the grass in front of the house – the dew-dropped-dripping grass, saying my name over and over, not any more like a prayer or a hymn but like crow crackle or a silver-spittle slur. He had his arms and his legs spread wide, like he was making snow-angels, if there had been snow, and he said he was flying or laying on the surface of still water or he was a star touching the cold-burning moon. And when he said I should lay down beside him and he’d show me how, I shook my head.
Sober his lies were not so fantastic after all.