Big Stories in Two Little Sentences
As the shadows made their way up the mountains of the Eastern Kentucky town of Hazard on a muggy, August Friday night, the four handsome boys, all of high school age, reached for a beer from the back of the shiny, black SUV.
Four hours later, as the EMT’s pulled the last of the four boys’ lifeless bodies out of the twisted heap of metal, four pairs of parents sat on their living room couches in their comfortable homes, completely unaware of the pain that would soon come their way.
He woke up underneath his desk, still clutching an empty bottle of whiskey. He dumped it, smoothed down his hair and shirt and sighed before opening the classroom door to let his students in.
For twelve long agonizing months he had battled the rapacious disease and kept it at bay. Tonight though, bronze token in hand, he planned to drink his way back into the familiar comfort of oblivion.
It isn’t so much that I always wake up with a hangover and blacked out from a hard night of drinks and drugs that bothers me.
It’s that I always wake up.
He unscrewed the cap and took a sip, which turned into a swig, which then turned into a skull. Drowning his sorrows in alcohol once again, it would always be this way, he could never change.
All of the writers and singers and geniuses that were blessed enough to be born under the starsign of Capricorn were alcoholics with awful family lives and terrible human skills.
And since I am also a blessed Capricorn, who thinks she can write, sing, draw and paint, and I am so scared of a normal family, I think that I should start drinking, so that my dog can save me from myself when I get too caught up in these shenanigans.
It had to be the clear liquid burning, the vodka, that made that face appear in the blackness of the night outside the window. But it wasn’t, it wasn’t the vodka at all, because now the face was back, and now it wasn’t afraid to be seen — and yes, it looked angry.
Jimmy said to the bartender, “I’m not one of them guys that gives a crap whether the glass is half empty or half full. Just fill it with somethin’ good.”
He had slipped into her mind as easily and unnoticeably as something gets slipped into a drink. And just as dangerously too, because now that he was there, she couldn’t be held liable for irrational behavior.