7.6.2002 (Original Date 2.21.2002) [1:38 p.m.]

(A really great solo post of Natalia...also the last Cleaning Out the Mailbox post. For now.)

...heat...

The bar is dim and hot. Smoke swirls heavy and low, obsuring one's vision and lending an air of mystery even to this stinking dive. The walls are close, the wooden panels plastered with blonde bombshells who fawn over pot-bellied drunks because they have chosen a particular brand of horse-piss, and stained from the thousands of benders that have ended.

Maybe he's in the corner. Maybe he's at the bar. Maybe he's slung across the bench of a booth, lazy and arrogant and utterly feline in his languor. There is nothing here to hold his attention, beyond the vodka in his hand or the cigarette dangling from his lips. There is nothing to hold his attention, beyond the brassy charms of the overworked barmaid or the desultory amusement of the truckers and factory workers and hustlers and freaks and geeks staggered along the bar as they tie one on and try to get the barmaid to give 'em a freebie.

Outside, the remnants of a snowstorm yet rage. Beneath the thin crust of virginal snow lingers a brown, polluted slush. It's a town like any town, full of factories and belching smokestacks, sagging apartments and bursting bars, with more than its supply of shattered dreams. Football season is over, and the long dark winter nights offer no comfort to the destitute or the desperate. There is nothing here. There is nothing to hold his attention beyond

...heat...

He must have known. He must have sensed her approach, a sixth sense, a buried knowledge, a blood-and-bone sort of knowing that bypasses the conscious mind and is only ever visceral. The battered door opens and the dive's denizens instinctively shrink from the blast of cold air only to turn again towards it, like flowers to the sun, as she slinks in.

Black eyes hot as coals sweep over the meager offerings at the bar, strike him a glancing blow, and then scorch away once more. It's a game of cat and mouse.

She's never the mouse.

She's never the mouse, rarely the prey, always the predator, and this can only be another move in an ever-evolving mating dance. Some drunken fool has his arms 'round her waist and another stumbles in behind the pair. The second one reaches out and pulls her crudely back to him, grinding against her hip to hip. For the space of three nanoseconds, she indulges his impertinence before flinging him down and away, and walking across his prone body as if it were a corpse to close the door that still hangs open, hemorraging cold air into the now-stifling dive.

Lazy as hell, she slouches against the closed door. She wears nothing against the cold beyond the battered shell of an old leather jacket. And beneath? the shrunken remains of a black t-shirt that was once three sizes too small, and is now six, atop shredded jeans so low-slung they're illegal in 49 states, and a controlled substance in the 50th. Slim fingers hook suggestively around the belt loops and lower the already dangerous denim another eighth of an inch before she makes her artless passage (once more across - atop - the fallen body of a would-be lover) from the door to the bar.

Someone falls off his stool, and though the thunk is loud in the suddenly hushed and lustful silence not a single soul lifts a single finger to come to his aid.