Friday, May 8, 2015

Daily Write - Night on the Row (Part 2)

Taking another drink, she listened to the sounds of breaking glass and loud shouting. Bawdy songs were yelled from some broken down tavern, while female voices shrieked in response to the grubby hands that played grab ass when females passed by. She took another drink. Predators walked up and down these streets, letting their glinting weapons be seen by all. They walked up to anyone, taking whatever they wanted and dared something to be done about it. It was a group of them, a group she never saw aside from here on The Row. They ignored her. She had nothing they wanted. She had nothing but a bottle of alcohol. A bottle that she would empty before the night was over. Yes, it had come to that.

She couldn’t remember her last sober day. When she was rescued, everyone headed to the rum and ale stashed away on the boat. While some drank the first night, she drank every night on the trip home. And had been drinking every night since.  It didn’t matter. No one had noticed. Everyone was dealing with the nightmare they had just clawed their way through. No one noticed anyone else. So she could get away with stumbling around the Estate or disappearing without a word to anyone. She tilted the bottle up to her lips and let the alcohol burn its way down her throat.


“You really shouldn’t be drinking that much,”


She turned towards the voice. She hadn’t seen him sit down. He had obviously been there for a while and made himself comfortable, leaning against the wall of a dark, grey building.


“Trust me. There are no answers in the bottom of that.”


“Who said anything about trying to find answers?” she replied in a sarcastic tone, taking another pull from the bottle.



She hadn’t seen him before. But would she have remembered if she had seen him before? He sat partly in the shadow of the building he was resting against and the rest of him was splayed in the harsh flickering ray of lamp light coming from a nearby post. There wasn’t enough shadow to cover the mail armor that he was clad in as it glinted whenever he moved.

She couldn’t make out his face, seeing how he was still wearing the helm that went with the suit. For all she knew, she had one drink too many and just struck up a conversation with a statue she had paid no attention to until now. But, real or not, he continued to speak.

“Isn’t that what most people are looking for? A solution?”

She did not answer, simply placed the bottle next to her lips again. If this suit of armor was looking for a philosophical debate tonight, it wasn’t going to get it out of her. Despite her silence, he continued.

“It is just that I think there are better ways to handle whatever it is that is bothering you instead of drowning yourself in alcohol.”

“Then you obviously are in the wrong place,” she answered, gesturing with her bottle, her words starting to take on that tell tale slur of when someone had had enough to drink, “Drowning yourself in alcohol is what happens here.  You and your sobriety is what is wrong with this picture.”

“You are pretty lucid for a drunk.” Was the response given.

“My night just got started. Give it a little time.”

She had sworn he had chuckled at her reply. But she could only that blasted helm on his head. He kept talking. About what, she really didn’t know. It really didn’t matter. There was something she liked about hearing his voice. It was much better to listen to than the normal din of The Row, especially late at night. He was settling, something solid amidst the hazy wash of everything else around her. He got her to talk, about anything. Of course, that wasn’t too hard since booze always had a knack for loosening her tongue and removing the filter that existed between her mouth and her brain.

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