LeftExchange
Pardoner's Shade: A Fictional Sketch
Fallmon: Character Sketch
Adam Fallmon woke up early to consult the clouds while the sun still nestled up to the horizon like a golden-child of tellurian sheets in a urinated bed.
Al O’Patrick’s Narration
This lags! Missin’ happy-hour ‘cuz of work. Luckily Roy’s tendin’ and he charges like a buck a beer for regulars such as myself. Ya, gotta tip him decent on the first couple drinks though. Else he’ll give you some story about the boss checkin’ stock. Yeah, the rest of the night’s a complimentary deal, especially when he takes to drinkin’ with me.
When he was only four Adam confronted Moloch about the children. He saw innocents in all the beady eyes, fish eyes especially, while the earth stuck like a spurned childhood phase of celestial athletics grew unbearably hot, then cold. When he was five his mother spoke to him of his unusual gland-like appendage, his pineal body, as they planted honeydew in their backyard garden. Alpeil Fallmon, his mother, died only a few years ago while he was still working at the Shady Pardoner Saloon. The phone call from Susan, his mom’s closest friend, rang over, “…crazy for feeling's so lonely…” as the jukebox always had a workday quarter in it. He worked the remaining few hours of his shift explaining his need to “watch the clouds more carefully now” to the tired, drunk patrons with sallow eyes. He no longer tends bar at the Shady Pardoner, or anywhere for that matter.
Those sallow eyes began to slip from their owners pallid sockets and enter his dreams as curious Spanish olives toppled from capsized martinis. Janus faced sots appeared bar-side humming dithyrambs of dipsomania for more wine and he began to distrust mirrors. The jukebox glow stretched into the nebula of smoke above the bar like an entryway to Erebus—gateway of the damned souls of neck-tied businessmen into circuit-boardroom. He had to quit.
Roy kept the beer coming while I ambivalently conversed with this young lady I hadn’t seen in the Shady Pardoner before. The Pardoner’s got its regulars but were generally laconic loners when it comes to gabbin’. We just lull in the stupor, communicating in the half-light through partially uttered, daily complaints. It’s an agreement among the steadies to ignore cordial inquiries and simply guzzle down our grog silently. The jukebox hardly sees any coinage, it just glows their like a horizontal lighthouse illuminating the path past the pool table to the restroom.
Yeah, so this was the anomalous conversation. At some point we’d exchanged names but I typically forgotten. Just the other day some wise-ass had some infomercial praising his methods of remembering those facts, both complex and simple, that you wish you could retain. Shit, I’m chocking’ on my times tables. Anyhow, Angela, I think that’s her name. How am I supposed to remember her name when I’m trying to remember that Ho-dads memorization methods. Hell, I can’t force his freakin’ method or her damn name from the catacombs of my torpid mind to a retrievable nook in my consciousness. Then I get all the damn other names and words confusing my efforts. I have the wrong chew-churnin’ players standing in the on-deck circle. Great,I can remember a whole dugout full of malarkey but I can’t pick the right word-player out of my memory-line-up.
Well, I’ll just keep listenin’ and lookin’ at her ‘cause ain’t short of ear-fillin’ and my eyes don’t strain on her.