In an apocalyptic landscape, on the fringes
of a dying metropolis, there is a bar.
The camera over the door is probably dead.
Doesn’t matter.
Afternoon gives way to evening,
wind howling like a coyote, hollow whirling sounds
as it sweeps against shuttered windows,
like in an old Western movie,
necessarily threatening.
Inside the bar were a few people,
stable in their positions,
carefully cultivating
the art of ignoring one another.
Speaking on and off,
the stranger spoke mostly to himself,
sometimes to no one, sometimes to everyone.
His speech was sporadic, alternating
between quiet whispers, mumbling murmurs,
flares of rage, bursts of hysteria.
Spouting libidinous fantasies
woven with extremes of morbidity,
obscene expressions scattered through poor verses.
He was engaging in a strange way,
his native English knotted;
sentences snagging on details then
spinning off into rumor,
particular and general at once, vague and precise,
casual but urgent, attentive to detail,
but absorbed by the whole.
To engage in conversation with him
was never ordinary.
He spoke of underworlds and afterlives,
love and loss, happiness and sorrow.
If there was any ostentation,
it was in his insistence
on establishing genuine dialogue.
When he addressed you,
it was sudden, like a predator
too close, staring into the depths of your soul.
It was as if he wanted the ledger of your accounts—
what you spent, what you’d stolen,
when you first stopped caring.
He always asked the same thing,
a question that caused space to contract,
the entire bar distorted like a room
in Alice’s Wonderland.
When you were the target,
the other patrons folded into the background—
students hoping not to be called on.
You could hear, almost hear,
doors closing, shades coming down,
FOR SALE signs going up.
His question behaved like an awkwardness,
improper in mixed company.
There was a shuffling of feet,
a stifled cough, eyes downshifting
as if the answer might be contagious.
Perhaps different phrasing would help.
An alternate question could be a way out,
a way in, or better yet, a way through.
It’s a fair sort of question,
no right or wrong answer—
just opinion.
He never wavered.
He looked you square in the eye and asked—
Do you believe in god?
Between gusts of wind the silence is absolute.
© 2025 Bruno Talerico
Stafford challenge 253/365.
Desert Dweller 