COCKTAIL ANIMALS
As a cocktail waitress, she earned a lot of tips, particularly when she wore the green dress with the buttons down the front. Not that it showed very much. All it really showed was that some guys have big imaginations. The small animals she kept at home proved a good audience. They seemed to smile and chatter amongst themselves when she was smiling and happy. When she didn’t hear them, she wondered if they were hiding, and then they would scurry about all excited, playing hide-and-go-seek maybe?
She liked the bartender and told him so. He liked her some, but was still surprised when she told her boyfriend to move out and asked the bartender to come home with her and spend the night. That night, she thought she had the animals hidden, out of sight. Sometimes they make too much noise, she thought, and someone else might not like her animals. The bartender came home with her and got very drunk. He recited poetry for much of the evening.
"I don't really understand what you're saying," she said, "but it's very beautiful. What is it?"
"Blank verse."
"I guess that's because it doesn't mean anything," she said, laughing at her joke.
"Maybe it doesn't," the bartender answered while he fumbled with the buttons on her green dress. That night in bed, she was glad the animals didn't make any noise.
The next morning when they went to breakfast she turned pale, seeing the owner of the bar at a corner table of the restaurant.
"I don't want them to think I'm that kind of girl."
"What kind?" the bartender asked as he looked at the morning's menu.
"Scrambled or over easy," she answered as she ordered and looked away. He wondered if she was talking about the eggs or herself. When she got back home that day, she put the animals in smaller cages. They were too much of.. …everywhere, she thought, in exasperation. She needed more room in her small apartment so she could pace the floor waiting for the bartender to call her, which he never did. She said it didn't really worry her. "Too many fish in the sea," she said to herself. The bartender watched her during the next few months as she fished around, landing one flounder after another. The men who used to exercise their imaginations now only needed to exercise their memories. She gave them lots of memories and her animals smaller cages when she got home. She had to make room for a larger bed and new clothes. The green dress didn't fit anymore. The buttons wouldn't stay fastened. She had consumed too many imaginations and was gaining weight. She thanked the bartender for helping her out of her shell, though she really didn’t mean it.
"Scrambled or over easy," he thought to himself. He gave her his old stereo; which she kept, but complained about bad reception. At night, while he sorted through his books of poetry, she enjoyed the attention of numerous imaginations, in person and over the phone. The nights she spent alone, she couldn't sleep. The sound of her small animals frantically scratching at the bars of tiny cages kept her awake until early in the morning.
Laughing and joking, she became extremely popular, dining and drinking at expensive night spots, always on some one else's tab. Voluptuous wasn't quite the word. Voluptuous became her job, which she filled very well. so well that she could only imagine fitting into her green dress. She never bothered with the buttons any more.
Stopping only for exhaustion, her small animals constantly jumped and twisted in their close quarters, which soon got so small that some slept touching all four sides. When she put her hands against the cages, she could feel the vibrations of tiny hearts, speeding in panic But she needed more room, so she put the caged animals in the closet, stacking them on top of each other. They never slept anymore, ceaselessly squirming in darkness, making small, sharp barking noises that sounded like birds far away. The bartender only visited her place once more. He found her distraught, grossly overweight, smelling of the night before. She excused herself, needing time to get ready for her date with an imagination… …or two.
She drove out to the woods one morning after a sleepless night, and stopped her small car on a lonely road that few ever travelled. She hiked down a narrow trail and sat at the edge of a cliff. There she took her life and freed the animals, though not necessarily in that order.
Months later, the bartender heard of her fate one night on the evening news. "It was her problem," he told himself, staring morosely at the small dead animal in the cage on the table in front of him.