A triangle. A teardrop, maybe, formed by two streets. A row of blue cylinders, a willow tree. Winter now so there’s a fire, but they’ve stopped feeding it, so we reach up to grab fistfuls of needles from a fir and cast them into the embers, where they sputter and hiss with the immolation, and waves of smoke drift up to sting the eyes. Water meets the glitter in mine, and it burns twice as much. I light a cigarette, and we huddle around the warmth pulsing into nothing like some living thing surrendering itself to sleep in the snow. How kind. How rich the perfume of spools of smoke tobacco and pine. I can still smell where we bruised the fronds when we stripped the fine green needles to feed our pathetic little pit of soot and sparks quailing against the night. 

I think it’s about dead. Yeah. Inside? It’s so cold. Almost done with my smoke. I tuck my thumb and index and middle finger back into my glove. It is cold. The little pit huffs out more smoke, but the heat has retreated within. No point throwing more needles in there now. We’re all gonna reek of this tomorrow. Cigarette butts and the cardboard packs they come in and old Flagpole newspapers and incidental leaves and soft logs of split pine probably too wet to work in the first place. 

The PBR is empty. Gotta run to the bathroom, just saw someone walk out. It’s a narrow window of opportunity, always a line there. The stag gleams rippling scarlet and gold above, a blind patriarch in imitation brass. Silver sea urchin chandelier, disco ball eclipse. The room is full of stars. 

We keep the parties going, even if they’re melancholy now because we are old. More sad memories than happy have accumulated in the dust of our minds, we varnish them over with room-temperature vodka. Cheapest shots in town, throw some money to the bands. There’s music every night. It’s always something weird. We love it so, no other place for us, really. 

It’s 2:15 a.m. This is when most have to pay for their lack of preparation, but we are not most people, because we have haunted the space between the slender neon torches and slender cypresses too long, whittling away the last flickers of a chill white night with cheap beer and expensive cigarettes in the glow of purple Christmas lights. A couple to-gos stuffed in the pockets, and now we lamp on the porch as the morning comes on cold and too soon, stars fade out.

We remember and we lament and we cling like so many blinking barnacles to the sinking ship of this town’s most glorious eccentricities. My low-rent paradise done gone. 

Commune in joy between a willow tree and a string of cheap lights. We freaks, we straggling soldiers in a war of attrition already lost. A cigarette, a $2 beer at last call, Tom shooing your drunk twitchy ass off the patio till you shuffle home in clinging warmth. 

The fire sighs itself to sleep helplessly, the warmth flees forever. Memories are a mausoleum. 

At least the wallpaper here is sublime.