My sister, aptly blogging at @QuilledSister, writes short stories on her blog. Read her stories! She is a good fiction writer. I am not. But sometimes I get inspired to write a response. This is one of them.
Original Story: Fatigue
My Story
She was old, these days. Not that you’d know it to look at her. Fewer did, too, these days, but she supposed that was to be expected. It wasn’t the streak of gray she kept carefully hidden out of respect for the bartender, who was still denying the existence of hers. It wasn’t the remnants of a bright pink applied in a fit of misdirected youthful energy—not hers, this time; that waitress had been removed the next day, along with as much of the pink as she could.
No, fewer people looked at her because fewer people looked for her. Didn’t they know what she could do? How she had stocked everything just so, using local ingredients wherever she could, but sending out across the world if she ran out of options. How she had brought in only the very best bartenders, the ones who understood what she was trying to do here? The ones who didn’t question when the six-foot-nine thug got a peach mangonada, the alluring goth chick got a single finger of whiskey (neat, but always slightly pine-flavored) for the third time this month, or the Clint Eastwood wannabe got—well, he got a finger of whiskey, too, but without the pine.
Ms. Harliot poured another drink, a tea for a man in a black bowler who could have been from the 1920s or the 2020s, a tea with perhaps a little too much matcha for a true connoisseur, but which he would only remember as delicious. The O’Harliots—they lost the O in those same 1920s when Ellis Island would let the Irish into the country but New York wouldn’t welcome them any further—had always been her favorite bartenders, even back to the first grandame O’Harliot who carted her around by hand before she had found a permanent home. No cockles or mussels, but they all got what they needed.
Every couple of decades she tried out another family, someone promising, someone who had been in before, maybe a few times. They’d last somewhere between a few hours and a few years, and then she’d find herself reaching out to another Harliot cousin who inexplicably found themselves staring at the labels above the bar, realizing that if they just mixed a little of this with a drop of that, the lanky boy who’d been staring into the middle distance since he took a seat against the wall an hour ago would feel a little better when he left.
They all felt a little better when they left. (Most of them felt better on their way up to the bar.) A little lighter. A little… like maybe that weight wasn’t quite so heavy today. Almost as if the emotional gravity in here were a little weaker than it had been on the doorstep.
As he left, the thug almost forgot he was carrying—almost forgot why he was carrying.
As she walked out, the woman with lustrous black hair, a bit too much eyeliner, way too much (or maybe too little) leather, and skin a whiter shade of pale didn’t think of those girls once. Or those guys. She thought about a bass guitar and the boy who played it.
As he retreated, the man with the painstakingly manicured five-o’clock shadow didn’t think the word “emasculated” once.
The awkwardly tall boy had left years ago, trench coat waving in the wind, a bit worse for wear but looking forward to graduation for the first time in his life.
She could do this forever. She’d been doing it for years, and she’d keep it up until she couldn’t any more. She could feel Christina—sorry, Ms. Harliot—feeling her age, feeling the world, but she could also feel a man who had just turned up her street, fuming about his ex, his lawyer, his ex’s lawyer, the judge, the clerk, and every happy man, woman, and child he’d seen in the last three weeks…
The Grudgery was old, these days. Not that you’d know it to look at her. But the people who needed her found her, looked at her, looked again, stepped across the threshold, and, invariably, felt a little lighter.
