Where there is Little Light and Everyone Fears the Bird Wont Sing

I knew features of the bar before I walked in: the cigarette butts curled on the floor like bird shit, the stalls scrawled in bad grammar, the only expensive bottle of scotch ashen in dust. The walls, cramped as a hallway, were scarred with the photos of miners who ordered cheap liquor, held Lucky Strikes in fingers coated in coal-dust. One man, cheekbones bore like carved stone, had shaken eyes, hair blown back. He looked like he was scared of what would happen after the picture. The room was the reflection of a barroom in a cracked mirror. The music from the jukebox stuck to the floor. Above the tiles, a single bulb burned uncovered and tied to its switch-chain a metal canary swung, maybe one of the birds that didn’t make it out of the earth without black lungs. As I stood in the doorway, I watched the sunlight open on the patrons—men who wore jean vests that smelled of compost piles, their shoes removed and propped against stools. They never glanced up from where they slumped over drinks, each lost in a lantern struggling in the mineshafts of their memories. I sat on a stool. The bartender stood in a corner, arms creased over the emblem of his shirt, looking into a poster he must have seen a hundred times or more. I bought two beers and danced with what might have been the only woman in town. She wore a red shawl over her shoulders that made the skin of her arms look like they were under a strip club’s lights. She straddled a yellow straw between her teeth. As we negotiated the possibilities between our bodies and an air mined for its silver music, I fascinated over the chewed end of her straw, fanned at the end, like a canary’s tail. I wondered what it must be like to be a bird between those teeth: to want to sing inside saliva, scotch and smoke and know where the light you desperately want to see is not the one that leads you out of breath.