Experiment

I’m 7’3″ so bartender draws a bead on me right when I stoop through the door, and it’s a sweltering wade through the stares and giggles while I hope my cheek hairs pass for five o’clock shadow. Smirk flashes through the dark velvet of Keeper’s goatee, and he flicks the point of his chin at me like a cigarette. ID! he commands, bright eyes piercing the scattered light of the fake hologram, but he doesn’t really look at it before drawing a stream of scotch into a tumbler, neat. Limbo under the countertop and it’s on the house, Keeper smirks and someone’s yelling, Stretch is gonna limbo! and the whole place chanting now, lim-BO! lim-BO! lim-BO! Thumping heartbeats of bass and amidst the whorl of shiny faces and yard- long glasses of draft I’m reaching back, way back, shaking my moneymaker in defiance of the heavens above for this sip of sin, a slight prick tingling my left meniscus as I think of the pickled frog sprawled on the lab table the other day, how the thing’s dangly legs twitched as I curiously tugged at its tendons with forceps.