Wandering Albatross

He slumped in a large couch framed against the wall length window, embraced by plush royal pillows and the sweat of his riotous labours. The children danced and played. An outdoor vendor stoked his grill sending a cloud of smoke, laden with the smell of bbq pork, billowing into the air trapping it under the neon "Palace Bar" hanging over the long lintel that bathed the quiet street in purple.

A wandering albatross, 7 years sad and beautiful, wandered in from the sea and rode gloriously through the middle kingdom lost.

Heaving and stretching, straining, the beast roared awake from its deep slumber, azure skin pleading to be shed. His denim skin tightened but seemed to float freely over his legs. Beelzebub released. Sweat glistened off his face flickering as the strobe lights spun and pulsed, pounding his body. Empty bottles of Qingdao beer strewn about defeated and still bleeding, the formaldehyde additive searing his blood. He was wounded. The battle was fierce.

Beaten and broken she settled atop soaring monoliths, resting and wept.

A shiny poster of Evander Holyfield raised high on the wall across the darkened room peered down through the dangling curved glasses in the overhead rack of the center bar and smiled approvingly.

His breath was shallow, he was drowning but didn’t know it. The music thumped and throbbed an almost undetectable rhythm, emerging, beating; his heart caressed it and nurtured it and interfered in a chorus of booms…boom…boom…boom. His head was dizzy with bacchanalia.

She attempted to find solace in the wind and asked, "Where will you take me next…toward my flotsam or away?"

A sultry panther paced the room, eyes hanging off her prey. Her hips slowly swayed side to side with every step. She was 17 and it was her night to get drunk.

"Silly bird!" scathed the wind "You are half the age you are and half of what you could be. The end is not as sweet as the start."

It was Sodom and Gomorrah. Women…girls….sheathed in tight dresses clasped on the bar rail as they leaned forward, rumps stuck out, flailing their heads tossing long black shiny hair about in a wild web of lust…this was their dance.

"Can’t you see that I have broken my beak in a storm?! What fish can I catch?What drink may I savour that leaks through the cracks?" "What news shall I return to cutting flak!?".

The waitresses behind the bar smiled chatted served and moved carefully from customer to customer. Conversations were barely audible…it was a game, with turns to be taken, the words were incidental…embraced by the deafening music. Posturing, cocked heads, coy smiles, curves, affectations…lures. Everyone breathed and shared the humid air pregnant with musk, sweat, perfume, and cigarette smoke.

The child wept, "It burns, it burns of searing vitriol!"

The children danced and drank and reveled in their sins. Bodies bumping, brushing, pressing, hot with sweat, hunted and preyed in the dense pit.

The air currents quieted. And with that, she flung her crushed heart out off the human edifice plummeting down through the dead wind, through the void and into the arms of God.

A pot-bellied tourist from Germany, hair graying, disappeared with a hostess into the bathroom. He wooed her through the course of the night buttressed by a family a world away, and as the minutes ticked with every glass he bought she became more and more his trophy.

And while the waitress jacked him off in one of the immaculate stalls a step above the sinks, back in the jungle the panther stalked her prey not 2 metres away. Unbeknownst to her, Jim’s legion of angry inches was poised to do battle. He would not have long to wait before he could bury his mighty lance into the flesh of the enemy and satiate his lust for what would prove to be explosive victory.


Posted by The Omniscient Narrator