Two Shorts
by Matty Byloos
IN A BAR CALLED GIVE ‘EM ENOUGH ROPE
Four strangers all with the same name sit alongside each other in a bar with no one else. And they all drink whiskey because it hurts ‘em so.
Four suicides gone wrong sandwiched into four spots alongside a bar, and this is where they’ve ended up. An orange tree outside shrivels in the new season. It’s colder now.
Four men trying on what they think it means to be a man, dance their separate ways up to a bar and each of ‘em asks for a drink. And then another.
And then another.
Four men grown comfortable with the idea that things, they just are the way they are, and that’s just the way they are. And none of these men is given to manners. And yet they all got here somehow.
In a bar called Give ‘Em Enough Rope, it all happens, and there’s no way to leave. Given the space for enough thinking, they all come to it themselves. They all come back to suicide.
A television screen behind them echoes something about killers.
SOMETHING ON TELEVISION
“I love killers because they represent everything we want to deny about ourselves. I want to kill because I love everything about our natures. Because you all refuse to realize that in reality, we are all uncivilized dogs. Because of our nature, you deprive yourselves. You have no idea what you are.” He’s standing on a couple of steps in front of a courthouse. He’s on one side of a circle, with a dozen reporters and microphones and cameras on the other three sides. Everyone knows he killed someone. They breathe it.
He just decided to stop apologizing about it, and now it’s news again. The television loves the truth, and tonight they love his truth, and they’re tellin’ it to everybody.
So the man is saying all this on TV In a bar, from up high on the television screen, he’s saying this to a now-empty room. If only the rest of gravity were willing, but there’s several ghosts in his midst. Four strangers hang in half over the weight of a heavy wooden bar, alone. A man is saying all this on television behind them, this story about a fondness of killers, and he’s just not realizing how far into their past his voice has actually gone.
The man on TV declares a final truth, but no one in the bar hears it. Just something, some light on television.