Flash Fiction by Robin Billings

Strain Free     

Early in summer, when it was warm enough I didn’t need a jacket at night, this girl I usually traveled around the bars with on Saturdays didn’t come for me. She had a date. So I drove to this place farther down the main road than the one we usually went to, this new three-story bar with a roof garden.    

English: Alexandria's waterfront, seen from th...

English: Alexandria’s waterfront, seen from the Potomac River. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It was no good walking down that far in the dark that late, not even on the main road. It was a weird neighborhood like that, friendly enough in the daytime, but after dark, the nicey- nice covers came off, and being out alone after dark, you were asking for trouble. 

I talked to a couple of bikers on barstools I saw just about every week, whatever bar I ended up in, and I had a beer with them in the acoustic guitar room. Then I walked into the room in the back with these big black box speakers spanking out sound, and I talked to a few people standing around, and I kept on drinking. 

After a while, I was feeling like I’d been planted there for days waiting for somebody to find me, and finally, somebody did. I didn’t know his name. He said it to me there in the dark with the cacophonous whirling busy busy talk talk bar sounds all around us, but I didn’t hear it, and I didn’t ask him to repeat his name, please. 

And then he was driving my car in the dark and then we were on his bed in the fierce and immediate quickened way you can only feel when you have been transported, when you are so drunk so very drunk that time skips unimportant daze beats, and we were stripped warm naked and we were on his narrow line of a bed with the streetlight pouring in on us through his yellow blind. 

I started down his front, where the trough line lived at the line of the bones of his collar, and I started with my tongue and my fingers and I felt all the hollows and the curves of his skin and his hard bones down beneath them. 

He shivered when I did things to him. I liked feeling that shiver run down through him and on into me. 

The dark hairs started down near his belly. They were soft and easy to suck. I felt his hands move from my shoulders to the back of my head and they were holding onto my hair and they were grabbing for my hair and feeling for a thickness to hold onto as I went down the hairline on his belly. His legs moved in a soft convulsion, waiting for the feeling of my wet mouth to find him. So I found his legs and I fondled the inside of his thighs with my warm wetness and he opened up, he opened up for me and I moved up and found him there in the center of his body and he was ready for me to find him. 

He tried and strained to move from his side onto his back but I held him fast there so he could suffer a strong pulse of need for a while longer and make it stronger for us when it came. I loved him right then. 

After, I stayed with him through the night. The way he held onto me, the way he stroked the hair on the back of my head, with a soft stroke down, over and over, taking his fingers away at the tips of my hair, pulling his hand away, and starting again, and cupping the back of my head with his hand after, it seemed to me he thought I’d maybe stay longer. 

In the morning I climbed out of bed early and pulled on my jeans and my T-shirt. He watched me from his skinny bed. 

I whispered to him that I needed to go home for a while. He smiled and said he’d see me later, but I forgot to pay attention to the street sign when I drove away, and I didn’t know his name. 

—————— 

Brief bio: Robin Billings lives in Alexandria, Virginia, works for a large association across the Potomac in Washington, DC, and is working through edits on her first novel.

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Pittsburgh, Karaoke & Beer

My love of beer takes me to several bars in Pittsburgh.  Two of the bars I go to are Del’s and Nico’s.  Both are in Pittsburgh’s Bloomfield neighborhood which is known as “Little Italy”.  Del’s has karaoke on Friday night and Nico’s has it on Saturday night.  Over the years, I’ve sung karaoke at both places many times.  Lately, karaoke at Del’s has been anemic.  Karaoke at Nico’s is going strong.

Years ago, Del’s use to pack the karaoke crowd in every Friday night.  I was there every Friday night.  It was a wild scene.  They had some of the best singers in the city hanging out at the place.  Then the owners put in three very nice flat screen televisions in the small barroom where the karaoke DJ always set up.  Before, the bartender could turn down the lights.  With the three flat screen TVs on it was as bright as day.

At Nico’s the DJ sets up in the dinning room and the only screen that is on is the karaoke monitor.  The lights are kept low.  It’s all about karaoke.

No karaoke singer wants to compete with three, bright flat screen TVs even if the sound is on mute.

Nico’s has won the Best Karaoke Bar in the City Award from the Pittsburgh City Paper now three years in running.

Del’s is a fine Italian ristorante and it will survive and prosper.  Karaoke at Del’s may not.

The Death of Karaoke (A Short Story) www.authspot.com/Short-Stories/The-Death-of-Karaoke.627745 

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The Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette is always open to short story submissions.  Writers (bloggers) should read and follow the submission guidelines.  If you want a free critique of your story, click on the Free Help For Writers tab at the top of the page.

The Bar Scene (A Flash Fiction Story)

One night many years ago. The bar scene near the campus of the University of Pittsburgh. C. J. Barney’s. The old Wooden Keg. My new hang out. Downstairs standing at the end of the bar talking to the bartender whose girlfriend use to waitress at the Sanctuary. Where Lauren, my ex-wife, and I met ten years before. Keep making eye contact with this redhead sitting on a high stool half way down the bar facing me. Wearing a mini with nude tone pantyhose. She looks awfully familiar. Some time during the night she leaves.

Later that night upstairs to meet Lloyd. One of the old crowd from the Sanctuary. An old running buddy. Was the one who introduced me to my ex-wife. He and I end the night at Calico’s. We stand at the bar. Lloyd talks to this brunette. The redhead is sitting with friends at a table against the far wall and we continue eye contact.

My hair is sliced back. I’m clean shaven. The new look. Redhead gets up and walks by on her way down to the john. Then she comes back from the john.

“Excuse me. Is your name Kathleen?”

Her eyes go wide. “I don’t believe it.”

“I thought it was you.”

She hugs me. “My god,” she says. “I can’t believe how young you look. And so thin.”

I feel happy and old at the same time.

“You don’t look anything like thirty eight,” she says. “I thought you were some young stud.”

“Thirty nine now.”

I remember the year before. One week after my divorce from Lauren was final. Getting drunk in the Luna. Asking the redhead to dance. Finding out her name. More dancing. More drinking. Making out in a dark booth in the back. Getting a phone number. Walking her back to her dorms. Stopping to suck face along the way in the night. Shocked to realize it wasn’t Lauren’s tongue in my mouth but the tongue of a stranger I’d met just three hours earlier. One final, long deep kiss in the glow of the lights of the Quad. On the walk home throwing her phone number in the nearest trash can…

Now, after another hug I say, “You want to stay in touch?” I’m a little drunk and know it’s a stupid thing to say as soon as I say it.

“I’m going to study in England.” Probably a lie, but maybe not. “But anytime I see you I’ll dance.”

Another hug. Nothing touching below the waist. Kathleen goes back to her friends.

“Nice to have met you,” the brunette Lloyd has been talking to says to me after Kathleen leaves. Lloyd is in the john. She and I haven’t said ten words to each other. She’s wearing glossy pink lipstick. A mouth like my ex-wife Lauren’s. Gorgeous dark gray eyes. She’s maybe twenty seven. We talk and flirt until Lloyd comes back from the john and he and I start walking out. I look back and the brunette is watching me leave. She flutters her fingers at me. Lloyd and I go our separate ways.

I walk pass the Cathedral of Learning. The bars are letting out. It’s time for me to grow up. I’m not a kid any longer.

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