A Game of Chicken

A very un-serious story of ghosts, a game of chicken and stupid lovers.

A woman in a tight red dress sits facing a hickory man in a black Canadian tuxedo at the bar, they sit in a tight corner talking so softly it seems almost impossible that they hear each other at all. They exchange stories about how they got their scars, an excuse to look upon each other’s flesh in such a setting. The man pulls up his jeans to explain, I was playing chicken with my older brothers a few years ago and got tire-swiped by my grandfather’s Lincoln, I took their left thumb as retribution. The scar on his calf faintly resembled an upside-down Texas where a chunk of skin was once missing.

The woman spoke into the man’s scar, I like the game of chicken, elaborating not at all. The hickory man smiled his bronze smile, teeth glittering in the neon lights. He knew only a woman accustomed to fear would be able to play with a soul as intoxicating as his own, he proposed a game.

Eventually, the rules were laid out, and the two young and adventurous lovers discovered a fortitude of lustful need within a ten-minute conversation. A lingering kiss between the two bid the start of their losing game.

The woman got up from the stool, leaving a trail of blossoms and lust in elements of swaying hips and meek odor, she exits into the alley and the man is all alone. He stayed put, drinking himself into a stupor, appearing to have been sat alone this whole time. At three in the morning, the barkeep shut off the lights and went home. The hickory man sat there in the dark with an empty whiskey glass licking the bottom like a sick puppy. If an ear was pressed up to his quivering lips, it would hear his inane prayers and wishes for his belle to lose the game.

I am not a chicken, I am not a chicken, I am not a chicken.

Days, weeks, then months passed. The hickory man stayed glued to the bar stool. Dejected misfits tend to avoid the matters of their hearts in order to play at loves childish games, blaming the rules but not the rule makers. Regulars of the bar started to complain about the paralyzing feeling the tight corner of the bar caused, anyone to sit in one of the stools could hear thick whispers, sending chills across their skin. Some bar members end up in altercations because an unknown patron would mock and call them chickens.

After two years, the defeated man decided to take his ass from his seat, giving up their game, and as he walked to the back doors out into the alley, he could smell a familiar odor of blossoms and heat. The alley was nothing short of normal until he tilted his head up to the sky. Her feet dangle above his head and she looked down with a soft face of sorrow. Chicken, she says. Now there is no more flesh left in you or me, how can there be lust without flesh, how could there be any love without lust?

She is sitting on the old bar sign, her dress draped over the sides like a flowing red wine. The man only considers a way to drink her so he could have her inside of him, but he slowly remembers that he is no longer of belly and mouth but of soul and carnage and he pulls on her legs until they are face to face in the bar alley. The conversation is soft as if no time has passed, and the rules are broken as they whisper proposals of love instead of games.

In present times, the regulars only complain of hearing two people fucking in the alley, but every time the barkeep steps out to disperse the guilty lovers, the alley is found empty carrying the strong scent of blossoms and whiskey.