The Green Fairy

He thought until his head felt like it was going to split open, the bone spurs in his jaw aching. The spurs, a gift from a streetwalker with a garish hole for a mouth, who upon hearing him call her a cunt slapped him across the face with her purse, cracking his molar in two, a puss canker the size of a walnut effecting his speech, which now came out in half-vowels and constantans, his father’s hopes that one day his son might take up the opera or speak in tongues squashed forever. He walked slapdash idly up the sideways, his hat squeezed like a ripe orange under his arm, the brim folded over levering his armpit and bicep. ‘never again will I listen to an imbecile… after all any man worth his weight in salt knows that imbeciles can never be trusted, even a well dressed one’. Across the sideways the harridan’s sister let go with a loud commanding howl, his ears crackling like tinder. Unaware that he was sinking into a cesspit of despair, like a man resigned to failure, someone whom life’s lottery had missed over yet continued to encourage, he ordered a glass of Absinthe and sat dejectedly in the corner by the stove. I will overcome this, he thought, the corners of his mouth awakened by the Green Fairy.