Today, of all days, why did he have to get this job?

Bruno Nolan, PI, sighed as he sat nursing his drink abjectly, hunched over in the gloam of the dissolving stall, his trench coat murmuring like the vellum of an ancient, worn map of the Seven Seas.

He hadn’t moved for what seemed like epochs. Felt like the ring-stained tabletop of his booth, with its moth-eaten seats and half-hearted repair jobs, had been slowly incorporating into his very being as sluggishly as barnacles and coral go about reclaiming a beached hull. Soon, he had no doubt that the velvety overgrowth, the faded red of a dried-blood algal bloom, would overtake his body. Take an axe to that hand of his, lying undisturbed for so long, and the rings of his own miserable existence would be laid bare——the palimpsest of time-worn life, the layered ancestry of doomed foundations, could be counted, read, and catalogued.

Pulling himself out of the whirlpool of his torpor, Bruno sighed again, deeper this time——the sibilant death rattle of a dying Universe. He tried to shake a flooding panic, willed it away like the ebb of the moon’s tidal pull. Desperate, he cast his gaze around his surroundings, searching for something to latch onto in this slow-motion shipwreck of a bar. His line-of-sight a fisherman, he peered through the rolling, salty-tanged mist of cigarette smoke, tacitly intrigued by what lurking leviathan his lure might ensnare.

The dilapidated beer hall in which he found himself——full of pathetically worn cloth and darkly stained wood——fitted Bruno’s mood perfectly. Almost too perfectly.

No one was ever happy at the Nepenthe’s Kiss. This was the place if you wanted to shoe your desolate life in concrete and toss it to the bottom of some bitter liquid the colour of piss. When the sun felt like a nosey witness that needed to be dealt with. You ended up littering its dusky shores when there was nowhere else to go. One by one, scum would drift in, washed up, discarded driftwood, jaded jetsam ground down by the churning tide, eroded by the pursuit of living, left to the elements until nothing was left but the utter smoothness of bone.

Everyone drank with the same pair of bloodshot, downcast eyes, wallowing, soaking, pickling in the depths of a grimy glass——a few minutes longer, just five minutes more——just enough time to forget the horror and despair that awaits on the other side of its mouldering, crusty door.

This was the place that wasn’t a place, it was the absence of a place. It wasn’t a hole-in-the-wall, it was a crack-into-the-abyss; wasn’t a dive, but a drowning.  At the Nepenthe’s Kiss, you could be nobody; nobody with a drink, that’s all that mattered. A No Body at all…

But this guy——this guy was somebody. And proclaiming it to the bar’s denizens like he was Davy Jones himself, standing there all sopping and salty at a sailor’s wake.

Glancing up surreptitiously, Bruno sized-up the man standing across the way at the bar, clutching onto its mottled wood like a seasick sailor onto a storm-sieged stern. He was wearing a loud pinstriped suit that had the unmistakable cut of a knockoff master’s magnum opus. His hoary hair, which had once started slicked back, was now dangling limply from his damp scalp in disarray, exhausted, succumbed at last to the alcoholic siege. His moustache, drenched in bootleg Gin, seemed to be following suit in a suicide pact only fit for star-crossed lovers exiled into the firmament, doomed to guide others to their destinations, but never each other to themselves.

Struggling to keep the man in focus, Bruno tuned back to stare morosely at the glass on the table in front of him once again. Nebulous fumes drifted up to him—— that bourbon-scented courage he had needed to talk to the bored-to-death looking girl in the midnight-blue dress. Looking so out of place, all those years ago, in that grimy apartment. Bruno remembered those transfixing pearls most of all; miniscule marvels of pure white suspended on a string of quicksilver, those searing-white stars orbiting gracefully around her neck, in tune to the elegant discord of the universe…

Unable to stop himself, Bruno found himself wading into the comfortably warm and ink-black waters of his threadbare brain. Back to Her shores once again. Back to those black witch’s robes, great dark sails, shadow upon night, bellowing. While she danced rhythmically behind, drawing him in, a siren tempest luring him to ruin, pulling him to the shore, back towards her drowning embrace…

No!

With a jarring jerk, Bruno wrenched himself away from the witch’s clutches with all his might, with a strength he hadn’t realised he still had——had ever had. He slammed back down to reality with a seismic shockwave.

A quick glance up over his horn-rimmed glasses to steady his swimming vision, towards the bar, and his blood ran cold: the man in the pinstriped had disappeared.

Throwing a couple crumbled notes on the table, Bruno grabbed his hat and dashed for the door——and emerged, spluttering, from the drowning depths of the Nepenthe’s Kiss——into a festering alleyway. Keeping the momentum, he burst onto the cracked concrete of a bustling Downtown sidewalk.

Bruno was not the tallest man in the world, and as he stood there surrounded by the crowd on all sides, his vision plagued by bad weather, he felt a bud of anxiety bloom its first thorny flower. Dodging this way and that like a boxer on the defensive he tried to catch a glimpse of the man in the pinstriped suit between the churning throng. There: a greying head bobbing up and down unsteadily.

Moving immediately towards it, Bruno tried to weave his way in between the burly bodies, trying to make up some ground, fighting against the inconveniences of his small stature. It took all his might, swimming upstream, the pallbearer of inconvenience to a mob so fiercely living life——and him an insubstantial castaway trapped in their wake. Quickly, he found himself exhausted. He didn’t have the energy anymore. He lacked the will. The witch on her black shore had drained him so utterly. Eventually, he just let himself succumb to the current, the homogenous school of humanity all around him. He let his body go limp and for the briefest of moments felt completely free, a mere bottle in the ocean, born forwards…

Until he was ejected from the current, shot out like driftwood, and found himself face down at the intersection, the bumps of the worn pavement telling countless ancient stories on his soft, squishy face.

Looking up, Bruno spotted the man staggering down a quiet side road, swaying gently from side to side, buoyed by his drunken stupor away from the sidewalk teeming with life. As if he too sailed on his own ocean current, the trade winds in his favour.

Bruno got up slowly and readjusted his glasses. There was no need to rush; mercifully, this sidewalk was empty. He couldn’t possibly lose the man. Not this time. Turning up the collar of his raincoat against the chilly wind, Bruno jammed his hands in his pockets and limped off in the same direction as his mark——the man he had been paid to follow——careful not to step too loudly.

***

The secret to a successful tail is not to be noticed. There’s a knack to it that takes years to master. Luckily, Bruno’s mark was so sufficiently sozzled that he didn’t need to worry about any of that.

As he settled into a comfortable pace behind the man, Bruno couldn’t help but let his mind wander the streets with him. He realised for the first time that it must have been raining while he was in the bar——that sweet scent of fresh rain in asphalt, condensed heaven, life itself, brought back memories that he didn’t want.

He stepped into a puddle, and before he knew it, he was standing on that shore again——back straight and composed, defiant.

And there, behind him, that witch of a darkness as black as the endless night of the solstice danced around her fire and chanted, calling upon Mother Nature to strike him down with all the energy of lightening and crush his bones with the deep rumble of thunder.

Well, he would just wade and wade and wade, first his legs, then his trunk, his entire being, becoming an amalgam with the inky-black water of the still lake. He’ll sink like a discarded stone until the glistening peaks and troughs of the surface looked as distant as the Milky Way on a cloudy night. And he would be completely enveloped by the superb solitude of the Universe, completely at ease. Each inky air bubble that escaped his mouth was a new planet floating lazily upwards, seemingly forever. Only to burst at the surface and release a torrent of swearwords, calling on the chaos of the universe to shake the very firmament loose and send it crumbling down, shattering like a delicate porcelain vase, raining down shards of his heart.

And yet, the witch danced away upon that shore of dark glass, unheeding, carelessly trampling those white lilies beneath her feet.

As if, he never existed. As if, he hadn’t said goodbye forever…

Bruno thought of the man the pinstriped suit. How he so desperately wished his mark wasn’t staggering off to see his mistress.

He thought of that poor woman nervously playing with her wedding ring, of that disorientated and hurt look on her face when he tells her the truth, sending her off on her own journey through that ocean of secrets and lies. A journey that would have her picking oil-slick black slivers from her heart with fearful fondness for years to come.

Somewhere deep within the submerged depths of Bruno’s heart, a crack formed, a fathomless trench, molten lava rising, a cascade of effervescent bubbles streaming upwards into a fathom of darkness. He was so angry he wanted to scream. Until he had no more air in his lungs; until he lay deflated on the tar like a cigarette butt. He had an overwhelming urge to run up to the man and shake him. To warn him of the pain he was causing his wife. Shake him until he understood.  

He wanted to cry out, to tell the man to stop. Did he have any idea? Did he even care? Did that cheating bastard have any pity? Any mercy at all?

Bruno had stopped dead in his tracks, blinking erratically, clenching and unclenching his fists feebly, trying to stop them shaking but only making it worse. He shook his head to clear the smell of rain——the smell of her hair——from his nostrils. He focussed ahead of him, only to see his mark running and looking back, sheer terror imprinted in his eyes.

Instinctively, Bruno gave chase——must’ve been dormant training from his copper days. His feet pounded the pavement, one after the other, rhythmically bearing him closer and closer to the fleeing man in the pinstriped suit. The man zigged and zagged across the quiet street, constantly aware of the sprite gnawing away at the distance between them with every passing second. He didn’t even slow down when he reached the intersection, the sound of car horns only the calls of sea-hardened gulls egging them on.

The blur of face-brick buildings that bolstered the street was an impenetrable fortress of lies and mistrust. Bruno needed to escape those prisons and their chains. He needed to be free of their bullshit that slumbered within, hidden behind those walls like leviathans lurking in the margins of maps, at the edge of the world, ready to tear out your heart if you entered unannounced and unwanted with a bunch of white lilies in hand.

Now, the distance between Bruno and his quarry could not be more than a yard or two. He was almost within reach. He stretched out his arms as far as they could go. Further even.

Bruno’s heart raced, each beat feeding his drowned, straining muscles the oxygen he needed. He would run and with every step he would shake those poisonous obsidian slivers that infest the heart. He would forget about her, Cassandra, the witch oracle who foresaw the future and was unable to change it——who perhaps never wanted to change it, who sat idly by and watched as the truth tore those she loved apart. Dancing as she wept, compelled to destruction, wreckage of her own nature. His wife.

With all his might he grasped ahead, gasping in effort, willing the man to succumb Moon-locked tidal force of his desperation. Desperate to save his client any further pain. Desperate to save himself too.

He blocked out even the faintest of sounds around him–the distant feet, the far-off traffic; the world. All his concentration was focused on a single point on the back of the man’s pinstriped suit. Fractions of inch and everything would be fractionally okay.

Focus gripping him like a Leviathan Squid, Bruno didn’t register the trash can that the panic-stricken man had flung down behind him. As it careened into his path, all Bruno could do was carry on going.

The universe slowed down as he fell, in solemn solidarity. He counted the cracks in the pavement, like creases in a concrete cushion, as he floated down to meet it, limbs splayed out haphazardly——and Bruno welcomed it, rushing up towards him like the broiling sea calling a mariner home.

Then, Bruno hit the ground.

***

Laying there, sprawled on the asphalt shore, panting heavily, Bruno already knew that the man——a swaying storm in search of a port, capsizing all who thought themselves in safe harbour——had already escaped. There was no point to getting up.

Bruno knew, too, that he couldn’t be the one who told the wife. He couldn’t be responsible for her despair. He hoped she’d understand. They each had their own storm to weather.

Adrift on his lonesome vessel, Bruno looked up at the diaphanous indigo of the dusk sky above, searching the lovers’ firmament for a loadstar to guide him.

There, he spotted a crow bemusedly contemplating the world below. Atop its mast, barely visible against the darkening sky, Bruno knew that it was ancient, the wisest being ever to have existed. He knew that this same crow had made its perch upon countless ships before. Had judged and weighed innumerable hearts. Presaging blessings and omens alike as generations set forth into cartographic fringes of the known, venturing into the unknown, boldly or foolishly, searching for the new and braving the uncharted waters of leviathans.

Bruno watched as the bird tilted its head to one side, observing the curious mortal below, judging him too. He felt its gaze seer into him, the two tiny pearls of each eye searching every inch of his being——searching, perhaps, for something, anything that deemed him worthy. He had no idea if it would find what it was looking for, but he submitted himself to its measured regard nonetheless.

He knew he was not blameless. He knew that his witch had both sought out that dark shore and had been driven to it too. An exile, a castaway, an explorer. He knew he had his own tempest deep within himself too. He knew that they were an accident waiting to happen. That accidents did happen. That, sometimes, accidents were meant to happen. He knew that farewells lasted until, one day, reappearing out the of the shrouding mist, something returned forever changed by the journey.

He thought briefly of those lilies lying on the dark carpet of his living room in a spreading pool of water, amongst the shattered remains of the vase——the one he had flung against the wall. Glittering there in the sunken darkness, like sea shells, scattered amongst the iridescence of sunken pearls. When he had found her. With him.

When he had to say goodbye.

With a mournful cry that pierced his very existence, down to the hempen coils that lashed his wreckage together, the bird spread its wings and took flight, disappearing into the folds of the descending night. Bruno looked at the crow-shaped hole it had left behind and he felt all the anger, sadness and pain leaving him. He watched as the slivers of his despair, the foul curses of the witch——those that were left, those that clung on, that he treasured——were sucked into its wake. A descending calmness stilled his inner waters; a brief, momentary respite amidst a relentless squall——for now, it was enough.

Bruno picked himself up tenderly and rescued his hat from a shallow puddle. Turning up his collar, he shoved his hands as far down in the pockets of his raincoat as was physically possible. Casting-off, he retraced his path back to the Nepenthe’s Kiss, a battered ship sailing into the night.

“Fuck it, I need a drink,” Bruno said to himself. To no one. To someone.

To her.