The bar was small, just a thin walkway you had to walk sideways on running from the front door to the backwall between two rectangle tables made of a type of plastic neither sturdy nor stable and covered in burn marks in the shape of abstract tortoises that the people who usually frequented the bar usually rested their index fingers on as they drank through straws. Everyone drank through straws in the bar; it wasn’t a rule, but it was known as the way by any that walked through the door and was followed as if it was, beers and whiskey and gin and tequila, all were slurped up through the bar’s token straws, pasta made ones that some frequenters munched absentmindedly on after their drink was finished.
Wednesday Wendy was drinking a margarita, using the end of her pasta straw to scoop up the salt from the rim to deposit in her mouth; Wednesday Wendy was looking out the small square window next to her table, which for once she wasn’t sharing, at a squat terraced house just over the road, a pink house with a window of its own that was open. Through the window she could see a small box television that a soap was playing on, the bright colours leaking from it tickling the air in front of the screen and displaying a man with a beanie telling a woman also in a beanie something that prompted tears from both of their eyes while in the background a bustling market street continued on; through the window she could also see a knee, from the thigh up and cut off at an angle by the frame of the window a single knee the colour of mahogany, poised so still it was clear it was watching the soap as intently as a knee could.
The bar was empty aside from Wednesday Wendy and the bartender who was grotesquely tall and thin and had eyes that blinked fearfully but limbs that strived to be attached not to a fearful barman but to a stunt man and so often did dangerous things with knives and blenders and fire without the bartenders control, so that his face would be wild and looking at you as if discussing the unprecedented and dangerous growth pattern of cacti in infantile areas all while one of his hands was joyfully stabbing a knife between the fingers of his other hand, faster and faster. As if sensing they were being watched, the soap playing on the distant television began expanding through the air and the sound of it and the knee did too, floating to play, perched as if projected, larger than through the window, disembodied in the air of the bar. Wednesday Wendy, who’d been absentmindedly enjoying watching the soap and the knee through the window, was confused at how suddenly she was watching them not through a window, but Wednesday Wendy was always confused; from the right side of her head where her wondering always came from she wondered what had happened to her sister, where she had gone, who she even was, and then the wondering collided with the drunken abstracted left side of her head and she forgot about her sister again, and then remembered again; each scoop of salt from the rim of her glass bringing back the memory of her and every other swallow taking her away, a back and forward flux of remembering and forgetting that made her mind disoriented.
A couple entering the bar interrupted everything, waltzing through the soap hovering in the air to sit down, calling over to the bartender whose one hand was holding a blowtorch close to the other hand which was nimbly dodging it just fast enough to only be singed for two beers. Once they sat, they removed their coats and took from a satchel bag a small alligator, placing it in the centre of the plastic table, right in the middle of a particularly large tortoise shaped burn mark where it shuffled in numerous never complete circles and made the strange hissing noise all alligators make, the subtle hybrid of feline and lizard. The eyes of the bartender looked afraid of the alligator and watched like marbles do a sharp incline its sharp teeth and slitted eyes, nervously; but the bartenders’ hands were excited and poured the couple’s two beers as fast as possible and the arms they were attached too unnaturally stretcheeeeeeeeeeeed, as the bar was a good metre away from the table they were sitting at, to drop the glasses down, plop, plop, on either side of the gator’s shuffling feet.
The couple picked up their beers and each took two deep slurps from the pasta straws already placed within them, the liquid still somehow splashing around their mouths and dripping lightly down their chins with hurrah hurrah types of visual festivity, and one poured a little of the beer from their glass on the alligator’s head and giggled like someone afraid of their shadow would giggle on a sunny day as the alligator blinked its eyes. As they settled in, the projected knee and the soap, which had been flickering as if caught in a storm of bad static, began to settle down and again took up the tiny air space between Wednesday Wendy’s table and the couple’s table and the bar and its tender, floating there ethereally and unbothered again to play out, the knee, without ever growing, losing, or gaining extra flesh itself, shifting position sporadically to sometimes cover up details of the soap and other times expose the different levels of scenarios being enacted and reacted too.
The alligator, who had grown into a taste for the beer being spilt on him over and over again, the beer which pooled beneath its head and torso so its body splashed slowly in it as it shifted, the beer it began slowly to scoop up into its mouth too whenever possible, watched the soap as intently as the knee watched the soap; it eyed the played out scenes and its eyes leaked colourless liquid and it shifted and splashed and watched and every now and then one of the couple would reach over, absentmindedly, with the singlemindedness of those already privy to the knowledge that it wouldn’t harm them but still wanted Wednesday Wendy and the bartender to know how easy and not scary it was for them to put themselves in a situation they wouldn’t be harmed in, and lift their index finger from one of the burnt tortoises and place it within the jaws of the alligator and stroke the rough texture of its tongue.
The bartender watched them do this with eyes that announced that they thought the couple mad and hands that announced that they personally didn’t, the hands, fed up with their blowtorch games, venturing closer to the jaws of the alligator, playing at approaching stealthily and carefully, sneaking down the sides of the bar top and tickling their way across the surface of the burnt as if teasing the beast. Wednesday Wendy, thirsty from all the salt she’d lifted from the rim of her glass and swallowed, the last of the salt having already gone to leave her wondering where her sister really had gone in a bafflingly encompassing way, was torn between watching the knee and the soap both through her window, watching it, projected through luminous force, in the air of the bar, and watching not either but the alligator alone who was drinking the quickly pooling beer beneath its head at a quicker pace and who the hands of the couple reached within more frequently.
Wednesday Wendy, weeping tears as colourless as the alligators at the loss of a sister she couldn’t remember the face of, ordered another margarita without opening her mouth, the large glass being deposited on her table by the hands of the bartender whose face then seemed caught in slow motion, heading in increments towards terror at the sight of an alligator being played within, but whose hands seemed merely annoyed at being interrupted in their approach towards its jaws, the glass once deposited rocking from side to side momentarily as if toying with the idea of doing a great big fall from the haste with which its deposit had been achieved. There was an abrupt and loud CRUNCH as one of the two making the couple a couple bit into their pasta straw because their beer was done and they wanted the bartender to know without speaking, another CRUNCH following as the one in the couple who wasn’t the original biter followed suit. They giggled at the noises they made like children discovering the joy of passing wind and slapped the table and laughed even louder when new beers and straws were placed in front of them and then louder still as on the soap above their heads a bald man began painting his dome blue.
Wednesday Wendy laughed too at the sight because she’d had some of the new salt straight away and she’d forgot and the only feeling left to her was the joy of watching a man become blue while an alligator released crocodile tears and got steadily drunk directly below from spilt beer, it was a joy that translated into her wanting sincerely to have the knee and the knee alone at her table, sitting with her, company that could be felt and touched gently and that could feel and touch her gently too.
The hands of the bartender were getting braver amidst the laughter and brevity and had reached the tail of the alligator, fondling the creases and bumps of the plated skin there before fleeing again, receding back to the bar before their next spell of bravery sent them back out to play. Wednesday Wendy fondled the salt on her rim but didn’t bring it to her mouth, instead she let the joy of forgetting stay, sitting fatly on her tongue like a lump of sugar slowly dissolving, and prayed to the tortoises on her table that the knee wouldn’t just hover there, that it would join her, and because it was a day when, though it wasn’t known, prayers were fifty times more likely to be answered, hers was so and the knee, not changing position or gaining any additional body parts, floated gently down and rested in the chair next to hers, the knee in the actual window from over the road to the bar vanishing physically from that window to embody and fill the projected knee that was now next to Wednesday Wendy.
A couple sat with an alligator in the bar; Wednesday Wendy sat with a knee in the bar; the bartender at the bar didn’t sit but stood and was fearful in the face but daring in the limbs; the soap continued undisrupted above all of them and in the house across the street with the occasional sonic interjections of manic laughter or weeping. The knee rested against Wednesday Wendy’s shoulder and Wednesday Wendy rested a hand on the back of the knee and felt its curves and sinew and the couple poured the entirety of both of their previously full beers on the table so that the pool there wasn’t just a little but a lot and the excess liquid spilt off the sides and the alligator, if it’d been just a little lighter, could have been floating. But it wasn’t floating, it was shuffling, it was splashing really at that point, and still drinking all and what it could, its eyes getting yellow and wild as all four hands of the couple, when free, played within the confines of its mouth and the two hands of the bartender, between making drinks, ventured further up its body.
The knee received a margarita too from the hands of the bartender, a pre-emptive giving to prevent it being ordered later when they were too busy trying to actually get into the mouth of the alligator, and the knee slurped its margarita through its own pasta straw which slid with no complaint into a little hole that appeared in its joint when it wanted a drink and vanished from sight when it didn’t. Wednesday Wendy, finishing her drink quickly for extra courage that once in her balanced like an acrobat on her joy, kissed the top of the knee and lifted and held it to her breast to whisper sweet nonsensical things that made her feel like she was understood by uttering them and not being told she was making no sense.
The soap was showing in flickering images the inside of an old pub filled with red wooden tables that at that moment were being smashed up by someone with a baseball bat screaming about the results of a pregnancy test and Wednesday Wendy whispered, “The doctors told me I would never eat shredded wheat again when I went in for a colonoscopy but then the sky opened up with rain and I became a bowl and milk and shredded wheat filled me and I proved them wrong, I proved them wrong,” and the knee leaned more into her and Wednesday Wendy felt so joyful and accepted and practically approaching the sublime that she dared herself to dare to scoop more salt up without knowing why she had to dare herself to do so and eat it, the whereabouts of and the wondering who her sister was hitting her again but not quite as hard as before because there the knee was, there, with her.
The couple, each of them, were on the fifth of the beers they’d ordered, the alligator on around the same, and, with their face still in the act of transforming into terror, the bartender’s hands graduated to the head of the alligator and encircled the mouth and, with a final twitch of terror, finally did as the couple did and entered the mouth, penetrating and stroking the long tongue of the gator from left to right and from up to down, the arms of the bartender stretching even more out of proportion than before to keep them in there and in place, the arms trying their best but the mouth of the alligator having other ideas of achieving it and snapping shut because the hands were not the hands of the couple that were his and the hands were intruders and also it was drunk and it wanted some meat and by god it done darn got it.
The hands that wanted danger like nothing else in the world got burned by the fire and were chewed up and swallowed, vanishing down the throat of the gator who then did another shuffle and completed a complete spin on top of the largest burnt tortoise on the table while the bartender, whose face had known all along what was coming, began to reform from an expression of fear into one of satisfaction that his fear was justified and his hand’s love of danger had been wrong. The couple, banging their glasses down on the table, cheering and cheering again, louder and louder as tick tocks ticked by on a modernist clock the soap cast in tele-colours, like a rainbow fragmented, down from above. The knee, giving a little hop out of her tight grip, let itself get comfy sitting on Wednesday Wendy’s lap and rested at an angle there, settling in in a way that let her know she needn’t hold onto it so tight. Without using her arms, Wednesday Wendy bent from the back and kissed again the top of it and, feeling with that kiss like she’d been kissed back, Wednesday Wendy wept, an increasingly accepting smile growing on her face as across from them the couple poured themselves more beer because the bartender had fainted from blood loss and they weren’t willing to let the party stop there, disregarding the pasta straws that were supposed to be required in favour of their mouths, an entirely separate glass, being filled and then emptied periodically out onto the table, lying next to the alligator’s jaws that moved like an animatronics as it gulped from the mess the spills made to wash down the hands.