Night Time in the Open
Amelia Shackelford
It was Friday night. Outside small men in gray jumpsuits were welding crude appendages on the zeppelin. Inside the drunks and miners had quarantined themselves to waste away out of the spitting, sputtering rain. Joe behind the bar tinkered with an antique portable radio, trying for the news. Giving up on the dials, he reached inside the guts of the thing. One of the tubes shattered in his hand. Blood on the radio meant no news tonight.
The street lamp over the zeppelin popped, rained sparks down on the small men that mingled with the sparks from their stick welders. The small men worked on, stopping at intervals to dismantle one of the miners' cars. None of the old trucks and station wagons had any doors or windows left. The miners didn't seem to mind, and the drunks didn't seem to notice.
I was watching the construction from the hill. A slow, cold mist settled on my head and shoulders. Now and then tiny droplets would coalesce and run down my cheeks and the back of my neck. I shivered, and water ran down my head into my eyes.
The girl, exactly my height with shaved head and large eyes, came out of the woods behind me.
"Where are we?" she asked. Voice like a lost pixie.
"Where did you come from?"
"The highway," she said absently. Looking down the hill toward the lot, she asked, "What's that?"
"A zeppelin."
"oh..." She pulled a small black flask from inside her tattered jacket, took a swig and offered it to me.
"What's this?" I asked, sniffing the proffered liquor.
"A drink."
"oh..." I drank it, bitter and radical and hot inside my wet chest.
"Let's go there," she pointed to the bar.
"We can't."
"Why not?"
"It's Friday night. They won't open for us."
I took my burnt eyes away from the sparking zeppelin and looked at her. Droplets streamed from the top of her pale scalp down her face in vertical torrents.
Absorbed in staring at the squat concrete building down the hill, she did not notice or did not mind when I took her hand. I asked anyway. "Do you mind?"
She looked down at my hand in hers, and crystal drops fell from her cheeks and lips, "No."
After a long time she spoke again, looking at the zeppelin. "They're killing it, you know."
"I know."
"This is a strange place. Has it always been this way?"
"No. They used to open the bar on Friday nights."
She looked down at our feet sinking into the wet ground. I looked up at the hazy moon. "Will you stay?"
"I think so, yes."
And I was happy.