I woke up this morning, just like yesterday morning, with my face in a pile of vomit.  I say a pile because when I sat up, the viscous mound rose four inches from the floor with a silhouette of my nose and face etched in its side.  No liquid whatsoever, just a lumpy mass, a nice likeness of me too.  But the smell, it was the smell of death. And do you know what death smells like?  It smells like regurgitated Jack Daniels.

My cat woke me up from my intoxicated slumber, licking my face after I first heard him nibbling at the pile.  He purred as he licked, sniffing then purring, purring then nibbling, like it was grilled salmon.  My first instinct was to scold him for eating the vomit.  Then I thought, 'what's the difference? At least the floor is clean.'  He finished the entire pile before I could get up and swat him.  He sprinted a short ways, laid down on the linoleum floor, and took a nap.

I told my friend Joel about the pile of vomit over drinks after my shift at the bar.  Of course, he knew why there was a pile of vomit in the first place considering he was with me the night before.  We were drinking whiskey at our usual pace, which is, as much as possible with no pace at all.  And even though he wasn't in my apartment with me when I fell asleep, he could visualize the scenario.  He had been there before as well.

"He ate the whole thing?" Joel asked.

"The whole fucking thing."

"Animals are strange that way.  I once had a dog that would take a shit and then immediately eat it.  Sometimes, he would swing around for them before they hit the ground.  Saved me on food, though."

"I wouldn't think that would be beneficial to his health."

"I don't know about that.  He lived to be 18.  What's that in human years?  126?  He got hit by a street sweeping truck.  Did I tell you he was blind?"

"Maybe that's why he ate his shit," I said.

"No, he was eating his shit ever since he was a puppy.  He didn't lose his vision until the neighbor's kids poured bleach on him.  The kids told my father they did it because he was dirty.  Lame excuse."

"And you didn't scold him for eating his turds?"

"No.  Probably the same reason why you didn't scold your cat.  He was a self-contained crapper-cleaning unit."

"That must have been convenient."

"Yup."

"You could write a poem about that."

"I think I will."

"Nice."

Joel and I have a passion for dissecting things of a mundane but often grotesque nature.  These tiny events could yield a discussion that is twice as long as the event itself.  Being writers, hacks, ranters of a lyrical nature, these discussions could be the catalyst to a great narrative or poem.  Sometimes.

"You want another drink?" Joel asked.

"Do you have to ask?"

"Barkeep?  Two more drinks.  A bourbon & coke and a 7 & 7 on the fly, por favor."

"You got it, boys," said the bartender.  His name was Mike and he was my shift replacement.  He knew the deal.  He'd slip us drinks when the owner wasn't looking and we'd tip him instead of paying for the cocktails.  It was an unwritten rule between us bartenders to take care of each other.  He served us the drinks and continued cleaning the wine glasses.

"You know, the funny thing is, a few minutes after my cat ate my puke, he puked it back up," I said.

"Scold him that time?"

"No.  He scarfed it down again before I knew what had happened."

"Nice."

"And quick too."

"Hey Mike?" Joel shouted, standing up.  "Great drink!"

Mike glanced over his shoulder and nodded an acknowledgement.  He is a professional, I'm telling you.

"Let's go sit on the patio and rot in the sun," I said.

"Good idea."

We slid off our stools and walked out to the patio.  It was sunny outside, hot as fucking blazes.  We noticed a few birds chirping as they flew their aerial routines.  We passed up the first table, the birds' shit target.  We sat at the second table in the shade.  We both lit cigarettes and made ourselves comfortable.  It was a perfect Texas day, hot as hell, not a cloud in the fluorescent, blue sky.  I had a perfect drink, a perfect cigarette, and was in perfect company.

After taking a few sips of my drink, I noticed a small flock of grackles hover above us.  They hissed and cawed.  One of the grackles, upset about something, shot a turd on Joel's shoulder and flew away.

"Dickass bird!" Joel barked, picking up a plastic ashtray and throwing it in the bird's direction.  He missed though the bird hadn't.  I laughed uncontrollably.  "Goddamn it!  This is my only clean shirt.  Shit doesn't come out in the wash," he said, smearing the turd on his sleeve as he tried to clean it off.

"You have to give the bird credit," I said.  "He's an accurate son of a bitch."

Joel didn't think that was too funny.  I ran inside and got him a wet towel from the kitchen.  He wiped his sleeve with it but continued to make the stain worse.  It was a lost cause.  The shirt would soon become a dish rag.

"Look at this!" he yelled, pointing at the green and black stain on his shirt.  "You talk about shit-eating cats and vomit and look what happens.  It's all a vicious cycle.  Everything comes back to you."

"Back to me?  He shit on you," I said.  "Don't worry about it.  No one will notice.  It's not a big stain.  Let me buy you another drink."

The stain was the size of a pancake.  But Joel eventually let go of his anger towards the bird and birds in general.  He always seems to get shit on every 6 months or so.  Maybe there is some kind of bird conspiracy against him.  Maybe they know how he ran over that family of ducks on First Street.

I was trying to make him feel better.  Eventually, a cocktail waitress came outside and I ordered another round of drinks.  I noticed Joel staring at the waitress as she walked off.  A smile appeared on his face.

"Do you know her name?" Joel asked.

"Of course I do.  I work with her."

"I'm such a sucker for a beautiful woman.  I love women!  They are truly God's gift to man.  Did you see the legs on her?  And what a smile."

"Her name's Jessica and she's taken."

"So what.  She's still beautiful.  I can appreciate that for what it is.  I need a new muse for my poetry anyway.  I'm tired of my old muse.  She started dating this fraternity jerk, tall, blond, chiseled face, a real jerk.  I lost all respect for her."

"But your old muse is still inherently beautiful, isn't she?"  I asked.

"Yeah, I guess.  But not to ME anymore."

"I see."

Jessica will probably never know that she will be immortalized on the page someday, some night, in a poem by Joel.

We sat in the sun, baking, drinking, smoking, for what seemed like hours.  The combination of these vices has a tendency to manipulate time like that, stretching it, bending it, losing it.  Hours can drop off your watch like rain drops squeezing from the April sky.  And we didn't care one bit.  We had the time to kill.  And we killed it like pros.

Jessica was eventually cut from her shift and, unknown to us, we had to fend for ourselves.  I told Joel I was going to the bar for two more drinks and he agreed.  He lit a cigarette and stretched out on the bench of the picnic table, lifting his shirt, exposing his hairy stomach to the sun, and placing his detachable tinted lenses to his glasses.  I went inside.

When I came back out, Joel wasn't laying on the bench anymore.  He was on all fours, squatting low to the ground, looking at something, at what I didn't know.  He looked like an anteater there on the ground, hugging the earth, his ponytail slithering on the asphalt like the snout of that type of four-legged creature.  He was mumbling something to himself.

"What are you doing?" I asked.  I sat the drinks on the table and lit the cigarette dangling from my lips.

He didn't say anything.

"Hey?  What's up down there?" I asked.

"There's someone over there."

"Where?"  I took a sip of my drink.  It was a stiff one.

"On the other side of the fence," he said.

"People outside the fence?  A world outside of this bar?  What a fantastic discovery."

"No, you jerk.  Not just someone.  A body, there... face down on the ground."

I squatted on the ground next to him but couldn't see much under the fence.  So I stood up and took a peek through the space between the boards.  Someone was definitely there on the ground, face-down and spread-eagle.  Joel stood next to me and peeked through the spaces too.  I pulled back and examined the fence.  Finding a level board, I placed one foot on it and hoisted myself up.  Joel hoisted himself up, too.  We looked over the fence.

"Oh... shit," Joel mumbled.

I agreed.  There next to the dumpster on the other side of the fence was a body laying face-down and he looked dead.  Stiff, flat, lifeless, he looked like he had been discarded with the rest of the trash, except that whoever threw him away missed the dumpster.  His left arm was awkwardly twisted like it had been broken in several places.  An army of flies was assembling in a frenzied mass around the dumpster.

"You think he's dead?" I asked.

"No, he's just sleeping.  OF COURSE HE'S DEAD!  Look at him!"

Joel was right.  He wasn't getting his beauty rest.  He looked dead.

"Should we tell someone?  Call the police?" I asked.

"You do what you want but I want nothing to do with the police.  I want to check it out, though."

"What do you mean?  Check it out?"

"You know?  Check it out."

Joel stepped down from the fence and tried to open the gate.  It was locked.  So he climbed back on the fence and hoisted himself to the top.  He straddled the top of the fence when I freaked.

"What are you doing?!" I asked, looking around for onlookers.  "Get down!"

The next thing I knew, he was over the fence and tiptoeing toward the body.  I had no choice.  I had to follow him; that's what friends do.  I was over the fence in a matter of seconds.

Joel grabbed a stick on the ground and poked the dead man in the leg.  His body shimmied stiffly.  Joel stepped back and dropped the stick.

"Yup.  He's dead.  Toast.  The bucket.  The farm.  He's all of that."

"What should we do?" I asked.  I had never seen a dead body before, not a person anyway.  It was a sobering experience.  Well, not too sobering but strange.  I began to think about my own mortality, for a quick moment, the brevity of what I had, what I had done, what I wanted to do.  And then I looked at this poor fellow, laying face-down on the ground, his nose smashed into the asphalt, and I thought to myself, 'I need another drink!'

"I'm going to look for some identification, a wallet, something," Joel said.

"You're not going to touch him, are you?"

Joel kneeled down next to the body and patted the back pockets of his dirty jeans, looking for a wallet, I assumed.  There was nothing.

"Help me flip him over," Joel asked.

"No way!  I'm not touching him!"

"It'll just take a second."

I reluctantly kneeled down and we flipped him over.  The stench flew to the sky.  We jumped to our feet and pinched our noses, protecting them from the smell.  The smell... it was horrible.  Remember when I said death smells like regurgitated Jack Daniels?  It smells worse than that.  It smells worse than anything.  But that's what death is.

"Oh man!  I don't know if I can take this anymore.  Let's go back inside," I said.

"Wait!"  Joel kneeled back down next to him.  "There's something in his shirt pocket."

"Don't touch him.  Don't... no..."

There was something in his shirt pocket but I didn't care.  I wanted to go back inside, get another drink, forget about the whole thing, death, dead bodies, the stench.  I wanted to go back inside and leave death behind, at least for the moment.  Joel reached into the guy's shirt pocket and pulled out a small box.  He looked at me and smiled.

"What is it?" I asked.

Joel looked around to see if anyone was looking.

"A pack of smokes," he said.  He opened the pack.  "And it's full.  Not my brand but what the fuck!"

"Put them back!"

"Why?  He's not going to miss them."

"You're right.  He probably won't miss them.  But put them back anyway.  That's got to be bad karma or something."

A noise came from behind me.  Someone was unlocking the gate.  It was one of the busboys taking the trash out.  When he swung the gate door open, he froze, looking at us, then peering at the dead body.

"Dios mio!" he cried.

I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind.

"Hurry!  Get the owner!  We found a dead body!"

The busboy ran inside and that was our signal to get inside too.  We followed him in the door and in a matter of seconds, chaos erupted in the building.  The screams flew like shrapnel, dead this, oh my god that, gasp gasp.  The busboy pointed to us and my boss wanted a few words with me.  I felt like I was a little kid again, in the principal's office at my elementary school, in trouble for something I didn't do.

"What's going on?  My busboy is speaking in tongues or something.  I don't hablo espanol, dammit!" my boss said.

"There's something out back that... you might want to see."

"What is it, dammit?!"

"Just go look."

The owner stepped outside and walked to the fence.  He peeked through the gate and stood there, motionless.  He came back inside and leaned right next to me.

"Who is that outside?"

"I don't know, sir," I answered.

"Is he dead?"

"Not sure, boss," I said.

"I'm going to the office to get Jerry.  You do something to calm these customers down.  Don't let anybody outside.  I'll be right back."  He left for the back of the building.

Jerry was an off-duty cop who hung out here often, shamelessly hit on every woman that came in, and smoked pot with the owner in the back office.  He claimed that he wasn't drug-tested at work because of the high stress that cops must endure on a daily basis.  Sounded good to me.  He was pretty worthless, though.

I had a brilliant idea to calm the customers down.  I stood on a barstool and shouted.

"The owner said that the next round is on the house!"

Cheers and applause erupted and everyone rushed to the bar.  Mike didn't seem to appreciate the gesture much and began to busily make what seemed like hundreds of drinks.  Ours were first, of course.  Like I said, he's a professional.  And we drank our drinks, thankful for something, death maybe.  I lit a cigarette, Joel did too, and we sat back at the bar.

"Did I tell you about this story I finished the other day?"  I asked Joel.

"No.  What's it about?"

"It's about these two guys..."

The owner tapped me on the shoulder.

"Since you found the body, take Jerry out there," he said.

"Why me?"

"Take him out there or you're fired."

"Yes sir."

Jerry came around from the back with a thin cloud of pot smoke hovering around him.  His eyes were bloodshot and his skin was pasty.  I motioned for Jerry to follow me.

Jerry followed me outside and I led him to the gate.  When we got there, we peered at the dumpster.  There was nothing on the ground.  The body was gone.  It had vanished.  Jerry looked at me, puzzled.

"I must be really fucked up but wasn't there supposed to be a dead body out here?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Then where did it go?"

We walked around the dumpster, then around the building, then around the dumpster again.  He was gone and I was clueless.  We went back inside.

Jerry returned to the back office and I sat next to Joel.  Mike placed two fresh drinks in front of us.  We dropped some cash in his tip jar.

"What happened?" Joel asked.

"The body was... gone."

"Really?"

"He was just... gone."

"That's fucked up."

Joel reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the pack of cigarettes he lifted from the dead man's shirt.  He opened it and pulled out a cigarette, a Marlboro Red, not our brand but no matter.

"Want one?" he asked.

"Sure.  Why not."

And the drinks kept coming.

To download a version of this short story to your eReader, visit my Books page. Please support independent publishing!

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