Open starter for: @boneyardfm @boneyardstarters
It took the second cigarette burning down to the filter for Dan to realize he wasn’t actually smoking it. It just hung between his fingers, ash growing longer, a seasick grey. The bar’s low lights turned the smoke gold as it curled upward, dissolving into the thick air above the crowd. Voices bled together around him, brimming with laughter, glass clinking, music vibrating through the wood of the counter, but none of it seemed to reach him properly.
Too much to drink. Too many cigarettes. Too much life pulsing around people who seemed to know what to do with it.
Everyone in the room looked purposeful in a way he no longer understood. Leaning into conversations, touching shoulders, shouting jokes across tables. They moved like currents in a river, directional and inevitable.
Dan sat in the middle of it like driftwood.
Putting in work had never been a problem before. There had been a time when effort lived inside his bones. Long nights had felt righteous then. Reading files until dawn, chasing leads until his eyes burned and his jaw ached from clenching, it had all felt like momentum. Now it just felt like repetition.
The bartender slid another round toward him without asking. Condensation clung to the dark glass bottles, droplets gathering and falling onto neat cork coasters stamped with the bar’s name. Dan grabbed one without looking and tipped his head back. Two long gulps. Cold bitterness poured down his throat, pooling in his stomach before spreading outward in a slow bloom of heat. It climbed his ribs like steam in a kettle, simmering beneath his skin. His face flushed faintly, that familiar alcohol fever beginning to crawl through him.
He had been drinking for over an hour. Long enough for the stack of printed files beside him to become creased and damp from the bar’s humidity. Long enough for the same paragraphs to blur together until he could recite them from memory.
Names. Dates. Forensics. Witness statements that said nothing and everything at once. He had read them again and again, chasing the same impossible thought that maybe if he looked long enough the words would change, maybe the ink would shift the way letters did on an ouija board, sliding across the paper beneath invisible fingers, maybe his brother would reach up from the quiet afterlife and circle the name of whoever killed him.
Dan flicked the cigarette into an ashtray already crowded with its brothers and watched the smoke unravel into the night air slipping through the open windows. He wished he didn’t wish for things. Wishing implied alternate versions of reality. Worlds where the phone never rang, where blood never dried under fluorescent lights, where the last conversation hadn’t been so ordinary it felt insulting in retrospect.
Maybe his life would’ve been simpler if he’d surrendered years ago. Let his parents win their endless tug-of-war. They had spent years fighting over the direction of his life like rival captains arguing over a ship’s wheel. He could have let them tie the rope, so instead he had cut it.
Freedom had sounded glorious when he was eighteen. Now it felt like being an albatross over open ocean, wings wide, endless sky, nowhere to land. The kind of bird that could fly ten months without touching ground, sleeping on its own wings because the sea offered no place to rest.
Pointless if the storm came.
Dan realized the bottle in his hand was empty only when he tilted it again and nothing came out. Another one. His voice sounded strange when he spoke, as if it had traveled through water before reaching his ears.
He didn’t even like martinis. He used to complain they tasted like salad dressing, too vinegary, the kind of drink people ordered because they liked the idea of themselves holding it.
The bartender made one anyway. The glass landed in front of him, triangular and elegant in a way that felt faintly ridiculous next to the messy sprawl of papers and cigarette butts around him.
The sharp bite of vermouth twisted his mouth, but he swallowed it down anyway and signaled for another before the first had fully settled.
When he downed both glasses, the olive remained at the bottom of the glass, glistening under the dim lights. He fished it out with two fingers and held it between his teeth, chewing thoughtfully. Dan liked chewing on things when he thought. When he was younger, it had been pens. Cheap plastic ones mostly, chewed down until the caps split and the ink tubes bent crooked inside. Teachers hated it. Said it made him look nervous. Maybe he was. Maybe he still was.
Later it became ice cubes during the long nights at the office. Meetings running too late, fluorescent lights humming overhead, spreadsheets glowing cold on the monitor. He’d crunch them absentmindedly until his teeth ached and his coffee tasted watered down.
Toothpicks came after that. Toothpicks made a man look occupied like he had somewhere to be or something important to consider, his father used to say. He’d roll them from one side of his mouth to the other, letting the wood soften as he turned thoughts over in his head that rarely went anywhere useful.
Now it was olives. Salty little things sitting patiently at the bottom of expensive drinks. They gave his jaw something to do while his brain insisted on running in circles. Chew, pause, chew again. Like winding a clock that never quite kept the right time.
Across the bar, someone laughed too loudly. Glasses clinked. The low murmur of conversation drifted through the dim room like smoke. None of it reached him.
Dan leaned back slightly on his stool, elbow resting on the bar, working the olive slowly between his teeth. He realized that the habit wasn’t really about the taste. It was about the rhythm. The motion. Something small and repetitive that made the waiting easier. Because that’s what it always felt like. Waiting.
Not unlike a dog sitting at attention, muscles tight beneath its coat, watching its owner’s hand. Waiting for the throw that proves it has a job to do. Waiting for the whistle that gives its restless body permission to move. Leash pulled tight, so tight it might as well be a noose. The promise of purpose dangling somewhere just out of reach.
Dan stared into the empty glass like it might offer an answer and wondered, not for the first time, whether there had ever really been a bone to fetch in the first place.
He shouldn’t be thinking at all tonight. Thinking was the whole problem.
The seat beside him dipped slightly under new weight, but he barely noticed. Bodies came and went constantly in a bar like this. Shoulders brushed, chairs scraped, laughter flared and died within minutes. No one stayed still long enough to matter.
Dan stared down at the files again.
Maybe another martini would help.
His hand reached for his pocket to fish out his wallet. The first attempt missed entirely, his fingers patted his thigh like they were searching for something that had moved. The second attempt was worse. His elbow clipped a glass sitting too close to the edge of the counter.
The glass tilted. Amber liquid surged toward the rim, then gravity finished the job, pouring the drink directly into the lap of the person sitting beside him.
Dan stared at the spreading stain like it might politely retreat if he gave it a moment.
“Shit,” he breathed. Then louder, “shit, I’m so sorry!”
He grabbed a handful of napkins from the dispenser and immediately began patting at the stranger’s clothes with the frantic determination of someone who knew he was already losing the battle. The napkins dissolved almost instantly, thin paper shredding under the soaked fabric.
“Fuck,” he muttered, grabbing more. “I swear I’m not usually—well, actually I might be, but not like this—”
His words tangled together, thick with alcohol, but he kept dabbing uselessly at the spill.
“I’ll pay for the dry cleaning,” Dan said quickly. “Seriously. Whatever it costs. Pants, shirt, emotional damages, public humiliation, whatever category this falls under.”
dededos
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titsay
izzy806
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
