Tell it to me any way you like but don’t stop talking. Please. I hear what I need to hear. We’ll make a deal. I’ll dunk this misshapen donut into this bad coffee and chew on this cigarette and not get drunk for an hour. And not talk back. I’ll thank my precious life for the sound of your voice; meanwhile, you tell your version of the story we all know all too well. What a lousy chair this is. I’d like to put it and its short leg through a window. But that would be wrong. It wouldn’t show the gratitude I feel. And anyway, rooms like these don’t have windows for the same reason bars don’t have windows. Oh, Felicia. Each day is more exhausting than the day before, then you get up and say your name and what you are and talk. Outside, we do nothing but get in each other’s way, you and me and all the others; here we sit in neat rows and face in the same direction, looking at you to help us in your turn. Hi, Felicia. You tell your stupid story of how you stupidly complicate your stupid problems, too stupid to see you cause them yourself and I swear on my life one more time that coming here is worse than any other problem I have and that I’ll never be back. And then I come back. If the meetings were held upstairs, Felicia, I’d have to go somewhere else, but in the basement at least there are no icons and we take our turns on the cross. I may have turned a corner, Felicia. The stupid things you say are starting to sound like the stupid things I say. Maybe I’m not the smartest drunk in the room.
Copyright © March 02, 2008 David Hodges
Very Short Novels 
6 comments
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March 2, 2008 at 7:22 pm
grantman
..sounds like a girl I once worked a suicide hotline with a long time ago…fortunately the relationship killed itself long before we had the chance…
grantman
Someday, Grantman, someone will compile your comments into a very lively biography! Thanks.
–David
March 3, 2008 at 8:19 am
Wizzer
Life is relative – “the smartest drunk”. Not sure anyone should aspire to that! I like the muddle & confusion – quite intoxicating.
Well, at least he has aspirations. Thanks, Wizzer.
–David
March 5, 2008 at 4:04 am
Litlove
What a brilliant snapshot of the awful morass of emotions that surround the attempt to break an addiction. All that fizzing anger at the impossible task of self-restraint being displaced onto, well, just about anything. But Felicia becomes the focal point, which I thought was such a clever evocation of the happiness the narrator longs for and rages against. Very powerful.
Thank you, Litlove. Everyone will get her chance to be his target.
–David
March 6, 2008 at 8:59 am
wailin
I wonder what a poem from you would look like, David. Do they exist?
No, they don’t, wailin, but thanks for asking. Little Worm is the closest I’ve come to writing anything like poetry in many years.
–David
March 10, 2008 at 5:31 am
absolutwillie
For the first time, you scared me David. But scared in a good way. It could be me on that lousy chair… Again, you rock!
Thanks again, Willie! For additional reading, A Lifetime of Fridays is scary in a similar way.
–David
March 10, 2008 at 10:23 am
verbivore
You do a fine job of getting at the complicated guilt and anger of someone in this situation. I particularly like this sentence:
Outside, we do nothing but get in each other’s way, you and me and all the others
Thank goodness for inside, huh? Thanks, verbivore.
–David