Bar, Graphite on Paper, 2011
The place smells stale, it smells of things that have been bottled up too long and are beginning to seep out. He positions himself at the bar. The tumbler is thick, squat. Whisky covers ice bricks: his optico-acoustico-olfactory pleasure is satiated. The verb 'articulate'. Words. He's not scared of them. Words are for playing with, it's not a thesis, although he is an educated man. The verb 'orchestrate'. Whisky. First the words, now the images, time to watch them flow before he messes with them. Cut and paste, rearrange, but stay shy of delete. Never delete. Conditional 3, if he hadn't done that he would have done something else. They all would. Things would have been different. Things would be different. Things where to buy valtrex online wouldn't have gone stale. Yes, they would. Same stale, different bottles. Same man sitting in a bar, alone. A different bar, but the same alone, which is the point.
*Andrew McCallum Crawford grew up in Grangemouth, an industrial town in East Central Scotland. His work has appeared in Lines Review, The Athens News, Junk Junction, Ink Sweat and Tears, McStorytellers, Weaponizer, New Linear Perspectives, Spilling Ink Review, Drey 2 (Red Squirrel Press), Ironstone, The Legendary, the Midwest Literary Magazine and the 'The'. His first novel, Drive!, was published in 2010. His collection of short fiction, The Next Stop Is Croy and other stories, was released in October, 2011. Andrew blogs at Wee Fictions: http://andrewmccallumcrawford.blogspot.com/. He lives in Greece.
