We walked through the dark of night. The city air was growing thick with booze and violence already, so our legs moved faster than they did during the day. I saw short, slender men scurrying, gazing around them with wide, fearful eyes, as if they were hunted for sport. A man bent over to talk to a girl on a bench, and an empty beer bottle rolled out of his pocket.

“Oh!” he exclaimed. “Oh,” I mimicked.

We were walking further and further from the safety of the bus stop, where only sober men operated the little houses on wheels.

We went to a bar, apparently named after a famous director. It was lodged on the side of the river, on the edge of a busy road where cars roar and hush back to silence.

A kind man in overalls asked me how my monday was, though his voice got carried away on the breaths of customers. Everybody seemed desperate for someone to hear their chatter, to dig for their layered feelings underneath, to excavate their dirtiest parts. You could hear it in their tones.

That’s why I didn’t immediately hear the man when he asked me about my day. You don’t expect that type of question from a bartender, either. Did they want me to be honest? Probably not, because in ten seconds someone else would try to lock gazes with them to get a refill. But a “fine” seemed boring, and I wanted to come across as one of the good guests, the better guests, the guests that they would tell their partners about after a day of work. Why couldn’t he just pour my beer and stop putting me under that type of pressure?

His eyes grew more unsure with each second of silence that passed, as if he regretted the question. That made me feel sorry for him, so I told him that I just came out of class. I presented the answer as a gift, though he didn’t know me and couldn’t care less whether I had class or not. It seemed he wanted to prove that he was not like those guys outside. He was nice, and proper, and I believed him.

When I had folded myself neatly between the pile of bags and umbrellas outside, a man came up to us to say that he heard in my accent that I was also Dutch. It seemed I was destined to have my defenses up tonight. After a while, he said he was sorry for interrupting us, so I said to him that it had been no problem. He answered that he would go get his pint from inside in that case. Unbelievable. The cars kept on creeping around us, edging their way towards the traffic lights, and screaming loudly when they were freed from their constraints.

Once returned, the man told us that he was a DJ, and that he felt like a child around his married friends. He also gave us advice about publishing. With a dismissive flick of his hand, he said that they cannot teach you that type of stuff. He smiled widely, half afraid to be rejected, and half indulging himself in our company. Ignorant of the flash of warning in my eyes, he continued talking, not listening. It seemed he just needed an audience, because you couldn’t go talking to yourself in the streets. I left.

On the way back, I braced myself. But something strange had happened. The moon had descended from the sky, the massive orb floating about three meters from the earth, glowing. The lights of shops and cafes were the stars, and the streets were suddenly empty. No men, no cars, no beer bottles. I walked the street, my personal rainbow road, the celestial bodies forming a bubble around me. They took me above the buildings, and carried me in between chimneys, and spun me through electricity cables.

Without any sense of time passing, the stars placed me safely in the bus, as if a mother had carried me to bed after falling asleep in the car. The bus driver looked at me, and he was my dad. The folds in his cheeks told me everything would be okay once he closed those doors. I looked up at him gratefully, wishing to take a star from my bubble and give it to him. But I knew the bubble would burst, and I did not want that just yet.

I sat down, and the moon had followed me outside the window. The orb glowed and flickered, and I shouted at the bus driver that he should turn around and look. It would make him happy, and he would be grateful.

But when he turned around, the orb had burst. There were shards of moon on the ground, flickering with the last flashes of life. The stars were gone, and when I looked up, they all had made their way back to the sky. I was in the chair that a drunkard had pissed on only a couple of days back, drunk out of his mind at four in the afternoon.

The teeth of the outside world gnarled at me, saliva dripping from their yellow teeth. The bus driver sat looking at me with a mad grimace, and the bus filled with all the people I had run away from. With a flick, the bus driver’s foot yanked down the speed pedal, and flew us into the river. When we entered the warm embrace of the water, the only thing I heard was the clink of a glass bottle on the pavement.                                                                    

***

Lucy Olsman (she/her) is a 24-year-old Dutch student of MA Creative Writing at UCC. She has also completed her English Literature master in Groningen in the Netherlands. Her work has appeared in Motley Magazine, Double Dutch (forthcoming) and Abyss Literary Magazine (forthcoming). She is currently based in Ireland and is finishing up her novel Little Princess.