She sits alone at the bar and thinks how she’s an archetype lyrical subject for phony romantics, men mostly, with scruff faces and long oily hair constantly tucked behind flaky ears and beneath hundred dollar camel hair hats that every hopeful idiot wears and strums an old Washburn in his room at midnight while the house party in the other rooms and all around begins to unravel when the bad cocaine from Terre Haute arrives and someone has slipped the sweaty pads of finger tips against a cold, bare lower back otherwise unexpected and undesired toward any form of embrace, but reluctantly, because it’s been a rough year and the finger touches are delicate like she is with her tulip petals at work and cautious like a kindergartner unsure of the right question to ask for a bathroom pass, she allows further exploration by those fingers, just so his confidence may grow and maybe that will arouse her attraction to him, though all-the-while wondering what low-pitched, sad song he is working on in his bedroom, and what new galaxy-eyed green lush sits on his worn double mattress with him; the one covered by a flannel quilt he’s had since childhood; covered in stains unpleasant to imagine from whom, threads loose allover and a couple rips from a grayish cat once named Dizzy long lost to the freedom of the alleys, the mice hunt and the fucking; “Do cats fuck?” she always wondered, or was it pure instinct driven; no lust, no dominance, no power; no emotion; no desperation; no desire, how wretchedly primal, how programmed, but how free; to find and fuck on instinct only, how easy; she swallows down the rye whiskey in front of her and thinks about his sad songs all about fucking really.