Lock-In

The table top was such that the beer mat was stuck, curled and disintegrating into its surface.  With no time to dry between drinks, the damp ring was sunken from the weight of hours of lost conversation.  Smoke still hung low across the bar that morning as the sun came up and in through the thin curtains.  The air was densely and ominously thick, the atmosphere tense and reminiscent of tens of people having suddenly been forced from the room.  There were creepers clawing in through the rotting window frames in the bathrooms.  They had never been straight, the cracked tiles on the walls and floor, crumbling away to dust all the time and leaving a toxic ant farm of snaking grouting.  There were glasses still squashed in huddleds along every windowsill with beer growing flatter and flatter, and the three shot glasses smashed on the floor by the kitchen door were still lying on the linoleum in smithereens.  The sticky pool the shards were shadowed in had lost its shine.  The wonky art work on the walls had not been put up straight in the first place.  The till had been drilled to the counter top and nothing had been done about the doors that had been hingeless when they arrived.  One far corner of the room was stacked ceiling-high with barrels, slotted together with weighty metallic smoothness and propping up three bass guitars.  The naked bulbs hanging bellow the shelves behind the bar shone up in Technicolor through the bottles above.