Clara bent over thesink, exhausted. Water drizzled from a second-hand spout, shooting out in spurts. Watching the resource drain away kicked her into motion g and she washed her hands.
My back aches like a bitch.She stretched, her hands on her lower back, and groaned.
She was showing, like a pumpkin or a marshmallow that was ready to burst in a microwave. It’d only been two months since he found herself stranded in the remains of the Everglade national forest, two months since she took back her life, and yet, she looked and felt like nine months had already gone by.
“Get your white ass back out here, Clara! The night crowd’s trickling in!”
“Coming!” She left the bathroom and went back into the dingy bar with its glow of Christmas lights decorated in gruesome waves behind the liquor bottles, placed there by a phantom from the past. Bars would never be a thing of Earth’s past. Everybody loved the novelty of drinking in public with strangers. She loved it too. It afforded her a job and one that came with enough tips that would easily save up into a nice security net for her and her baby.
Pregnant women were fun little novelties. And the way she was showing, so quickly and so soon, she was racking it in. A week didn’t go by without some drunken proposal for her hand by a stranger, and the regulars had already given up. The bar was going to have a baby. That’s how it’d gone down. The men, and even the few women that hung out here had decided in agreement they’d all raise the kid together.
A man in a cargo jacket sat down in front of her, and she smiled. “What’ll you have?” When he lifted his face toward the light, her heart stuttered a beat before normalizing. Her smile held.
“You got any scotch? Any Glenlivet? They still sell that around here?”
She turned but watched him out of the corner of her eye. “We don’t have that, not anymore... only Wells.”
“That’ll do.”
“Straight?” she asked.
“On the rocks.”
“Ice’ll cost you. Here it’s more than the alcohol itself.”
“That’s fine. I’m on vacation. I don’t give a crap about money.”
Clara shrugged and fixed the drink, sliding it to him. Another person walked in at that moment, a regular, one who liked her privacy and sat away and at the other end of the bar.
“So what brings you to this part of the world for vacation? Why not the stars?” she asked.
The man chugged his drink like the world was about to end and she quickly poured him a second before he could ask. Ice and all.
He was handsome, ruggedly so, but screamed military to his very core. They got the military customers sometimes but not often, and not men like this guy.
“I live in space. Lived up there since I was a kid and there’s nothing left to see for me there, but I was born right here in the central swamp. A good friend of mine told me to get my feet back on the ground for a while, so here I am, trying to figure out why I listened to her in the first place.”
“A lover?” Clara laughed as the guy started in on his second drink.
“More like a sister.”
“She sounds like an interesting person, especially if she can sway a man like you.”
“Oh she is, and what do you mean? A man like me?” He eyed her over his glass, his lip twitched up in a smile.
“Military. High up, I’m guessing?”
Clara began to feel at ease and moved to the girl at the other end. She handed her the usual soda, kept frozen for her within their precious ice. Her gloved hand reached for it and brought it toward her chest, cupping it quietly. She’d given up trying to talk to the girl weeks ago. Now, she only protected her like the rest of their small community had started to do.
There were rumors. Rumors that she wasn’t really human. But no one ever said it out loud, and no one would. Bengie, her boss, supplied the girl with hair dye and contacts and that was all that there was to it.
“You guess right.”
She went back to the cargo guy. More customers filtered in. She rubbed her back.
“How high?” she asked.
“As high as I want or willing to go for now,” he laughed but looked beyond her to the quiet, hooded girl. Clara stepped between them.
