“Guess our ages,” the clearly slightly oldest one says. “Start with our widdle baby.”
I’d chosen the remotest nook of a bar that I choose daily at whatever hour my house gets cold, to bear in mind the end of my most painful, lonely, robust bond, which I’d since smoothly prolonged only another year. I compare the tiny bald face of the massive one, the baby, to the faces on both sides of him.
“How old am I?” asks the one by the wilted plastic palm tree. “Here’s a hint: It’s one of our birthdays tonight. You may be off one whole year and get so close, that way, at what’s it really.”
“I am being tricked,” I remark.
“How old am I!” she cries.
The baby says “She’ll buy you another Zombie if you do this.”
“You and her and him,” I reply, “want me to do something extreme, like say you’re only twenty-nine, or say the other way you have one of those middle-aged topless car boy-faces that can’t help but get things said to it, when really you and him are both exactly thirty-five—”
“I’m thirty tonight,” the baby crows.
“Do me,” adds the woman, creasing the same amount of shallow creases in the same places in her face as the oldest one, who adds “Do her.” Is this a family and just more broad-minded than I about what blood-related people can do for fun?
I pause, to give off contemplation.
I tell her “You’re turning twenty-one and you seriously should never be here.”
“I’d like to buy you one Zombie for every remaining second of your life,” she says, “but it’s not your birthday. You’ve said all the completely right things to us.”
“What should I take back about what I’ve said?” he’d asked the last night of that last year. “That you have everything to do with why you don’t ever enjoy yourself? Or that your desire to avoid permanently damaging me does not necessarily accompany your intimatest instinct?”
I was seeing the upshot of this instinct until, mid-pump, forbidding my bidding, his dry hand covered my eyes, and it wasn’t even close to my birthday. This flash lolls in my stomach as the jet-red of a pressing palm.
Selen Ozturk is a San Francisco-based writer with work in The Point, Full Stop, HAD, Senses of Cinema, Socrates on the Beach, San Francisco Chronicle, SFGATE, and more. @writingenjoyer on Twitter. Listen to R.E.M.