Odium

Detestation; hatefulness; disrepute

Ferg pushed open the saloon-style doors and saw a blind woman dovening over a player paino--her fingers hovering over it and her mouth twisted in a lost kind of angst. Several men, broad-backed, sat at a table near her. One of them wore a backwards hat. They all fisted pints of beer, sighing and looking down at their sweaty forearms resting on the table.
There were no windows in the place, no flourescent lights or advertisements. Just a few bare lightbulbs fixed into the ceiling where exposed ventilation tubes crawled in a endless monochromatic confusion. Ferg fingered the card he received in the mail the day before inviting him to an exclusive party at a bar he had never heard of. The directions he followed took him on a familiar highway to an exit he had never seen before.
He sat down on a stool at the bar, which was to the left of the bank of tables and the piano. To his left there was an older looking man with an enervated face and no shirt. His fists were wrapped in gauze and ragged cloth. In one hand he grasped a glass and with the other he steadied a dead body of what looked to be a younger version of himself. The corpse had its own stool.
Next to the boy was a man whose arms and legs looked to be tied in sevreal knots, only a nose and an eye showing through the mess of his limbs. Two young men sat on either side of the tangled man, and checked their watches every minute as if they didn't want to be late for an appointment.
At the end of the bar, to Ferg's right, was a clown dressed all out like he had just come from the circus, a big blue tear painted on his right cheek. The clown touched his face and sipped a beer and talked about the weather with a man wearing the ashy shirt and overalls of a firefighter. The firefighter flicked a zippo on and off, his eyes getting lost in the flame.
The bartender, who was dressed as Abraham Lincoln, approached Ferg from behind the bar.
"Invitation, please," he said.
Ferg unfolded the paper from his pocket, Lincoln looked at it and nodded, putting the paper in his apron.
"First time at The Odium?" he asked.
"Yeah," said Ferg.
"Well, what can I get you?"
"Actually, I have a question. I got that card in the mail with a note saying the manager wanted a story written about this place. Do you know where I could find him, or her?"
"We don't have a manager," Lincoln said, "do you work for a newspaper?"
"No," Ferg said, "I'm just a college student, well, grad student, actually. I'm getting my MFA in creative writing."
"Hmmm," said Lincoln.
"The note, uhm, said there might be a publishing opportunity for me, do you know anything about that?"
Ferg twisted the watch on his wrist, and saw the corpse sitting next to the boxer begin to fall as the boxer caught it with his free hand. The firefighter chuckled at something.
Lincoln cracked a faint grin.
"To be honest, kid," he said, "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."
Ferg turned to the table and chairs, the four men still hunched together at their table, and the women still dovening back and forth at the player piano, her hands still floating over the keys as they played themselves. Ferg heard the clown ask for another pint and he looked around for the door that he came in through, but he couldn't find it.