This is the type of bar you pictured yourself in, when you were younger.

Chipped cordial glasses teetering on cockeyed vinyl tables, pale leather booths, stubby candles and acrylic LEDs burning a dim burgundy, limewash walls with blustering artwork. A bartender who pointedly ignores you in favor of slanting over yesterday’s crossword.

There’s no smokey film of limply-held tobacco that fogs liquor bottles and drunken minds, though. That is something the law would arbitrarily dissuade and the current warmth would indefinitely prohibit, though an overactive imagination could not be held to those standards.

Your younger self would’ve imagined you a regular of this type of joint, of course, but in a way that belied no alcoholism or neediness. An air of casualty, scented like your older sister’s perfume and the starch of dry-cleaned skirts, the hallmarks of adulthood. In actuality, you stumbled upon it quite by accident—a heat wave in November that’s sent you scrambling for cover. Just yesterday you were thinking of finding yourself a scrappy tree for the holidays, a Charlie Brown. Today, you and the rest of the city have replaced wool and flannel for cotton and linen.

Stepping into the bar is less instinct and more self-preservation. Here is you, the girl that is truly a woman, wearisomely metropolitan, with chalky red lipstick and a book in your purse that you’ll bang about but will never read in public, surrounded by blocks of superiorly bucolic urbanites. And here is the bar, so succinctly placed, so carefully etched and nuanced, like it heard the whisperings and decided to lure the poor fool who’d read Sylvia Plath’s descriptions of the city and had decided to shove fists in their eyes and wander into a darkened alley instead.

You think of her often, that little girl with the precocious imagination. She would’ve loved this.

There is a picture of yourself from youth that you keep in your wallet, pull out when you’re maudlin, or pretending to be. You’re holding a petting zoo lamb, swathed in your grandmother’s beloved fox-fur coat for the amusement of the adults, drowning in lapels of titian. The lamb is squalling—it misses its mother. You are pink-nosed, chapped lips pulled into a jerry-built smile—you’re sucking back tears behind milk teeth to appease yours.

Were you ever truly that young? Or is it that, in your quarter-age, you cling to the idea of youth, of cherubic-cheeked little girls, to give you sustenance. To glean off their innocence, gnawing on the greasy bone leftovers of one moment in your life until the next, appetizing era is plated in front of you and you are suddenly no longer starved but too full to indulge. Time does not simply pass; it mildews, it molds, it festers and it rots.

The edge of the bar hosts a single corner stool, just awkwardly tall and oddly angled enough to have been kept empty. You squirm onto it, poorly pretending not to scope the scene out.

There’s a woman sitting at the end, in a corner. To be clear, there are many women around you—old women, young women, coke-thin and plump, pretending to be preoccupied and pretending to be alone.

But this one, she’s got a sheen to her. Like cling wrap, untouchable as if examined beneath a studio light, the world her step-and-repeat. She’s clearly older, but with skin like it was shorn from a baby, clinging to the concaves of her exposed sternum. A chic chignon, classy outfit. She reminds you of your mother, in the same way that your mother is reminded of herself when she looks at you, and that is why you don’t even bother with feigning disinterest before you writhe out of your seat and cross the sticky floor to her.

"Hi." You slide into the space between her open knees, noticing her features are even more so disarming, if not blurry around the edges. "I normally don't do this, but, well, hi."

You’ve caught the woman’s attention, but she doesn’t respond. You don’t know what you were hoping for; a hard pass, shy coquetry at being propositioned so openly, or brazen flirtation that takes the hard part off your shoulders. Instead she begins to conduct what looks like a test, with neutrality, and you are unsure of your results, or if it would be better to fail or pass. She stares at your shoes, faux-leather Mary Jane’s, at the mascara tarred under your eyes, at your unshaved legs and chin, at the mismatched earrings you’d thought amiable this morning but now worry are childish.

“What book do you have in your bag?” she finally asks, and after floundering for an inhale or two you toss Delta of Venus on the counter, not bothering to question how she knew you’d be carrying one.

She flips through, like she can see the exact amount of pages that you have a tendency to skim whenever alone in public to appear erotically aloof before giving up, and scoffs a bit under her breath. It’s an ugly, mildly humiliating sound. Like the shy scuff of sneakers on bleached linoleum.

She’s made her assessment, you suppose, because she takes a last sip of her cocktail—a rocks glass of what looks like whiskey, a chewed-up lemon peel on the counter next to it. She passes the drink off to you, and the bemused expression when you eye it propels you to choke the contents down.

“There’s something you need to hear, before we go.” She sighs, as if reading from a script. She grabs you by the upper arm—the first touch, the last touch, The Creation of (Insert Names Here). It doesn’t scald, it doesn’t send shivers. It feels like when your hand falls asleep, and you have to stroke it gently back to life.

“You’re not nearly as important as you think you are.”

Is this foreplay? Or maybe some type of degradation kink—you don’t think you’re into that, but what do you know? An older, beautiful woman much more experienced than you is leading you out the bar and into the muggy gloaming with little effort—who are you to question how the cards are pulled?

“I really, really don’t do this type of thing,” you feel like you must insist on the walk back to her place, but it falls flat. She’s two steps ahead, flashes a sardonic grin that withers worse than the gloomy, heat-swollen sun ahead.

It’s not until she corners you outside her front awning that you realize you never quite sanctioned what was about to occur. You didn’t get to awkwardly proposition her; and though she somehow seems to know yours, you didn’t even get her name.

She doesn’t seem to mind. Just walks you backwards into the apartment, mouth gluing hot and wet to your exposed shoulder, pointy pink tongue seeking out crevices and hollows.

Her movements are rough, jerky. Erring on the side of savage, but with a lack of passion that jars your immediate pleasure from your skin, lets it hover uncertainly over your body like separated by some invisible electric fence. The kind made to keep dogs leashed, to derive them of the pleasure of wind and salt and liberty.

Your knees hit the bed and she shoves you onto your back, and with sharp nails hauls your dress off of your body, ripping seams, scattering buttons like mice into corners. You flinch, the cat getting your tongue made literal. A palm crawls down your body, shoves fingers into the girlish placket of your panties, circles you.

“This is what you like,” she pants into your mouth, violent, fingers fisting the sensitive, girlish strands at the nape of your damp neck. Baby hairs, you think wildly, blinking away pinpricks of pain, little white speckles across your vision like the holes in the cap of a water bottle turned butterfly prison. A lifeline.

“It is?” you ask. You’d always imagined it would be, but—reality bites back a bit harsher than fantasy. All teeth, little gum.

“Yes,” she hisses, pragmatic bordering on accusatory. “You made me like this. Remember?”

It’s hard to tell at what exact point you realize it. Maybe when she finally kisses you, and you tilt your heads the same way. Maybe it’s when you sink your teeth into the lobe of her ear and she grunts like an echo of yours. Familiar features, familiar breath-smell, the little bicep birthmark that your grandmother dubbed an angel’s kiss now facing its doppelganger. This close, her pupils shrink in and out in time with the drilling of your heart.

Presented with this singular option, there’s only one question in mind—hardened and futile as a little pearl, spat from your wet, pinkening oyster of a mouth.

“Did you finish it?” you ask, and you’re breathless now for a different reason. Can you taste the success on her tongue, now that you think about it? Or is it the desperation, the rejection, of your own spit, like an antivenom curdling the coagulant, muting taste buds. “Is it published?”

She knows what you’re talking about, of course she knows, she feels and she bleeds and she comes just like you—with a hint of transactional performance, the despondency of the beautiful and the damned. How pitiful you must appear, to be shimmering with euphoria and shaking with terror and still think first of your inert art, your adolescent manuscript.

She doesn’t need to say it, but licks the words over your heart, to strengthen the blow. You have a lot to say about a lot of things, and almost none of it matters. Allows her fingers to soothe the sting with their wisdom. It’s just this, at the end of the day, at the cooling of the heat, the bottom dregs of the drink. Simple pleasures that make the nighttime tolerable. A dark room, a hand in your panties. It doesn’t matter if it belongs to you, or him, or her, or another version of you.

She’s hungry, she is gluttonous. She chews on half-baked words and spits them inside of you, shoves them deeper with fingers that hold calluses in the same clefts as your own. A looming miasma, loamy and musky, unfolds noxiously, and her teeth glint. A pit forms, a fruit knife beckons, and your hands both reach for the serrated edge simultaneously—

Flesh.

Wet.

Ripened.

Consumed.

You wake late. In the tangerine light of morning, you feel…coruscant. The word sits patiently on the top of your tongue, bestowed by an expanded vocabulary that sits snugly in a congealing brain. Your muscles are sore, your tendons and joints gummy, and each inhale pushes up against your lungs, prodding at the limits this strangely new body has set. In the mirror, your features sit ever-so-slightly wrong. Long and limber fingers pull hair—coarser with age in each individual thread but still silky smooth in diaspora—into an elaborate knot incised by half a dozen bobby pins with a sleekness and skill you have never possessed prior to that morning.

Everything is clearer-cut, in focus. Has gleam and glint. Has purpose.

This apartment wasn’t yours last night but it is this morning. There, in the corner, your collection of shoes; spindly stilettos to biker boots with jangling silver charms to demure kittens braying for a spin around the block. It’s all familiar: the sheets striped linen, the cupboard’s collection of blue clay mugs, the matryoshkas and broken seashells and empty wine bottles dripping cream candle wax on the dining table. Most importantly: it is empty, except for a fattened orange cat scraping its tongue against the edges of a sardine tin.

You dress simply, prototypical. Pointy leather boots with thin heels that would catch in subway grates for the more banal, a brandless Little Black Dress, a handbag you’d probably once coveted but now sling about negligently. You lock your door with a dangling keychain of moments that you will never remember.

There is a woman on the brick stoop, smoking. Her nails are long and yellowing, unpainted; her cough is thick, syrupy. She tilts her head in a nod as you pass, holds out a hand to stop you before you step over her. She’s wearing a thick coat, despite the fledgling heat, and withdraws something from inside its furry shell. A thin novel, pages (the words, too?) flimsy as onion skin, cover jewel-toned and therefore bland, monotonous. A familiar name is scrawled across its unbroken spine.

There is no victory here. There is passion that has found etymological kinship with zeal and resentment and fatigue. You test those words out as you accept the book and begin down the side alley. You don’t say goodbye.

Any storyteller will concur that it is always on abnormally-weathered days like this that patterns or motifs occur. That maid become mother become crone. That an onanist emerges from the scouring heat like molded ceramic from a kiln, resigned to shape themselves into these sibylline circumstances, these arcane occurrences. If it were to happen to anyone, at least it happened to you, an aspirant artist. Although, surely this wouldn’t have occurred if you dreamed of being a dental assistant, would it?

Your seat at the bar, a five minute walk away, beckons. Above it, a poorly-printed copy of Schenck’s Anguish. The crows are too dark, the bleating ewe too pale in her pain. You turn your back to them as you sit, straighten your hem.

A young woman pauses outside the bar’s grimy windows, airs at her pinkening brow. She’s got the rheumy, naive eyes of someone who thinks they know what they want in life, if only the silver platter were to appear in their palms. Up close, you know that the upper lip sweat above her cheap lipstick will be—not quite charming, but certainly not worth dismissal, either.

You wait.

You will be interrupted in five or so minutes, if one were to factor in the likelihood for the pretentious inner-monologue ramblings of a self-conscious virgin, which you most certainly do. It’s important to know yourself better than any other, after all. Tucked into the cheek of the novel, used as a placeholder, is a clearly cherished photo of a child with a lamb in her freckled, bare arms. You set it to the side, next to the martini glass that you don’t remember ordering but will enjoy regardless, and play-act at reading. The first sentence, like a repetitive nightmare:

This is the type of bar I pictured myself at, when I was younger.

Bridget Gwyn is a writer currently living in the Colorado foothills. When she isn’t in school, you can find her on a riverbank or in a coffee shop— she will probably be reading and pretending to write. This is her first publication. You can find her on Instagram at @bridgetagwyn or on TikTok at @bridgetbookinhand.