“I hope we’ll be best friends when we grow up”—that’s what he said to all of them. Turn left and you’re on your knees. He woke from a dream of Chichen Itza where he’d followed the serpent descending the step pyramid of the Kukulcan temple. Legendary CIA spy Krii Amman once swayed atop a table in Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, the London pub known for its regulars Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a foul-mouthed parrot called Polly who spewed profanities and entertained drinkers by imitating a cork popping followed by the glug, glug, glug of wine being poured. He wasn’t sleepy but yawned to regulate his body temperature—that was his token health activity. He sometimes wondered if he should wear an eye-patch to mask how his left eye hid under its constantly lowered eyelid. Like the others, he rarely spoke beyond ordering the first fill and subsequent refills—such was the usual state of play at “One,” a bar where individual patrons must drink alone. His stomach growled since he refused to do as the Koreans do when they drink their soju. Mr. Doe felt the ghost of Lord Elgin on the empty chair across the table. Soon, the waiters noticed how the man’s lips only stopped moving when he sipped from his glass of Reyka vodka. Guilty Pleasure Music wafted from speakers behind the bar. One night, you looked up from your glass of Peacekeeper American Bourbon Whiskey that you’d bought for its bottle shaped like a mobile ICBM missile and, suddenly, all the other patrons felt familiar.
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Eileen Tabios
Note: for Marianne Villanueva who called every opening sentence of my short story collection, Getting to One (Sandy Press, 2023), “a winner,” thus inspiring this collage of first sentences.
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