The Power of Love

by Timothy C Goodwin

She pushed play on the jukebox and then plopped her little boy down in a booth like he was a purse and then plopped her purse down in his lap and then pulled her mace out but then dropped it but no one in the bar was paying attention to her anyway because meanwhile her boyfriend advanced his part of the “plan” and did a little leap so he could reach out over the bar in order to punch the bartender—her other boyfriend—in the face with the ring of a combination lock around his middle finger and the lock itself in his palm in order to make the punch harder than a bad girl’s dream, concluding in the bartender’s head snapping to the right and ejecting a considerable amount of personal matter; stools screeched in alarm, a table moaned as it was shoved, glassware clinked to register the punch’s points in some unseen video game, the other patrons uniformly leapt backwards from the epicenter of this (heretofore) eyeroll-inducing drama’s sudden, cruel bit of violence only to find themselves stepping right into another as she pressed the trigger on the reacquired mace and yelled FUCKERS! YOU FUCKERS! YOU FUCKERS! through squinty eyes and indiscriminate aim, and with her one man weeping on the floor and her other man singing FUCKER RIIIGHT? FUCKER RIIIGHT? in a crooked melody, she took satisfaction in the coughing and gagging and yelling until she, too, misjudged her own distance and got swept up in the coughing and gagging and yelling, a full-bar symphonic cacophony that barely penetrated the volume of her favorite track by Huey Lewis And The News, one that her little boy—still over there, still in the booth—ignored: he’s heard this song so many times before at so many bars, he no longer pays attention to it.

Timothy C Goodwin has writing and photography included in Maudlin House, JAKE, Roi Faineant, SWAMP, Moodboards, The Centifictionist, and elsewhere.. He lives in New York City.