I’d say she walked into the bar, but it was more of a lurch. Her smile was crooked, lipstick smudged like someone had slapped her around more recent than you wanted to think about. She looked like trouble with a capital T.
Then we saw the blood stain oozing near the center of her shirt.
She wasn’t pretty like in the magazines — she was earthy, real, the kind of woman who made good men check their wedding rings and bad men forget they were wearing one.
“What’s a girl gotta do to get someone to buy her a drink in a joint like this?”
The room went dead quiet. The jukebox just stopped playing, the ceiling fan forgot to spin. The blood stain on her shirt grew like bad news. She tried to take another step, but gravity had other plans.
A couple of old slot-machine angels caught her before the floor could. Steve, the bouncer from the rectory — yeah, that one — lifted her like he was carrying the last piece of hope left in town and laid her down on the pool table. “Ain’t that the lady that used to march in the protests?”
Lucky for her, Doc was only three drinks into his usual Friday-night stupor and still knew up from down. They hauled him off his stool and propped him beside her. His grin sobered fast; one look at her vitals drained the red from his face. “It don’t look good,” he rasped.
“Who done this to you?” came a familiar voice through the crowd around the table. The sheriff’s faded southern drawl, one that used to ring strong and true. But he was already down in the bad half of a bottle of good Scotch and nobody paid him much mind. Besides, we all knew her story; we knew who was out there.
“He’s meaner than I thought,” she said, breath ragged, blood still oozing through the fabric. “And he’s got his pack with him — laughing, lying, and loving every bit of it.”
“They never stop,” said the lady from the slots, the one who caught her when she started to fall. “Like a flash flood that catches you off balance, lies wash over you before you can think about the first one. Then … it’s too late.” She shrugged, looking down at the floor.
A voice in the back said _somebody has to do something_, but no one moved, murmurs of “it’s too late now, hopeless”, floated around the room.
Her voice was just a whisper now, hard with effort. “Somebody has to go out there, confront the bully, win or lose; it’s our last chance.” The green felt darkened under her … slow, quiet, crimson in the light.
Her eyes fluttered closed, but her chest still rose and fell in a slow rhythm, a march no one wanted to watch but couldn’t take their eyes anywhere else.
The lady from the slots leaned in close. “What’s your name darlin’? You haven’t told us your name.”
“Liberty,” she smiled. “My name is Liberty.”
Somebody said, loud and clear. “No one should go out there now. We all need to go. We need to go together. There’s more of us than them.”
From the back of the room a weak voice said: “There will be blood in the streets!”
Doc looked up from the woman. “There already is.”
Thanks for reading Dante’s Descent! This post is public please share it if you think it will make people think, act, be brave.
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