VICTORAY SAWA No. 3

A haze fills her mind and then she wanders off. She wanders into the back room. In the back room is a boy spinning postcards on a small table, taking a sip of whiskey on ice and then spinning a postcard again. He looks up from this mundane activity and catches her eye.

"You know," he says to her, a stranger who seems to recognize her as nobody else in the place does. (Because she came alone.) "You know, way back when...

(He is referring to a simpler time, when he first met her. She does not remember this. He was young, nine years old, and she eleven. He sat on an overturned paint bucket, his knees sticking way up and pointing at the sky, and she walked past with her mother. He, out of loneliness, threw a crumpled up paper at her. It was a note that he had written, not for her, but for a pretty girl who walked by. The note read "I like you, will you be mine?" She never read the note. The paper bounced off her head and landed on the ground, and the girl's mother gave the boy a nasty look, grabbed the girl's hand, and walked off. The boy blew a bubble, from the gum he rolled around underneath his tongue, and spat a rapid spray towards the sky.)

back when we were younger, you were the prettiest girl I ever saw."

"What do you mean?" she responds, her eyes becoming more and more clouded from drink.