“Half shot rum, short glass and lots of ice” she said her arm slid across the beer drenched bar. She’d snuck a smoke out of her concealed stash, and lit up as she started speaking to me. She leaned in, as they always do, a whisper would have saturate the space between us but she insisted on squeezing her breath into even this tightest of all places. “What’s your name?”.

I slid on my seat, rocking the chair back “Vincent” I . Pushing against her invasion, I moved back farther, ensuring that when she confessed all I’d have enough room to push through the only space she’d yet to claim. I’d carve a hole through the plumes of white fallout bellowing from her toxic lungs, and escape! She came closer, my exit-strategy foiled.

She kept on twitching - like she was being revisited by flashes of a sordid memory. Twitch, “you know I don’t come here often”, twitch, sniff, twitch, puff, twitch - pause for reminiscence - “my boyfriend, the callous fuck, made his first move here”. Interesting I’d say - a line which is as disturbing as a child sucking on a five rand coin.

Interesting indeed, here I was stuck again, imbibing someone’s now-snapped-momentary-romance. “Focus, fuck sakes, I’m talking” - “sorry I was somewhere else” I’d say, another well rehearsed line - another opportunity to chuckle at my misfortune.

Deftly rolling her smoke from one hand to another, she takes up her stare again - “so yeah this is where I come to unwind you know…what do you do to relax?” - I chop down trees, I work at an ant farm, I collect silkworms, I smuggle Ethiopians across the border, I am a rebel leader on the weekends, I am a secret agent working for the government -  “You know I usually just chill”, she’d lean back and give me that distrustful look, “you don’t go out, drink with your friends, chat up the girls, drive drunk and molest your door trying to get in to your apartment at four in the morning?”. “Nope”. “Not at all, ever?”. “Well I do drink from time to time and have a few braais now and again”. “Wooh look at you, you’re a bloody renegade”.

I don’t think she saw it coming - I kicked her chair out under her and whispered “this story is over, get back in your cage”.