The Drowned Life

The Drowned Life

By Jeffrey Ford

Hatch floated down the long empty avenues of Drowned Town, a shabby, but quiet city in a lime green sea. Every so often, he’d pass one of the citizens, bloated and blue, in various stages of decomposition, and say, “Hi”. Two gentlemen in suits swept by but didn’t return his greeting. A Drowned mother and child, bulging eyes dissolving in trails of tiny bubbles, dressed in little more than rags, didn’t acknowledge him. One old woman stopped, though, and said, “Hello”.

“I’m new here,” told her.

“The less you think about it the better,” she said and drifted on her way.

Hatch tried to remember where he was going. He was sure there was a reason that he was in town, but it eluded him. “He started looking up and down the streets for a pay phone. After three blocks without luck, he saw a man heading toward him. The fellow wore a business suit and an overcoat torn to shreds, a black hat with a bullet hole in it, a closed umbrella hooked on a skeletal wrist. Hatch waited for the man to draw near, but as the fellow stepped into the street to cross to the next block, a swift gleaming vision flew from behind a building and with a sudden clang of steel teeth meeting took him in its jaws. Financial Ruin was hungry and loose in Drowned Town. Hatch cowered backward, breast stroking to a nearby dumpster to hide, but the shark was already gone with its catch.

On the next block up, he found a bar that was open. He didn’t see a name on it, but there were people inside, the door was ajar, and there was the muffled sound of music. The place was cramped and narrowed the further back you went, ending in a corner. Wood paneling, mirror behind the bottles, spinning seats, low lighting and three deadbeats – two on one side of the bar and one on the other.

The drowned life. Photo by Elena

“Got a pay phone?” asked Hatch.

All three men looked at him. The two customers smiled at each other. The bartender with a red bow tie, wiped his rotted nose on a handkerchief, and then slowly lifted an arm to point. “Go down to the grocery store. They got a pay phone at the deli counter.”

Hatch had missed it when the old lady spoke to him, but he realized now that he heard the bartender’s voice in his head, now with his ears. The old man moved his mouth, but all that came out were vague farts of words flattened by water pressure. He sat down on one of the bar stools.

“Give me something dry,” he said to the bartender. He knew he had to compose himself, get his thoughts together.

The bartender shook his head, scratched a spot of coral growth on his scalp, and opened his mouth to let a minnow out. ”I could make you a Jenny Diver… pink or blue?”

“No, Sal, make him one of those things with the dirt bomb in it… they’re the driest,” said the closer customer. The short man turned his flat face and stretched a grin like a soggy old doll with swirling hair. Behind the clear lenses of his eyes, shadows moved, something swimming through his head.

“You mean a Dry Reach. That’s one dusty drink,” said the other customer, a very pale, skeletal old man in a brimmed hat and dark glasses.” Remember the day I got stupid on those? Your asshole’ll make hell seem like a backyard barbecue if you drink too many of them, my friend.”

“I’ll try one,” said Hatch.