Another Night of Drudgery

I’m considering chucking my bloody mobile at the wall. It would crunch against that fucking cold Welsh bluestone, and even in a thousand electronic turds it would be as useful as it is in perfect working order.

The Carlsberg clock seems to be stuck at ten to two, over the heads of the last bums left in the pub. I’ll have to hike up to the stone circle if I want even half a bar of service that’ll give me a couple of minutes of connectivity, barely enough to publish this post, much less talk to anyone.

“You goin' to hang about all night, lookin' sour?” My grandfather just tapped me gently between the eyes, smiling. “That mug o' yours flattens the lager.”

“Nothing happening here, Taid,” I reply, swiping at his nicotine-stained fingers (and keep typing — I can at least pretend I’m connected to the outside world).

“Nothing's happened here since your mama flew off to South America, Amelia.” He pours an umpteenth round for the craggy bastards at the end of the bar. “Ever since then, the mams and dads keep their children locked away at night—”

“—and their secrets they whisper only to the stove in the empty first light of morning,” I finish, rolling my eyes. I dump a sack of peanuts into the empty bowl. “I'm not my mom.”

Gwyn Jones downs half his pint in one gurgling swallow. “Too right. Your mom were the sweetest thing ever walked the shores of Anglesey.”

I grab his glass and tug it out of his reach. “Gwyn Jones, you tell me one more time how you snogged my mother in high school, and you'll not get another pull from this bar so long as I'm behind it.”

He has the presence to look abashed for a moment, his graying hair falling over his soft pale face. Then he lurches for the pint in my hand, yanking it away like a triumphant child. He eyes my grandfather. “Nope, not a drop of yer mam, but you sure got a bucketload of your granddam in you, chit.”

Taid Gwion laughs behind me, joining the rest of the middle-aged peckerheads in the place. I mutter in my native Spanish, knowing none of them understand a curse word unless it’s filled with the ratcheting sounds of Welsh, and my grandmother isn't here to thwack me on the back of my head. She's sharp in any language.

I slump back on a stool, tapping my smart phone next to a soggy beer mat on the bar. “Taid Gwion, I believe these old buggers have had one too many, and are in danger of committing acts of public drunkenness, drunk driving, or being just plain unmanageable unless we cut them off and send them home to their wives and children.”

Taid raises a white eyebrow as the drunken idjits spew beer-frothed protestations in my direction. “You sure you want to inflict them on their innocent wives and kids?”

“Better them than me.”

Taid Gwion sighs, pulls me back through the bar to the tiny kitchen, where he fries fish and chips and not a damn thing else, no matter what the fancy pubs closer to the mainland serve. “Take the rest of the night, hey?”

I drop my head and start to stick my phone in my pocket, a strand of purple hair covering my eyes. “Sorry, Taid. It's okay. I'll close up.”

“I'm 63 years old, not 90. I don't need you here every night.” He pats my cheek and kisses me on the forehead. “Go on, go wherever you go when you're ready to scream your little Latin head off, and come back fresh tomorrow. Maybe plan a weekend in the city soon, huh?”

I nod. “Thanks, Taid.”

So now I’m off, up the hill, to those three precious bars of mobile service, to broadcast publishing capabilities, IMing, and Tal.

Hasta pronto, sheeplovers.

The Dot Matrix of Nowhere

This is my grandparents’ village. My village too, now, I guess.

It’s there. See the specks? All 5 of them? I swear, that’s a village. People live there. Really small, backwoods people. (I can say that, as none of them — or likely, the next 3 generations of their descendants — will ever master a computer to the point of reading some nobody’s blog.)

The bigger speck in the middle is the pub, where I am trapped, day and night, until either A) a meteorite hits us, B) the nuclear power plant on Anglesey melts us into gooey mounds of eyeballs and testicles, or C) some lotto-winning knight comes and rescues me. Or none of the above: I finally get up the gumption to leave the old-timers and have a life.

This is the village where my mom grew up. The village where she grew up and then ran away from as soon as she could legally buy the tickets to get the hell out. The village she'd told me about, that hangdog look in her eyes, all throughout my own childhood, until the accident. Until I'd been forced to move there myself, with the parents she'd missed but hadn't been willing to stay with.

By 15, the only big city my mom had ever seen was Chester. What, you’ve never heard of it? Neither has anyone else who doesn’t live in North Wales or the North of England. By 15, I'd seen Mexico City, Rio. I'd climbed Machu Piccu with my parents, tagged along on my dad's photography trips down the Amazon. I'd walked down the streets of Caribbean islands ripped apart by hurricanes. My dad let me smoke a cigar once in Cuba (that shit stays in your stomach for days), and we camped for two months in Patagonia while he read to me and mom every night from some famous travel book.

And then they died, and I came here, and everything paused and went to gray.