A week later, I play like a God with mini-skirted angels flapping about me, applauding every prod and clatter of the balls as I drive them with unbidden ferocity into dark orbits below the table. Three balls away from shooting the final shell, black, into its reserved, deserved pocket even before my competitor has begun to invoke his superstitions, mutter silent prayers. Yet my eyes stay riveted on her, lingering serenely against the wood burnish, a mute witness to diminution, ruin.
She fixes my hapless teenaged opponent with her patented patient gaze, veiled, mysterious and filled with unknown promises, and he is then driven not so much by the game as driven to distraction, to despairing hope. I know why she perfects that glinting blankness in these half-lit corners, a blankness that's not vacuity save for a screen against which someone could project perplexity, torment, desire, and watch them swirl within her.
I look into the boy's eyes, scummy, pooling with salty frustration. But who is the conqueror, who the vanquished? I know that the meek inherit the earth, and he shall know it too. The spoils of defeat on this gaming turf are richer than we'll ever be.
Clammy palms, parched throat, a dull metronome against my right temple - vital signs, intact. The green of the table melts into my vision and spills into the green of her eyes. I strike the balls harder and harder with my slender projectile, pounding them into oblivion, the once-satisfying clatter and thuds shriller now than ever, so that the cigarette fumes wreathing the table seem to rise off the greens, born of hate and violence and lust.
Today, I imagine myself stab her eyeballs and send them reeling into abyssal sockets. Wielding the cue like a Mont Blanc, I weave hazy lines of destruction. She is my ego, my grief, and sad to note, a refined lady of the times. I'm a writer after all, and paint I must. Vivid images of whorish madness, merged with the subdued laughter of my life, and I write and take another swig of beer and mouth the words she says, “Bitch…”
