The life of Peter the Troll is only a little less lonely with company. The bar provides drinks to forget and forgive and another meal that didn’t have to be cooked and washed up after, but simply ordered off the finite selections of the evening. Little interactions come clean and easy if you ignore the laughter behind your back when you go home half drunk by seven o’clock to read obscure books and look at pictures of another life that you left long ago. Peter remembers his time with the ladies, his ladies, but now spends so much time in his mental and social cage that it seems that the wall were always there but he didn’t always notice.

Once something is slapped as truth it gains an undeserved substance that can be used to build another wall that can be used to jump into the next abyss. Or it can be used to fashion a key to unlock the cage long enough to feign rapport and enjoy amiable counter service, gratuity not included.

Watching the ebb and flow of people from one night to another sitting on the edge of a nightlife fading is the job of a keeper and a giver. Peter’s hands are already full so everything else is expendable, just another open tab, just another show, just another night surrounded and alone. Still, there is a certain gratis energy that sweeps him into bottles of wine, cold pints, and chilled libation accented by the fruits of unpaidlowpaid laborers in the citrus fields of some warmer clime while its snowing outside and people come in stomping, looking for one, seeing many, and finding nothing.

Sitting under the bar becomes comfortable despite the incessant drips and clip-clopping of high-healed hooves.