Lost Friends

I hadn’t opened my curtains to look outside since I saw that crazy mob and their bonfire last week. It doesn’t help that I keep hearing that man with the megaphone delivering venomous speeches to get the people riled. I wish someone would shut him up. Not me mind you. I’m not one to stir the pot.

Eventually my curiosity got the better of me, and I drew back the curtain just a smidge to look outside. This time I saw tons of people just milling about, almost twice or three times as many as last week! I didn’t even know there were that many people living in this part of Kijuju to begin with. I don’t think they’re foreigners given Mr. Sunglasses’ disdain for them, but God only knows where they’ve been hiding. I wasn’t too focused on the individual faces in the crowd until I saw one that made me shout out in surprise: It was one of my old drinking buddies from work! I haven’t seen him since he and some other guys were “transferred” to another work site. Every time I asked my boss about them, he just gave me the old runaround. Now I see one of them here of all places. I so wanted to open up my window and call out to him and say, “Hey, let’s go get a drink – my treat!” but I didn’t want all those other people tagging along.

At night the crowd dispersed so I thought I’d check out the old watering hole we all used to go to on the off chance that he or any of my other former drinking buddies would be there. The bar was in complete shambles. I had no idea that fight a couple weeks ago had completely demolished it. Now that I think about it, I heard that the owner had been killed during the melee. Poor guy. That’s probably why the bar had been ransacked as well. There wasn’t a thing left in there that wasn’t broken. Every last bottle of alcohol had been cleaned out.

I turned around to go home. You know what they say: Never fall in love with a bar. I should have heeded that advice. Now I have no bar and no friends and no woman. Worst of all, I don’t even have anything to drink.

As I started to walk away, my foot kicked something hard. I bent down to pick it up. It was my lucky day. I had stumbled upon an unopened bottle of whiskey! Today turned out to be better than I thought it would be. I’m sitting here enjoying the spoils of my little expedition. Anyone else drinking as they read this?