Prose by Heather DeBel

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Stumble Inn

There’s a bar in the woods called Stumble Inn where guys get drunk after finishing long shifts. They have hard hands and dirty mouths. They throw nickels into the jukebox forgetting its broken.

They are proud of all the wrong things. How much they can put down, the laws they’ve broken, people they’ve spit on. I know nothing about their children. I know everything about their uncles in jail, cousins in biker gangs, fathers who died of cirrhosis.

They like to give me advice.

Don’t have kids.

Don’t get married.

Don’t get old.

Don’t drive home from a Bob Seger concert with a half-drunk bottle of whiskey in your passenger seat and blow in your glove compartment.

Jimmy tells me about the time he passed out in the road two years to the day after his son passed away. Someone swerved to miss him, hit a mailbox. You drunk asshole! The guy driving yelled, before he kicked Jimmy in the face and drove off. Jimmy has a half moon scar on his eyebrow that he says, “practically disappears” during a new moon.

We call him crazy. We like to think these stories are true.

Joe’s father jumped off the George Washington Bridge to avoid being beat to death. He had won against a mobster in a poker game. Apparently, it was a heated game.

Harry is my favorite. His glasses soften his eyes. When drunk, he talks about his mother with a mouth that sounds swollen. Without warning, her head had fallen into her plate of turkey during Thanksgiving. He claims she died of a heart attack before her head hit the plate. This life wasn’t for her, he says.

The guys talk to me like I haven’t lived. Their tone says, sit down little girl, let me teach you something. Maybe they’re right.

They don’t know my mother is the drunk who painted the side of Stumble Inn. These days, she’s the kind of drunk who stays home to wallow, though she used to be a frequent at the bars around here. I like to hear of her singing and dancing, a glimpse of my mother I might never see again. I look for her in the stories they tell me.

When I get home from the bar, most nights I drag her in from the lawn. She’s an artist of sorts. She used to get paid to paint murals before she got too drunk to even do that. Her art was strange, mixing neon colors to paint pots and pans, dressers and couches, some of the most colorless things. We need more color in life, my mother always says. We need more color. When she stopped getting paid for it, she painted buildings anyway, her drunken eyes blurring the lines between ultra blue and radiant red. Our very own fire lake on the side of Stumble Inn.

I’m not sure why we all keep coming back here. I like to think we are looking for people we’ve lost, still gripping onto an old life that has already slipped away. I like getting drunk on whiskey and what reminds me of my mother until I’ve had enough. That’s the problem though, isn’t it? It’s never enough.