Anyone Could Walk Through That Door

 

 

Her eyes scanned the empty room and twitched briefly, a frown was too much effort she didn't intend to waste on the place. It wasn't dislike, but there was no love for the place either. The place was just an old bar, rundown but not really in disrepair.

 

It was dimly lit; not dark, but you'd be squinting if you wanted to look from one end of the room to the other; with burned down candles on every table and a few turned down spotlights over the booths.

 

Wendy sighed and looked down at the bar again, the glass she had been polishing for the last three hours still before her on a placemat. She didn't really feel like the glass needed any more cleaning, but she didn't really have anything else to do and it was something people did in movies all the time so she might as well indulge in some nostalgia for that sake.

 

 

The whole place was empty, except for the bartender-turned-”might-as-well-be-the-owner” who sighed every couple of minutes behind the stained bar and squeaked a few imagined spots from the glass in her hands.

 

A fly buzzed briefly against a lampshade in one of the dark windows before setting off to fly into the bug-zapper in the kitchen behind Wendy.

 

She sighed and looked over at the door with some of her very last ounces of anticipation. It didn't pay off.

 

The door could always open and admit anyone at any time, maybe with some story to share with the bartender, maybe with no voice but a pocket full of tips, but none of those ever happened anymore it seemed. A freaking repo-man would be preferrable to being alone all the time, thought the bored and lonely girl behind the bar.

 

She looked away, and as always, she sighed extra heavily when the minute-hand on the clock ticked past twelve and started its way down another lonely hour.

 

Wendy frowned properly this time as she glanced at the clock and thought bitterly that at least the hands on the clock met each other once every hour, the fastest hand on the clock having fallen off sometime the past year, not that she'd noticed when it happened.

 

In fact, she hadn't even noticed when the jukebox stopped working six months ago. Though to be fair, it was hardly ever used and for the past year she had been the only one there to actually play anything on it.

 

Maybe because she had been the only one there every night for that past year. Not for the first time she wondered how she would find the motivation to go back there and open again the following evening.

 

She sighed softly and pondered; again, not for the first time; how the financer of this place, an old uncle of hers perpetually travelling abroad, could afford to keep paying every single bill every single month when this place just constantly hemorraghed money.

 

 

 

She never got any closer to figuring it out, but it was one of the few things she could do around the place to keep her from losing her mind. The other things involved riveting exercises such as counting ceiling tiles, bottles and glasses around her as well as cleaning glasses that never needed any cleaning beyond dusting.

 

As the clock struck a quarter past three, and Wendy finally cracked her neck from side to side in an attempt to loosen up and refocus for shutting the place down for the time being, the door chime echoed through the place and froze Wendy with her arms behind her back at the apron's knot.

 

The bell almost deafened her and didn't even begin to prepare her for what she saw.

 

She just couldn't believe it: an actual person walking into her bar! Wendy almost panicked and hid under the bar, halting herself just as her knees started bending with weak pops. She was completely dumbstruck, her mind blank and hands ever so slowly moving to steady herself on the bartop.

 

The woman who walked into the bar stopped and immediatelly found the bar to her left before moving slowly towards the it and looked at something a few feet behind and above Wendy.

 

The woman was dressed smartly, Wendy absently noted: a grey blazer over a white button-up shirt and similarly grey suit-pants, going well with the black hair reaching down to the point of the woman's shoulder blades.

 

She waved a hand in the general direction of where she was looking, and after a few more seconds of staring Wendy started and looked over her shoulder. The woman had waved at the only bottle on the second-to-highest shelf in the cabinet against the wall, an unopened bottle of scotch of some unpronouncable brand that probably was ridiculously priced. Though Wendy would be damned if she could figure out if it was too high or too low.

 

She turned completely and took down the bottle, blew what little dust there was on the bottle away and opened it after a few seconds' struggle. The powerful aroma of alcohol assaulted her nose and she almost flinched before pouring a generous amount into the glass she had been polishing all night, alomst saddened to see her distraction go.

 

The woman in front of the bar placed a few notes on the bartop and Wendy swiped most of them mechanically into a drawer, not even bothering to count them and quickly hoping that whatever was left wasn't insulting as change.

 

The woman didn't even look at the money next to her glass, but just picked the glass up and moved deeper into the dim bar, choosing a booth furthest from the door and the bar as possible and disappeared into a couch with her back to the bar.

 

Wendy let out a soft breath she hadn't even realized she was holding and continued staring at the back of the head of the woman sitting at the far end of the room from her. She absolutely could not believe that she had a person in her bar. Far less what she should do now that she wasn't alone.

 

All of a sudden, because of this sudden and long-coming paradigm-shift, she felt as if she could not do any of the things she normally did behind her bar, for fear of disturbing her customer.

 

Polishing glasses seemed too noisy for some reason, and trying to strike up a conversation from this far away just seemed too strange to even attempt. Walking over there to talk was also out of the question, just what kind of bartender did that sort of thing?

 

So it seemed that, at least for the time being, Wendy was stuck doing nothing but stare at the woman in the booth, not being able to shut down even if she wanted to, but also with quite frankly nothing at all to do.

 

She sighed softly and after a long time of standing prefectly still she leaned forward and rested her arms on the bartop, staring straight ahead.

 

The bar was still dimly lit, if at all; the candles in their holders along the walls and atop the tables were all useless stumps and the spotlights in the ceiling were turned so far down on the dimmer switches that Wendy doubted they would even be luke-warm if touched.

 

The bar was still a bit rundown, not through misuse or harsh neglect, just the simple passage of time with a one-person staff who didn't feel like touching up anything that wasn't urgent or too noticable. She wouldn't call it a dive-bar really, if she was being fair, she would describe the place as a grey little hole in the ground, not really awful, but nothing anyone really noticed in this quiet part of an otherwise busy city. A place for, at least when they still bothered to come here, the type of people who didn't really have anything else and just felt defeated because of it. Half the people who used to come here (a woefully small number even then) were unemployed and the other half didn't really care about where they worked as long as they could have a drink there once a week.

People rarely even got drunk there, just a glass and a nod was usually enough. It wasn't a place for people who had just about nothing to go to feel worse and weep in front of the embarrassed bartender, nor was it a place to gather courage before improving one's life. It was simply a place to perpetuate a defeated attitude in people who couldn't really be bothered anymore to be depressed about their lot in life.

 

Wendy grimaced to herself. She had spent way too much time pondering the people who used to come there and wishing for at least more of the same once the trickle of people stopped altogether.

 

The bar kept quiet, no more flies had joined the first, and there wasn't even the squeaking of the cloth Wendy used to clean the glasses even if she had processed the fact that she wasn't alone to the point that she felt justified in doing something again. She guessed that she had soaked in too much of the atmosphere to be bothered. She would call the atmosphere apathetic, but she frowned at the thought and decided that it was something more to it than just simple apathy. She thought that apathy sounded too delinquent, too volontary, and that the perpetual atmosphere of the little hole in the ground was a touch too sad for that, even if sad was too strong a word somehow.

 

The silence was broken by the soft sound of a glass being put down on a table, audible from that distance by virute of the complete silence that otherwise reigned.

 

Wendy rested her chin on one of her hands and glanced at the clock. Ten minutes had passed since the door bell had startled her and she looked at the glass door. It was too dark to see anything past the nearest fire hydrant despite the gloom inside and Wendy slowly turned her head to look at the booth again.

 

The woman was still sitting down, her back to the door and Wendy, occasionally sipping her drink.

She never moved or made any indication that she knew she was not alone, she seemed to be in the same mood as Wendy, even if her face wasn't visible.

 

A long time passed, the clock finally giving up in the process and only showing the first half of the past time since the last glance, and the woman slowly rose from her seat.

 

She walked over to the bar, sat down on one of the stools in front of Wendy with her drink still in her hand (only half-drunk, Wendy noted) and gave no indication of why she had done so. Even though the woman kept looking at her drink, Wendy didn't feel like she could move from where she was standing and just kept staring at the top of the woman's head, slightly tilted over her glass.

 

The same slow ritual played out again, with the woman taking rare sips of her scotch and Wendy occasionally diving into her somber thoughts.

 

The woman eventually finished her drink, and when Wendy glanced at the door to see if the dawn would come anytime soon she frowned for a second at the barely-visible fogt gathered outside the door.

 

'So much for light forcing its' way in here and maybe sparking a conversation with a human being.' Wendy wryly thought to herself seconds before the woman rose from her seat.

 

She finally looked up, and Wendy idly noted with the smallest possible measure of interest that the young woman before her actually closer to her own age than her attire suggested, as well as the fact that the woman had violet eyes that didn't seem to be any effect of coloured contact lenses or anything of the sort.

 

The woman nodded once at Wendy, the first acknowledgement of the night that there actually were two of them there, and turned to walk out the door.

 

Wendy was gripped by a strange panic for a second, as she felt as if this was the last person she would ever see, even if she went out during the day, and she cleared her throat.

 

The woman stopped immediatelly and looked over her shoulder at Wendy who inwardly smacked herself for bringing attention to herself with no real reason. A few seconds passed and the woman's eyebrow slowly climbed an inch, Wendy cleared her throat again.

 

She took a deep breath, smiled the tiniest smile she could manage and croaked out the first words uttered in the bar in months.

 

”I, uh, we...”

 

It wasn't really squeaked or whispered out, but she felt as though maybe it had been better if she had, so that it would be easier to wave off as a strange cough.

 

Wendy flinched, but carried on, despite feeling as if she had committed the worst faux-pas imaginable in her own bar. The bar had become eponymous with silent nods and downcast eyes for as long as she could remember and for some reason she felt as if that was just why this other woman had come here and Wendy just destroyed any solemn mood the other person was looking for.

 

Nevertheless, she had started talking and had to finish a sentence somehow.

 

”P-Please come again, we're open all week.” Wendy finally sputtered out, fearing that she had driven off any sort of chance this person would ever come back to provide at least some sort of distraction.

 

Her fears were brushed aside though as the woman simply looked her in the eyes, nodded once and walked out the door into the maybe-early-dawn-fog.

 

Wendy flinched and grimaced at herself again as the door bell chimed, this time not as loud as the last time and turned to the glass in front of her on the bartop. She briefly chastised herself both for disturbing the woman as she left as well as for being embarrassed for the same.

 

Because at the same time, while the place was perfect for perpetuating a mentality of being beaten down to the point of not caring about it anymore and just trying to run out the clock, Wendy felt as if she had no right to deny people the right to sit at one of her tables and just feel the weight of the world on their shoulders without the motivation to shrug it off or even top collapse under it.

 

Wendy picked up the glass and started running her rag over it again.

 

Perhaps she had been there too long and kept the same atmosphere going too long after the people stopped coming, but she couldn't really see a point of changing anything. As long as the bills were paid in the same mysterious way and she didn't get run over in the street, she didn't see a reason to stop opening the bar every evening and closing in the morning.

 

Besides...

 

Wendy's mind wandered for a second.

 

Maybe she should keep the place open for one more soul to run out the clock in her bar.

 

A soul who had actually acknowledged that Wendy

 

And who knows? She might strike up an actual conversation some night.

 

And even if she didn't show up ever again, well; the woman had proved to Wendy,for a short time at least, that the door still worked for other people.

 

And until hope finally died again, maybe for the very last time, there was still a very small chance...

 

 

 

That anyone could walk through that door.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE END