by Cam Eliot

Created on: April 15, 2008

This is a narrow hallway, long and thin, the anorexic arm of a house. Two light bulbs, one spent of its glow, and a bright-eyed exit sign bear down judgmentally. So many people in the hallway faces, blurred and blotchy, life in cubism a hand, knees bumping by accident, shoulders touching, flesh like sandpaper to mine, limbs unattached and floating in space. I want to apologize, say: I wouldn't get this close to you if I didn't have to. I wouldn't thrust my personal space into yours, but we're drunk. I blindly hurl out a hand, fingers catching the wall, suction-cupping there like a baby-on-board sign to a station wagon window.

Chin up, eyes up, I gawk at the people-shaped shadows loitering in my hallway mine now, my anorexic arm, my cattle chute, my path to Mecca. The exit sign casts them all into shades of red rose and ruby, darker still in the corners but paler beneath that one, staring light bulb. I should not have had that final shot of tequila, I realize. I can still taste it on my tongue, sweet and bitter, salt on my lips. I, small person in this fat, unruly crowd, begin to walk the wall toward the bathroom. Shadows move and weight shifts around me, voices in my ear and above my head: great party, still haven't kicked the keg, I saw you dancing on the table earlier.

I smile, laugh these are the things that come instinctively. Amiable, pleasant, nod and yes I'm fine excuse me. Skin skips across skin, hot and flushed. People I have never met shove to get me out of their way; people I know gaze at me emptily. Fingers slide and grab hold of the bathroom door and I stumble, heels dragging as though through sand, into the bathroom. I am accosted by bright light like only the dead see.

I squint at the girl staring back at me from across the room. My reflection in the mirror. Dark hair spilling poker-straight down her back, eyes smudged with Kohl and glowing. Pink cheeks, a shoulder bare as the wide collar of my t-shirt slips south; I turn from the mirror, my hand clutching the sink's edge. There is a keg in my bathtub, I remind myself, while staring at it. Two boys are hunched over it, pumping the pressure, the sound like a cigarette lighter being ignited. They pause when they realize I'm standing there, leaning there, the point of my hip now against the counter do I know either of them? I can't remember why I came to the bathroom in the first place; it just feels like this is where the crowd delivered me, face-to-face with the keg and the bathtub and these two

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