On the House

by Colleen Anderson

Jordan hated everything; wife left him for goddam grooming parlor, boss said he wasn’t meeting his quota.

He’d show them quota. He stormed into a bar, each person’s face hidden in the sins of their past.

 “Keep ‘em coming,” he ordered, slapping down his credit card. He would join the sinners.

The bartender snorted. “One rule. Don’t pass out. Never pass out!”

Jordan flooded his pain with whiskey shots and beer; then someone with too white a grin bought more.

Severe abdominal pain woke him. Straps restrained him, tubes leading to the bar.

The bartender smiled. “You’re on the house.”

Colleen Anderson

Colleen Anderson’s new and forthcoming fiction and poetry are in The Pulp Horror Book of Phobias, By the Light of Camelot, Canadian Dreadful, Tesseracts 22 and others. In 2018, I edited the Alice Unbound: Beyond Wonderland anthology, and a collection of my dark fiction, A Body of Work, was published by Black Shuck Books (UK). www.colleenanderson.wordpress.com.