she orders herself a martini, shaken but not stirred. the barman says, that’s very bond of you. she smiles, well i’m not very fond of you at all.

her girlfriend saddles up to mister tall dark & handsome and even though he talks to her, he also makes it a point to flash his wedding ring. she’s not blind but she hasn’t spotted her next target yet either. their gay friend is just miserable, no one showing up even on the edge of his scope, this party was so utterly straight. not one lamb amongst these butchers, he mutters to himself fingering the straw of his pina colada.

they were at a wedding or some sort of fund raiser, she finally drunk enough to forget which was which. her friend had moved on to a balding man of forty three but only because he reminded her of a high school sweetheart whose hair was longer and thicker than hers. instead she cautiously placed her maritini on a nearby table, on someone’s half eaten dinner plate actually, and made a bee line for the ladies room. their gay friend interfered, cutting across her path and scooped her into some nonsense jig that could’ve been the conga but done with bag pipes.

this is the man for you, he whispers, spinning and tilting her hips into the right direction. she thought she saw whom their gay friend meant, but there were dozens of men, collared shirts with loose neckties, untucked and sweaty armpits in her field of vision that he could’ve been anyone but none struck her as worth noting, worth stopping the increasingly desperate urge to find the ladies room. she caught a glimpse of her friend now chatting up the barman, all youthful reminders now having been laid aside.

be right back, she tells her gay friend and resumes the necessary trajectory for urinary expulsion. she makes it and finds girls her age and younger dabbling in eye shadow and lip stick while two come out of a stall pinching their nostrils and blinking their eyes. if only it was that easy, she says to herself, going into the very same stall to piss it all away.