Bar Fly – Sophie Nardi-Bart

July 1, 2026

I let my mouth drop open. He places a hand on my cheek, squeezing the fat of it. With his grasp on me he tilts my face upwards, like he’s inspecting me.
        I worry I look like some kind of bug, staring cross-eyed at him this close. The expression on his own face is a dumb one. Dumber than usual; eyes lowered, lips flexing repulsively outwards like a blowfish pulled above the water. I close my eyes so I don’t have to see it and let his wet lips land on mine.
        His tongue finds its way inside immediately and begins to perform a colonoscopy of my throat. I push the front of my body into his. He pulls it in deeper with the bulge of his arm. He’s kneading my ass with the other hand, squeezing it so hard that I don’t even feel my body as much as I feel the edges which delineate it and so signal the presence of his own.
        I enjoy this in an abstract sense and wish it would progress to the point that I don’t have to feel it at all. To the point that I evaporate and watch from above as he paws at the air. Find a pleasure accrued not through the hard won actuality of having to lie there and take it; but a hallowed pleasure, that’s entirely his and so mine by proxy. That’s what I want.
        I think he’s close to pushing me up against one of the kegs, or even onto the floor, but instead he pulls away abruptly, wiping his lips ungraciously with the back of his hand and running the other through his hair.
        ‘Look, sorry, lemme grab the rest of the cans, yeah? So I can restock the fridge and then we can get out of here.’
        ‘Oh, yeah, okay, sure.’
        I stand looking at him. He looks back expectantly, which I translate into my being asked to retreat from the cellar. I shuffle back up the ladder and go straight to the bathroom.
        My lips and cheeks are swollen but not in an appealing way. I feel the urge to batter the face trapped inside the glass until the shards break into my fist and then that urge flips on its head like a coin into nausea and I find myself on my knees in front of the toilet.
        I can smell stale piss and shit, masked slightly by the top notes of bleach. I stick my head deeper into the bowl and retch up my dinner, which wasn’t much, just two boiled eggs and a ginger shot. The colour is an alien beige; clotted, like gone-off breast milk.
        I flush it quickly and stand up, feeling better already. I rinse my mouth out and splash water on my face. I definitely look less swollen.
        Harry is pulling on his jacket as I walk out of the bathroom. He looks like a model, but only a commercial one, like for protein powder or teeth whitening strips. The way he looks up at me as the bathroom door slams shut suggests he’s forgotten I’m here. I’m sure that’s impossible, so I shrug it off and walk around to pick up my own jacket, lying on the barstool where I’d left it after complaining suggestively that I had never once seen what goes on below that trap door behind the bar.
        I lean archedly against the solid wood of the bartop as he double checks all the appliances and turns off the lights, and then I follow behind him out the door. The air is like drool, like a mouth watering up involuntarily. I look up and down the empty street as Harry pulls a metal shutter down over the front of the pub. Once it’s locked, he kicks the metal violently two or three times. The kicks echo out like gunshots into the silence and make me jump.
        ‘What the fuck,’ I laugh awkwardly.
        ‘I’ve gotta make sure it’s really closed. I get nervous someone’ll break in or something.’ He kicks it twice more and then accepts defeat, throwing his arms down like he’d like to stand there kicking it all night.
        ‘Alright, so,’ he turns to me, ‘I think they’re all already at the club, so we’ll just go there, yeah?’
        ‘Cool.’
        We set off. The movement inspires a surge of confidence in me, makes me want to reach out for his hand. I don’t, because we’re walking pretty fast and have also each started rolling a cigarette. We chatter mindlessly, much more effortlessly than before. Everything’s easier outside, released from the pressure of four walls; like trepanning a skull. Outside we can be anybody: people who’ve just kissed, people who’ll soon kiss, people who might exist in a quantum state of kissing and not forever.
        The entrance to the club is a gash of neon yellow. Harry walks up to the bouncer, who seems to recognise him, and I flash my ID obediently behind. The door girl doesn’t look at me as I tap my card. She has a brown stripe at the front of her blonde hair, like an inverted skunk. She’s pretty, lips bloated slightly with liner or filler, the fur hood of her puffer casting a shadow down across her eyes.
        As I pull my wrist away from her stamp, I realise Harry has disappeared. This realisation sends a wave of lucidity through me, like I’ve been hit. I wander inside, neon yellow turning to a neon blue.
        The bar is a strip of acrylic, spilled liquor reflected in the overhead lights. I buy a double vodka soda for £2.50 from a dead eyed bartender with a buzzcut and an ugly tattoo of Garfield in a sailor’s heart on his bicep. I knock it back in two sips, squeezing the ribbed plastic until it cracks. I want another, but I’m afraid he might refuse to serve me. So I release the disfigured cup and stagger through to the main dance floor.
        It feels like crawling back up inside the womb. I squint through the strobes to locate Harry, more out of the need to not be alone than any active desire to find him specifically.
        He’s dancing in a group of bodies jerking together in perfect bpm. When I tap him on the arm, he fist bumps me with what feels like reluctance. We start dancing together; I try to force my body into exuberant and sensual movement. I close my eyes, to concentrate, but open them again when I feel a rush of empty space where the heat of his presence had just been.
        He’s dancing several feet away now, with a girl called Molly I think; a yoga or pole dance instructor or something, with a nose ring like a clamp and an antiquated floral crop top exposing her tight yoga or pole instructor stomach. I watch his hand slip onto the doorknob of her hip, opening and closing it onto himself. On her small body, his hand looks even bigger, spreading out and melting through her jeans to the hot flesh beneath. She rubs against him like a bitch in heat, which I can observe very well now that I’ve ceased pretending to move at all and am just standing there watching them.
Molly turns around into him, and he devours her whole. It looks like he’s eating her, taking all of her lips and some of her nose and chin in as he sucks her down, her tongue fluttering as it surfaces for air around his. I cringe, thinking we must’ve looked like that, though nobody was around to watch us.
        I let a handful of bpms cascade down over me like black gelatinous blossoms and then I turn on my heels and flee. I run out of the club, past the door girl who’s still sitting there hunched over herself, and into the street.
        I walk drowning beneath the weight of a grief like a weird waking ethanol dream. The psychedelic grief that I’m really me, stuck instead myself. I have no attraction to the delineation of my boundaries through violent sensation; through death by my hand or another. I just want all delineation to go away completely. To be nothing more than an idea. Not a body but a gas, gushing out of myself.
        Eventually I have to steady myself against the brick wall of an underpass and throw up into the gutter. It’s nothing but a forceful stream of vodka-clear liquid, some of it splashing back onto my boots and the ankles of my tights. I fixate on the image of Harry and Molly together, to try and force more vomit out. Then I conjure the dreaded image of myself watching them; injecting myself into the third position, hung from above. And then I wake up in all of my clothing, with no memory of the rest of getting home.