Black Glass by Karen Joy Fowler Page A

was bleeding. But worse than that, ginger ale laced with bufotenine was soaking into the cut and into the skin around the cut and way down his wrist. He had dosed the Shirley Temple to fell a linebacker with a couple of sips.
    Harris dropped the tranquilizer gun and groped blindly to his right until he located a wet T-shirt. He rubbed his hand with it, all in a panic. Someone slapped him. There was a scream. The hatchet sliced through the air above him and lodged itself into the bar’s wood paneling. The tune from Super Mario Bros. 2 played on. The other singing started, in cacophonous counterpoint.
    â€œAn awful foe is in our land, drive him out, oh, drive him out! Donkey-faced bedmate of Satan,” the loa shrieked. She struggled to remove the hatchet head from the wood. She was an enormous woman, a woman built to compete in the shotput event. She would have the hatchet loose in no time. Harris looked about frenziedly. His heart was already responding, either to bufotenine or to the threat of hatchetation. The tranquilizer gun was on top of Super Mario Bros. 2 and under the loa’s very feet, but farther into the bar, at a safer distance, Harris saw his maraschino cherry on the floor. He dropped, ignoring the alarmed flash of pain from the injured knee, and groped with his uninjured hand. Something squished under his palm and stuck to him. He peeled it off to examine it.
    It was a flattened cherry, a different cherry. Now Harris could see that the floor of the Gateway Bar was littered with maraschino cherries. One of them was injected with tetrodotoxin. There was no way to tell which just by looking.
    Near him, under a table, a woman in a wet T-shirt sat with her hands over her ears and stared at him. NEVADA BOB’S , the T-shirt read. It struck Harris as funny. The word BOB . Suddenly Harris saw that BOB was a very funny word, especially stuck there like that between two large breasts whose nipples were as obvious as maraschino cherries. He started to say something, but a sudden movement to one side made him turn to look that way instead. He wondered what he had been going to say.
    The loa brandished her hatchet. Harris retreated into the bar on his knees. The hatchet went wide again, smashed an enormous Crock-Pot that sat on the bar. Chili oozed out of the cracks.
    â€œI shall pray for you,” the loa said, carried by the momentum of her stroke into the video games. “I shall pray for all of you whose American appetites have been tempted with foreign dishes.” She put her arms around the casing for Ghouls ’n Ghosts, lifted the entire thing from the floor, and piled it onto Super Mario Bros. 2. The music hiccoughed for a moment and then resumed.
    There was now absolutely no exit from the bar through that door. Harris’s backup was still out there, peering into manholes and washing windows, and the street was two video games away. Harris’s amusement vanished. He wasn’t likely to be at his best, alone, weaponless, with a hurt knee, and bufotenine pulsing through his body. Only one of these things could be rectified.
    The bar was starting to metamorphose around him. The puddles of liquor on the floor sprouted into fountains, green liquid trees of crème de menthe, red trees of wine, gold trees of beer. The smell of liquor intensified as the trees bloomed. They grew flowers and dropped leaves in the liquid permanence of fountains, an infinite, unchanging season that was all seasons at once. A jungle lay between Harris and the loa. His tranquilizer gun was sandwiched between Super Mario Bros. 2 and Ghouls ’n Ghosts. The barrel protruded. Harris wrenched it free. It took three tries and the awesome properties of the lever to move the uppermost video game. Harris tried not to remember how the loa had picked it up off the floor with her hands. He retrieved his gun and went hunting.
    She was coy now, ducking away from him, so that he only caught glimpses of her through the watery