Jessica Klimesh
A parakeet and a garden gnome walk into a bar. The gnome is twelve inches tall if he’s a foot, with a venerable white beard and jolly blue eyes. He pulls a wooden sled behind him with a large, puffy snowman on it. Never mind that there’s no snow on the ground outside.
Old Russ behind the counter says, “Hello, fellers, what’ll it be?” Someone has put Rod Stewart and Michael Buble’s version of “Winter Wonderland” on the jukebox, even though there’s still corn to be harvested in the fields.
The parakeet, bright yellow, still echoing the colors of summer, chirps at Old Russ. “Why do people always assume birds are fellers, huh?”
“Well, I—” Old Russ stumbles over a non-apology and rubs his age-spotted hands over the bib of his overalls. He glances around to see if anyone is watching the exchange. But it’s early yet, happy hour hasn’t even started. Outside, the sun is shining. The only patron is a middle-aged man with a ruddy complexion who calls himself Hemingway.
“And why,” the parakeet continues, “would you assume I’m here with them just because I came in with them?” The parakeet waves a wing in the direction of the gnome and the snowman. The parakeet’s chirps are harsh and lacking the musicality one would expect from such a creature.
“Well, I—”
The gnome turns to the parakeet; his voice is deep, slow, and tedious. “It seems that…this…is the start…of a bad joke or…something. Just look at…the first line…of the story.” The gnome then addresses Old Russ. “Is this…funny…to you, Mister?”
“Well, I—” Old Russ looks down, scratching absently at his arm. “I’m not the one writing this, you know,” he says with more than a hint of defensiveness.
The snowman doesn’t say anything, but small beads of water form a tiny puddle at his feet. The little pebbles that shape his mouth have drooped into a frown. He doesn’t look quite as puffy as he did just a couple minutes earlier. Nor as large.
Old Russ neglects to serve the parakeet, the garden gnome, and the snowman, and the trio is illogically left standing there, their positional blocking made purposely incomplete by the author of the story.
A young couple, Jack and Jill, walk into the bar just as Old Russ serves Hemingway another mojito. Jack wears a suit, looks out of place. Jill wears jeans and a green hoodie with “STATE” written across the front. She carries an empty bucket in her right hand. With her left hand, she fiddles with her wedding band, using her thumb to work it up and down her finger.
“Water, please,” Jill says, her voice pained and weary.
“Your best champagne,” Jacks says.
Old Russ snickers. “Two glasses of cheap wine coming up.”
Jack nods. “Whatever.” He turns to Jill and says, “Look, hon, it’ll be okay. I’ll reinvest, get our money back.”
Jack then shrugs off his suit jacket, yanks his tie loose, and pulls it off over his head. He throws the tie like a lariat, and it falls neatly around Hemingway’s neck. Hemingway salutes Jack and says, “Thanks, sir.”
Jack proceeds to strip off his dress shirt and slacks. Underneath, he wears a clown ensemble. He affixes a big red nose to his face just as Old Russ brings their wine.
“I don’t like this. Not one bit,” Jill says. She stares at her empty bucket, hoping Old Russ might take a hint.
The snowman is shrinking. Before long, his top hat slides over his face, and his eyes roll away. Old Russ brings out a yellow “Caution: Wet” floor sign, sets it next to the snowman.
“So,” the gnome says to Hemingway, “are you…named after…the writer? Ernest?”
“Who?” Hemingway says.
Jack juggles brightly colored balls.
The gnome points at Old Russ, trying to remind him that he hasn’t taken their order yet.
Old Russ shrugs. “Sorry, fellers, but I just do what the author tells me to.”
“There’s that word feller again,” the parakeet says with an eye roll.
“Well, I—”
“I know, I know. You just say whatever the author tells you to say. Maybe think for yourself for once?” With that, the parakeet makes eyes at Hemingway, then chirps on and on—to anyone listening—about a beach, getting soooo drunk and hooking up with damn near everyone. She inches closer to Hemingway. Hemingway asks Old Russ for another mojito.
“Already?” Old Russ says.
Jill sets her wedding band on the table and sighs. She watches as the snowman’s carrot nose slides down his torso.
“Hey,” Jill says. The lights around the bar are whimsical, a string of pink flickering flamingos. The moon sets, and the sun also rises. The snowman offers the only indication of how much time has passed. Time, it seems, no longer exists except in the fiction of reality. Certainly not in the fiction of fiction.
No one seems to notice Jill, whose face has gone pale. Jack has given up juggling his balls. Now he’s attempting a high wire above the jukebox.
“Can anyone hear me?” Jill says. “Can I get some water?”
The walls of the bar implode. The ceiling lifts and disappears. Clouds coat the ground, and trees hang upside down from the sky. Old Russ does cartwheels across the floor.
“What the hell?” the parakeet says to Old Russ.
“The author’s whim, I guess,” Old Russ says.
The parakeet just shakes her head. “I guess I’m never going to get served, am I?”
“Well, I—”
The parakeet waves him away. “Just forget it.”
“Hey,” Jill says again. Almost a whisper now.
The snowman has turned to liquid, the puddle stretching beyond the yellow floor sign. An uncontainable mess.
“Can’t anyone see it?” Jill says, her voice weak. “There’s something wrong with the snowman.”
The snowman is no longer a snowman and is, instead, just a hat on a sled. The parakeet has given up on Hemingway, and the gnome has given up on getting a drink. The parakeet and the gnome move toward each other in mutual understanding. Together they dance under the flamingo lights.
Hemingway downs another mojito and asks if anyone knows any good jokes.
Old Russ leans against the bar, watching as Jack, standing tall on a barstool, swallows a sword. “Nope,” Old Russ says, “only bad ones. They always start with ‘so-and-so and so-and-so walk into a bar,’ but I’ll be damned if I can ever remember the punchlines.”
“Huh,” Hemingway says, nodding his head.
Jill stands, picks up her bucket, and gives a little nod toward Jack. Jack doesn’t notice her.
“I need water,” she says, her voice raspy with thirst. She edges her way around the liquid remains of the snowman seeping out the door.
No one looks at her as she leaves.
“I need air,” she says, opening the door.
JESSICA KLIMESH is a US-based technical editor and proofreader with an MA in English from Bowling Green State University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Cedar Crest College. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Brink, The Café Irreal, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, and elsewhere.