flash friday Archives, I think this is from sometime in the last few years when there were no flash fridays, perhaps even passed off as not all that fictional in Flash Friday

A guy walks into a bar and Manhattan is gone, everything south of Bleeker street. It probably wasn’t his fault, probably just a coincidence, but it happened like that and there’s no going back, no second guessing that matters any, like; if he had walked into a starbucks maybe Queens would have gone or if he had stayed at home maybe some small provincial Manchurian town would have disappeared.

The guy does think everything hinges on him. A lot of guys do, but only from time to time, like last call or when he’s at a prize fight and a hockey game breaks out. Most guys are wrong, there is not shit that they’ve done or are going to do that means anything to anybody else or more to the point that will affect the world, time, space, eternity.

This guy, and his mom had given him a name, but he’d been the guy who walks into a bar for so long he even called himself the guy, he is the butterfly effect. Yeah, he knows, it’s just a theory and as far as he knows it’s theory of Ray Bradbury’s from a delicate sound of thunder and even then it’s how the death of a butterfly in the past can affect the whole path of the future. Well, he was living in someone’s past, effecting it by walking into bars, and his present was someone’s future, destroying Manhattan south of Bleecker.

He walked into a butcher shop once, saw gizzards in the window and every Anne Bancroft movie disappeared off the shelves of every movie rental place in Nebraska, Alberta and Copenhagen. He didn’t even know that for a week until he woke up cold and dusty in the freeway median in Council bluffs, walked into Omaha, walked into a diner (which incidentally cause something like a heat storm to fry Calcutta, the red cross showed up the next day but there wasn’t much they could do) and read the paper with his coffee thinking ; I like my coffee like I like my women, sipped gingerly while poring over devastation.

Three weeks later he’s in Calgary, the rodeo has left, and only a few cowboys without the good sense to go home are still hanging out drinking, talking about there almost was’s and coulda beens. The guy walks into the bar. A kid sinks the eight ball on the break, whoops and hollers, collects twenty from his slack jawed partner “You can’t bottle that!”

The guy takes a seat near the jukebox, Johnny Cash is bitching about San Quentin. Waitress comes over

“You alright hon? What can I getcha.”

“No, no I’m not alright. Molson’s. Y’all have a rear exit?”

She looks hard at him, then smiles “You mean me or the place?”

He smiles back, says nothing.

“Yeah it’s locked. You in some kind of trouble?”

“Not yet.”