Hootie had worked at the dive bar long enough to witness its degradation, its slouch from air-conditioned haven to one-wonky-fan outpost. In the daylight, the bar looked like it had been birthed by the desert, commanded to rise, like it would stand until the end of all things. The windows were encrusted with a sandy film, the once-white walls now the same terracotta color as the earth. At certain hours of the night, if one stood looking at the bar from a good hundred yards away, just to gain perspective, as Hootie sometimes did, to see things in a new way, to mimic the sensation of standing on one’s head or holding in air for too long, the bar looked primordial—Hootie had learned that word, primordial, during her stint as an online anthropology major—yes, primordial, at certain hours of the night. One might feel tempted to see how far they could go; how far could they walk with the human light of the windows, the siren call of the martini still in view? A faint blip on the horizon, and then darkness. And then what?
In anticipation of a power outage, Manny prepared a final supper. Burgers, creamed corn, beans from the can, instant noodles that smelled like the childhood afternoons when Hootie’s parents had work. And, like cinematic clockwork, just as the plates were filled, the power was lost. Hootie hadn’t realized she had been relying on the background voices of the newscasters repeating words like caution, chance, likely, warning, shelter, until they were gone. With electricity’s hum silenced, the din of the storm swelled. The wind wrapping around the bar, the groaning of the windows, and in the distance, thunder. A light rain had begun, could be heard pinging on the roof.
Manny struck a match.
“Can you remember the last time we had a storm?” Hootie asked Manny.
“Not like this,” he said, the red glow of the candlelight giving him a new face.
Hootie couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t spent an evening writing food tickets, watering down drinks, waiting for customers to come, praying for customers to leave. It felt…unnatural, to be seated there, across from Manny, candles lit between them like they were playing at a date. Like she had awoken from a long, disorienting nap and found herself in a room she didn’t remember falling asleep in.
“When was the last time we left the bar?” Hootie asked, food untouched.
Manny chewed. “We saw that movie.”
“Movie?”
“In Flagstaff. That movie. You know…”
Manny let the memory drift off, forgotten. Hootie had no idea what he was talking about. A strange sensation fluttered about her ribcage. She felt, at once, very aware of her face, her skin, the realization that her forehead was coated in cool sheen, the sensation of a mosquito brushing along her arm. A hole had worn through her sock along her ankle. Could she feel her lungs moving? She felt her pulse in her fingertips. Fight or flight? Or the mere realization of existence?
For a long time, Hootie had avoided admitting the length of her tenure, telling those whose drinks she poured instead that she was just passing through here, would be gone when the summer ended, was jetting off for the holidays, was taking a gap year… And telling who? Customers who didn’t care, drifters who would forget her face as soon as their drink was sweating in their palm. So what did it matter what they thought? But it did matter to Hootie. It mattered a great deal. Unprompted, she would say she was in school, studying law or marketing or Russian literature. And then when she was too old for that easy lie, she’d say she was an actress—that she was, in fact, waiting on a call from her agent that very night, that she expected to soon be a hard-boiled lady detective in an upcoming TV serial. And when that became embarrassing, when Dan, the waiter, laughed one too many times overhearing this, she finally called herself a bartender. This was much like brewing the gas station coffee and writing barista on your resumé.
For a long time, she’d also insisted that her name was not Hootie, the nickname that the bar had thrust upon her—what kind of a name was Hootie, anyway?—but it became easier to adapt. To transmute herself into this place. To shed the trappings of old skin. So she tried Hootie on for size. Hootie who worked at the dive bar, who had been here for so long she sometimes had a nightmare that if she set foot outside the perimeter of the property she would simply crumple, her flesh flaking away, peeling off in grotesque sheets as her bones clattered to the asphalt, her eyeballs rolling out of her skull like pool balls.