No Dominion A Novel

The glass is breaking. That's not the surprising thing; the surprising thing is that it didn't shatter when he threw me against it. Shouldn't come as a shock. This place, they went through a few front windows the first year they were open and decided it was more cost-effective to lay out the extra cash for the safety glass. Save them from having to replace it every time there's a brawl in here. Which is pretty regular I'd imagine. Any case, I'm not bitching. Wasn't for the guy who had the bright idea, I'd be on the sidewalk right now, my good leather jacket cut to ribbons and my face sliced up in all kinds of new and interesting ways. But now it's breaking, it is most definitely breaking. I'm sure about that because my face is jammed up against it. The big question for me is whether this is the kind of safety glass that bursts into thousands of tiny pebbles when it breaks or the kind that turns into shards. Pebbles would be fine. Shards, not so much. The window creaks. Tiny fissures appear in front of my eyes. OK, time to stop worrying about the glass, time to start worrying about getting this guy off of me. I can't expect any help from the bartenders or the crowd, not after they watched him pound on the bouncer with that pool cue. And I don't see any helpful officers of the law rolling up outside at this point. Not that I have any intention of being here when the cops show up. So, I guess it's just me and him. That's OK, I can go this one alone. Not like it's new to me or anything. I just wish he really was on PCP; if it was just PCP he'd be pretty easy to deal with. But this? This is gonna take grace and style, maybe even a little tact. He shoves my face harder into the big front window. People out on the sidewalk flinch as they see my features squashed yet flatter against the glass. The glass creaks again. The fissures grow another millimeter. He's still screaming, babbling insanity at the top of his lungs, howling so loud I can barely hear Boxcar Willie on the jukebox: You load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older, and deeper in debt. Ain't that the fuckin' truth. He's enraged that my face won't just explode through the damn glass the way he wants it to. He rears back, and before he can slam my face forward, I've slipped to my right, spun, twisted my arm free of his grasp, winced as a clump of hair is torn from the back of my scalp, planted my right foot in the hollow behind his right knee, hammered my elbow into the back of his neck and sent him face first through the window in my place. The sidewalk audience scatters as he hits the pavement. I step through the dagger-edged hole he left behind. Shards it is. He was spazzing the second he came out of the bathroom. Before that, I hadn't even noticed him. Why should I? Not like I'm working; not like there's any reason I should be doing anything but paying attention to the booze in my glass, the cigarette in my mouth, the pool game in front of me and the girl by my side. Especially the girl. Girl like this, most everyone in the place is paying attention to her. Want to be invisible? Hang out with a girl like Evie. All that red hair, the body that not only won't quit but works weekends and holidays, too. That smile. She's the kind of girl guys like to look at, but most aren't sure how to go about approaching her. Too bad for them. They miss out on the best part, they miss out on how cool she is, how funny, how sharp, how down-to-earth. Anyway, a girl like Evie on your arm and you turn into a shadow, just the lucky fuck taking up space next to the best view in the place. So a night like this, when it's so coldHuston, Charlie is the author of 'No Dominion A Novel' with ISBN 9780345478252 and ISBN 0345478258.