A clap on the back was all her got as the Barman passed him on the way to the bar. Kelly’s was a beer garden, the regular haunt for the regulars of inner city Hobart. Not that it was or wasn’t a city. The locals called it town, they called the Barman ‘Barman’ even if they didn’t know that it was his last name. The Batman’s’ were a large percentage of the township just outside Cambridge. A large family with a happy father that worked as an engineering consultant at the Zinc Works. “A terrific occupation” he’d said right up until the day he passed, falling through some old grating, 72feet above one of the main smelting tanks. He’d fallen, broken his arm in the way down, bouncing off the lip of the tank comically and landing heaving like a dropped candle. Crumpling into his yellow hard hat with an ‘oof’.

The noise we all end with? Oof, or something as similar. Nonsense.

The fire went out in his eyes and that was it. The Barman family? Still there-

Tables full, kind hearted mother with a broken visage, remarried a single colleague of his she met at the funeral. Barman never forgave the corcumstance, he worked in bars now, seeing the works, “the worst of people really” he’d say.

Moments in time. All passing, free of reflection. Done and decompressed, thhht. His tired eyes, skeptics thoughts, cold called for his honest perspective on life. Communicated in eyes, hands and clicks. All vibrations: voice, glinting eyes and heat. The lightness in Barman came from his back. Strong minded, but a back ‘like a tin’ or an alloy, his fathers hands he had, his mothers lean face. The holes, the gaps of a removed child. Out on his own, cold waste, old dinners and cast iron 2nd had equipments. Friday was his night to cut loose and cause chaos. Pluming people with alcohol then mopping up. Step 1, alcohol, step 2 profit was his undiscovered motto. He was a crafty conceited apple in the eye of most. A nut, resistant to the cracking. The Craik. Even sauced, slapping, with thenneighbours going at it. He was always unassailable. Free from the plight of rude and polite. No transactions, no receipts. Scrunching moments and throwing them back, like the fruit before it’s juices. Tequila!

That’s not writing, that’s just typing. Get all the pieces, string them

Together in the longest

Line you can.

Barman! Another.