the bar closed like a hand round a shatter of glass. That is, the night bled on the bar, the bar sucked blue-black blood down its carpet, which everybody said was the only thing the place left dry. This one, this particular bar, took an especially tight grip, sucking the stars out of the sky, digesting, not spitting them up but stomaching them, a swarm of bees in a juicethick hive. Today the night was a woman, or was believed to be a woman, which is all any woman is, really. She wore her hair in soft black curls and if you squinted the oil on her face looked like a glaze, like stardust, like the night, unwilling fully to submit to the grasp of its venue, left a trace of itself on her skin. Her figure was an hourglass, but only because of the fist at her waist. Her hair fell long only because night, too, fell. When she opened her mouth pints of oiled stardust bled from the cracks in her lips, which were, if one looked closely enough, constellations.

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