One: Between Midnight and the Dawn

She didn’t know what it was about The Bar. Maybe it was the name. In the city, it would be a pretentious name that the cool people would flock to. It would be an ironic place that only the In-the-know people would stamp as theirs. Even if their definition of ironic was about as correct as Alanis Morrissete’s. But here, in the heart of Prince’s Bay, New York it was just because Patrice Murphy had inherited the place from her father, and her father from his father. And the Murphy’s were good people, just not very imaginative. So the name, The Bar, stuck.

And while there was more than one bar in her little town, there was only one The Bar.

And here, she could sit in the corner each night. She could soak up the life of others with her one tumbler of Tyrconnell, neat. Sometimes it was the conversations between the sailors that lined the bar bitching about the day’s haul, sometimes it was a few bar flies looking for company, sometimes it was a businessman that had tripped over her tiny town on his way out of New York. Like the one that sat by the door with his ever full glass of white wine.

She didn’t talk to them, but she liked to listen.

Sometimes it was the steady hum of conversation that stopped her from feeling alone. Sometimes it was just knowing there were other people out there. She needed the interaction. She’d go mad in her workshop without it. When she was working she needed the loneliness. Her work required the heat and the emptiness.

But she’d learned over the years that the lapping of the water on her dock could drive her slowly insane in the hours between midnight and sunrise.

She sat back against the smooth wood of her tiny booth for one. The cracked vinyl seat would bite into her left thigh, and a tiny chip of wood on the underside of the table would be there for her thumb to worry over as she watched.

As she soaked in the sounds of people that kept the madness at bay.