The Party

We were all having a wonderful time. 

It was getting late, though, going on 4, and I was with a sleepy girl who was wanting to go home to bed so I was on one last circuit saying my goodbyes to people I hadn’t seen in awhile, but a lot of them were very drunk and it was hard to make sense out of what they were saying or for them to understand my replies. What they were saying was true, but clumsy and hard to decipher, hard to make out, all muddy and confused.

   There is an honesty to drunken people, wasted people - people at parties - a happiness and generosity that I like, even when I’m straighter than them, which I usually am, these days. There is a poetry of sorts in their saying what is really on their minds, past politeness, saying what they really think and feel.

   In a loud and crowded upper room I was saying goodbye to an old old friend. His arms were slung around my neck like one of those monkey puppets and his eyes were rolling around in his head like ball-bearings. He was trying to get his tongue in my mouth. I was engaged in the long and laborious task of disentangling myself from him and getting to my feet when two girls walked into the room. These were the same two girls who had been making such a big show of commandeering the bed a long time earlier in the evening. They looked as though they were looking for something.

   As I got to my feet one of them jabbed a long hard object into my chest. I looked down. It was a plastic cap gun rifle. She pushed it further into my chest and squeezed the trigger.

   “Bang,” she said, flatly, not looking in my eyes. She pointed it at someone else beside me. “Bang,” she said, again. 

   “Bang,” she continued, turning it on another. “Oh, I’ve already done you,” she said. Her voice was drowsy, monotonous. Lifeless.

   “Ba..,” she began again and then stopped herself. “Oh,” she said, and giggled “you’re a girl,” and looked around for someone else. 

   “You’re a man,” she said, “Bang”.

It was only then that I realised just what it was that they were doing, that they were shooting only the men. That they were making their way through all of the rooms of the party, one by one, shooting all the men.

   And then she said it herself and there was no humour in her voice, or anger. Not really even hate. A few drunken men attempted to complain and moaned a little. But they were very far gone and it came out only noise.

  

There was nothing in her eyes.

  

Over the drunken room I tried to ask her why she was doing this, why she thought that it was funny, or deserving, or even just a good idea. I wanted to know what it was that had happened, what had happened to her before to bring her here like this.

   But she wouldn’t even look at me, it was like I wasn’t there. It was like she couldn’t even see me - only a man, another man, just another man. And so she kept on, glassy-eyed, waving the gun around the room, over and over, shooting all the men.