Tavern at Forever

This story is by Gary G. Little and was part of our 2024 Spring Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.

It seemed like this road went on forever. He turned his head left and right and looked for any change. Nothing. He turned slowly, watching the horizon. No bumps, no nothing. No hills, no clouds. Nothing.

“Ha, maybe this is forever,” he mumbled to himself.

How had he gotten here? Why was he on this road?  He stomped on, not knowing the direction he traveled … just on.

His right arm brushed against something on his belt. He looked. A canteen, and as soon as he saw it, he felt thirst. A swallow of cool water assuaged his thirst, but brought a query to mind.

Nothing, all the way out to the horizon … about 3 miles. I’ve been walking for how long? Dunno. Dunno when I started. But how can the water in an unshielded aluminum canteen still be cool?

He trudged on, and in the distance, a distortion in the horizon appeared. Pace after pace, he watched that distortion grow and focus into a building, a rather bland tavern.

At least, he thought it was a tavern. Nothing told him that. There was no blazing neon sign proclaiming Bernies Pub, Bar, or Tavern; it just felt like a tavern.

He pushed the screen door open and felt a shiver as he walked into the cool room.

“G’day, Joe,” said the innkeeper, busily wiping down a gleaming mahogany bar.

“I’ve never been here. How do you know my name?”

“I don’t. It’s just everyone is Joe till they introduce themselves.”

“Handy if your name is Joe.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Where is this place?” Joe asked.

“Where ye need to be.”

“Huh?”

“T’is where ye need to be when ye get to that point.”

“That point? Damn, man ye … you talk in circles.”

“When ye get to a crossroads in life, where you decide to go left or right, do you save your buddy or save yourself?”

Joe smelled the humidity of the jungle and saw before him the still form of the man who had been with him through thick and thin for the past months in combat. He knelt and began first aid, calling, “Medic!!”

The innkeeper continued, “Do ye go to college and get a degree or work in Uncle Tom’s cotton gin? Ye has been here many times, Joe.”

“How many times? Here in this tavern?”

“Oh, many, Joe. Ye were here when ye decided your final career path. How did that work out for ye?”

Joe thought of the work he had done for half a century and how he loved every minute of it. It had its challenges, but that was why he loved it.

“It worked out very well.”

The innkeeper’s Celtic brogue crept in as he said, “And ye were here just before ye wed.”

Joe smiled now. “Yup, that was the best decision I ever made.”

The innkeeper looked melancholy as he said, “And ye were here for Abigail.”

Joe wept at that memory. Abby, the daughter they never got to hold in their arms, to welcome into the family, to be the youngest daughter. That one hurt. Some choice. Let her pass on her own or plug her into machines for the rest of her life. That decision was agony.

Joe looked at the room. Rich walnut wood adorned the walls, interspersed with pictures that seemed familiar. There was his high school graduation. It was a bit skewed. Oh yeah, that drunken party and almost a tragedy on the road. Thankfully, someone else got the keys.

His graduation from university. By then, he had learned his lesson.

The birth of Bob and that golden lab that had come into their lives. Bob and Molly had been inseparable.

There were memories from all points in his life.

“This is all me,” Joe said.

“Whose else would it be? It’s all the crossroads ye’ve taken and on this wall is the telling of that tale ye have been weaving.”

And then the matter of fact innkeeper came back. “Yup, and you’ve been here twelve times for this one road ye keep taking.”

“Twelve?”

“Yup. Twelve.”

“This’ll be thirteen then.”

“Yup. And on every one of them, as soon as that screen door slams your backside, ye come walking back in.”

“But …”

“No buts, Joe. Can ye no understand ye cannot walk the road ye want to take? Sometimes, what’s best is not the road we want.”

“But …”

“What did I say about buts?”

“But,” Joe persisted, “I can’t leave the family with …”

“Trust me, Joe, ye haven’t left them for the baker’s dozen years you’ve been stuck to that hospital bed with pipes and hoses rammed up every orifice ye have.”

Briefly, Joe got a glimpse of a still form on a white bed in a pastel pea-green room, with the sound of the pumps and multiple machines that were keeping that body at the legal term of alive.

Images, grieving images, appeared in that passing dream. Emily, his dear, dear Emmy, grey with age and grief, stuck to the shell of a husband who would not let go.

“Twelve years,” he muttered.

“Yup. Twelve. And Emmy has been by your side for every one of those resuscitations for the past twelve years.”

“How many times?”

“I told ye. Twelve. Not once a year. Sometimes ye went a year or two before ye coded. All the time Emmy hoping against all hope the last one would be the one ye would come back and be her Joe again.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“Oh no … ye’re incorporeal. Ye dinna exist, laddie. No communicating with the living. Them’s the rules.”

“Twelve years …”

“Yup. Twelve years, with her coming back every time ye code, and they bring ye back.”

Flashback memory this time of this room and medical people in their pea-green scrubs and buzzing instruments working on a human shell, resuscitating it, bringing it back to the legal term of living.

He wept for Emmy, Bob, his son, and Susan, his daughter. What had he put them through for twelve years? He never imagined this kind of hell for the living.

“Then I guess it’s time to end it,” he said as he walked back out that screen door and felt it slam into his backside, but this time he took the road to the right.

Machines suddenly buzzed, beeped, and booped in the pastel pea-green room. Again, staff came running, the desk nurse called those to be notified, and Emmy came as swiftly as she could.

The doctor stood over the still form and asked the question he asked for this patient so many times. “Emmy? Do we bring him back?”

Emmy stood momentarily, listened, and felt a ruffle of air against her ear. It was as if Joe whispered to her one last time, “Goodbye, my love.”

“No,” she said. “Not now. I think he wants to move on.”

Joe smiled as he walked the road to the right and continued on.