Barbara with the Boots spent sixty bucks on a cab to get to the club where her ex-boyfriend’s band was opening. At that time, he was my boyfriend, and we were doing some lines in the dirty dressing room under the dripping pipes.

    I didn’t know a thing about Barbara because the only question I had ever asked him was, “Do you really love me and no one else?” and his answer had been enough for me.

    Barbara fell drunk out of the cab and lay on the sidewalk laughing, and when she started to call his name, they came to get him saying, “You’ve got a problem outside.” I followed along and he said, “It’s Barbara. I told you about Barbara, right?”

    Barbara was beautiful even lying there on the dirty ground. She wore faded jeans with knee high boots that laced all the way to the top. He took her back to the dressing room to sort her out, and I waited at the bar, thinking about those boots.

    I could imagine that once he had knelt at her feet, and unlaced those boots slowly. She must have watched him through her lowered lashes as he slid the laces in and out of the holes, before he pulled them off, threw them aside and laid her down.

    As the band warmed up, checked sound levels and tuned and retuned their guitars, Barbara joined me at the bar, shook her hair and bit her lip.

   “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

    The music was loud so we didn’t talk. We watched him with the belly of the guitar vibrating against his groin, watched him slide his hand up and down the neck in that unavoidably phallic way that guitarists must. When he soloed, his fingers moved in intricate and beautiful patterns as he teased and plucked the strings. It crossed my mind that his fingers were not nearly as creative or sensitive in other settings, but I didn’t mention that to Barbara because I was afraid she’d have better memories.

    We stood there, me getting drunk, and Barbara getting drunker and after the first set, he got a beer from Cherie, the bartender, who smiled at him like a mid-western farm girl. He looked over at us drinking together and shook his head as if we had planned it.

    He whispered something to her, moving her blond curls away from her ear so she could feel his warm breath. She would be his next girlfriend, although I didn’t know it at the time, and she looked over at us and back at him with sympathy and understanding. She was very pretty and by then we were sloppy drunk.

    Barbara said, “He said that I was consuming him,” drawing out the word and rolling her eyes. “I didn’t even like him at first, and now, apparently, I’m too much… Consoooming him.” She howled the word like Janis and the pretty little bartender looked over at us like she was scared.

    I remembered that during an argument the weekend before he had confessed that my love was so strong that sometimes he was afraid it would devour him…and that is why he had to pull away. I had promised to try to be less intense. I didn’t tell Barbara.

    I did say though, “Some guys work very hard to make sure that their women are always hungry,” and I realized it was true. And she opened her eyes wide and said, “That’s right, that’s right!” and she bought me another drink. Cherie served us with a faintly curved lip.

    After the second set, they had to clear the stage while the next band waited in the dressing room. He handed me the cables and the back-up amp and said, “I’ll meet you in the van.”

    Barbara and her Boots stayed to watch the next set, since she knew the singer and could get a ride home with her. He went into the office in the back with the bartender to settle up.

    Back at the house, I went to the bedroom and as I fell asleep, I could hear the band taking apart the show. I woke briefly to some drunken shouting and soon, laughter and snores. In the morning, I grabbed some cold pizza and left for my early shift at Stop and Shop. My boyfriend was asleep on the couch, with his mouth open, his hand in his pants.

    Much later, after our relationship had crashed and burned, after I had caused a few hysterical and humiliating scenes about the bartender, who ironically got him to stop drinking for a while, I still thought about Barbara’s boots.

    I searched yard sales and thrift shops until I found my own. I took them home and laced them up, imagining that someday someone would kneel before me and unlace them slowly, while I watched him through my lowered lashes, waiting for him to toss them aside and lay me down.

©

Barbara with the Boots has been published in Poetry Bay’s Flash Boulevard, an online literary journal of Flash Fiction. Editor: Francine Witte

Dorothy Cantwell lives in NYC and has worked as an educator, actor and playwright. She’s been a featured poet in the Great Weather for Media Sunday Series, Su Polo’s Saturn Series, Viviana Duncan’s Stark Reality, Patricia Carragon’s Brownstone Poets, and the Huntington Poetry Barn. Her poetry has been published in the Long Island Literary Journal, Brownstone Poets Anthology and Flash Boulevard, and will appear in The Assisi Journal 2020. She is currently working on a chapbook, Awaiting Solace.