The glass was half-empty. It was all Sonic could think about, as he held the amber bottle next to his eyes, looking at the liquid that was ready to be drunk by his thirsty and greedy maw.

The little girl left him in the cafe after her mother called on their work phone. The mother, whose blond hair curled at the tips, her lips a luscious red just like his mother's, with breasts that wanted to be important and stared at, she held her child deftly and she gazed at him with those blue eyes he thought he saw on Precious Moments figurines, the little 13 year old with a soul, a heart, who wanted to play with her best friend again, an alcoholic hedgehog who had a son but would rather get cheap drinks in a bar then come visit him.

He felt bad. He really did (honestly he would say). Desire to remain drunk and impenetrable, impregnable, as the withdrawal symptoms melted away, and he became just nothing but a lowly drunk, paying only 1 dollar a glass of cheap beer that tasted of cattle piss. Alcohol, he needed it in his bloodstream. To function. To love. To even go meet Tails who was sick, his voice a weak whisper that would whimper his name to the hospital walls as the sirens had continued calling him, trying to get him to suffer the whirlpool that consumed many Greek men…

Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…

He could hear their strangling voices, their breasts barely concealed by their white uniforms, their syringes seeming to date back to the 1920's, listening to their clicking footsteps, the sound of the beast coming in to check on his meal, his prey of a child who hadn't lived a fulfilled life…

Mr. Sonic…

Before the doctor let him in the room to see his beloved surrogate son, he popped a Vicodin. It helped soothe him. It mixed well with the alcohol.

Mr. Sonic…

Let the bitches sing!

"Sonic…"

Tails' voice was barely uttered from his weak jaws. The doctors left him in the hospital, yet never had done anything for his leukemia. No chemo, no blood transplants. Just let the child suffer in its white and blue walls and its hospital bed made of steel like a latrine.

Mr. Sonic…

"I'm doing the best I can for you, buddy. You gotta hold on."

Tails nodded. It was all he could manage to do. Tails loved him, yet doubted him. He could smell alcohol on his breath. Cheap Mexican imports. Mead, the wine of Gods.

The smell of cigarettes ignited in his nostrils. He could catch the doctors outside of the pediatric ward in the long dark shadowy trees smoking. They talked about how most of the children only had fevers and some cases of pneumonia, but one was very sick. He needed chemo, but his surrogate father couldn't afford it. He was left in the hospital to die.

"Now who would do such a thing?" His breathy voice streamed tendrils of smoke in the gray sky.

"Some cheapskate artist who thinks public healthcare should be free."

"God damn," he coughed. "Who does he think we are? Canada?"

Pigs. The whole lot of them.

Miles coughed too.

"Am I going to be okay, Sonic?"

Sonic often left such matters to a God out there, but lately, he thought such a God didn't exist, ever since he met his mother's van and her insomnia.

He smiled. Tried to be reassuring. But he was sick, as frail as glass bones, and if he didn't get his paycheck to help the piggies start the little machines, there was no use helping Tails. The piggies just wanted to roll in the mud. Eat their caviar. Drink their wine. They didn't want to help children who were about to die.

He held his hand, and the nurses made him cough. They made him sick with their bacteria from their fermented bodies.

Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…

In one room, the nurses were threading a teenager's scars like a little limp doll. In another, they were rolling one amputated patient on his wheels, driving him to the cafeteria, to eat cold chicken sandwiches and hamburgers made from soy. Children crying about their shots, their arms bloodied as the mosquitoes drained them. Old men lying in a metal casket waiting for God to pick him up. Suicide patients wishing they never drank their pills, but instead shot themselves with a gun the old-fashioned way. Vegetables hooked to a feeding tube, the nutrients sent up their nostrils and into their brains, where they wouldn't deteriorate after years of neglect inside their lonesome bodies. No one hugged them. They were dead already, but families had kept them crucified to the living machines, keeping them as healthy and as alone as many years. Dying, very slowly, a light glimpsing from their tunnels, wanting to be taken to it, but God kept them as a testament to how great modern medicine was.

The whole hospital depressed him. Everyone cried and sighed and died in hospitals. No one was ever happy in them. No one was ever happy with the nurses' services. They just kept them alive so they could make money off their fragile and vulnerable bodies. The more you were alive and capable of being sick cause you were ignorant, the more they sapped money from your insurance and account.

He could still hear the whispers of the other doctors as they discussed over a pack of Marlboro's, of what kind of parent would leave their child in a hospital and not deal with him himself, and not pay for chemo. Piggies rolling around in dirt and mud. Eating their own kind as their steel teeth grind against their tongue and their voices filtered from their voice box, and they snorted smoke, ate it and blew it out like trains.

"Fucking selfish bastard," one said.

"What a goddamn ignoramus," another said.

"I heard he had a drinking problem," one said.

"Oh?" asked another.

"Yeah. He drinks whatever he can get. He was experiencing withdrawal symptoms here before. He shook and screamed and I was about to send him to a mental asylum until I realized he hadn't had anything to drink for a day. I told him, 'Here, take this pill, it'll help with your withdrawal symptoms. And call this rehab clinic; they'll be able to help you out.' And what does that bastard do? Turned out he had a stash of Vicodin he kept when he was in that car crash a while back. So he sold a couple and got some more cheap beer. The nasty Rolling Rock and Mexican shit. I know I can lose my license just constantly giving him Vicodin, but no matter what I do, advising him that he kept drinking like this for months he could die in another car crash or get in some sort of accident or have his liver fail, but he doesn't listen. He doesn't damn well listen. He just keeps drinking. Like he's got all the time in the world. I'd give him about five months before he gets cirrhosis. Or at the very least, end up having to pay for dialysis with his 'music career'. That family had been nothing to me but a pain in the royal behind. His father seemed sane enough. He died of a heart attack. But his mother? Oh God, his mother."

"What about his mother that makes her so awful?" another asked as he snuffed out his cigarette, the smoke drifting to the branches that held the souls of dead newborn babies. Sometimes the other could hear them crying, calling out for their mother who was supposed to love them.

"Hell if I know. I'm not a psychologist. I didn't go to medical school for that. But past diagnosis on her papers seemed to switch back and forth between 'bipolar type 1' and 'delusional disorder' and 'schizophrenia'. She bandaged her breasts cause she wanted to be androgynous, yet ripped them off when she had sex with multiple men. Glasses were always dirty. She was always dirty. Her nails were always so pretty though. Pretty, pretty nails. Her lips were gorgeous too. She never slept and ate except gas station food, which you know isn't healthy at all."

"Uh-huh," another said and nodded like a mindless bobble head.

His head kept going up and down; up and down…it was almost hypnotizing for Sonic to watch.

"Anyways, she kept offering sex to me. I said, 'No! I'm a doctor, not a nymphomaniac like you are!' Her nails, oh her pretty nails, she then grabbed some popsicle sticks…"

"Yeah?" Up and down, up and down…

"Then she got them all sharp, and tried to stab me with them. Then she grabbed the lubricant, and tried to stuff it in my mouth and she kept crying out, 'Fuck me, you pig fucker!' Told the nurses to sedate her and put her in some asylum. She managed to convince the nurses and doctors there that she was fine and she didn't need medication. Then she started drinking until she choked on her own vomit when she was withdrawing. Such a horrible death. And her son didn't care and never called for 911. He just left her to die. Funny how their family is shortly after his father died."

"Wow!" another exclaimed. Up and down…

"Yeah, and I hate treating him but I feel bad for his son. I heard that apartment he lives in is a dump. I'm willing to give him a chance cause I feel so goddamned sorry for him, but if he doesn't pay for some of this hospital treatment soon I'm going to just call social services. I could do it sooner, but mother always told me to give even the shittiest of people a chance. Even when his mother basically tried to stab me."

He might as well not give him a chance to call the phone that he was an unfit parent. Sonic left, while the sirens continued to speak his name softly, seductively, their candied bodies ready for him to lick and taste…

Mr. Sonic, Mr. Sonic…

He walked alone in the streets. The morning was cold, uninviting, and he thought he saw a man with red eyes ready to stab him with a blood-stained knife as he walked through the crowd, but he tried to ignore it. It would give the legacy of his mother more power, more legend with her brain that was holed and rotted, with the doctor's needles protruding from every crevice in her mind.

—

He came home, as tired as a kitten full of its mother's milk. He didn't have to work until in the afternoon, so sleep! Sleep he must! His eyes were full of film, his body ached, and he popped another Vicodin as he downed it with the beer he got from a friend who might as well have been a bootlegger from the Prohibition era. Gatsby would surely supply him with all the drink he needed, before the magnificent bastard was murdered.

He tried to read his favorite books. He couldn't get past the first paragraph of Fight Club with his inebriation. He tried to count how many blankets he had on his bed, and he always had about four. Cause he was always so cold and clammy, his body feeling as if ice was inside it.

Couldn't read Dandelion Wine either. Or Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury was too complicated for his sickened and stupid mind.

He turned on the television set from the 60's. He tried to turn the knobs to exactly the right color. When he got it near perfect, he was suddenly bored of Seinfeld and How I Met Your Mother. He turned it to some football. Then realized he hated football. Then cooking channels. He mostly ate out of the microwave, so none of these meals would ever be accessible to his tongue.

He still only had a few hours to sleep…

He tossed and turned. Sea of blankets had to make way for Captain Sonic. The floor felt wet when his socks were moist upon touching it. Seagulls flew overhead, with their black canvassed bodies. A lighthouse was in the distance, shining a ray of light for him to reach, to become guided, loved, and forsaken.

Never forgiven for his heinous sickness.

The gulls careened off the edge of his bed, his socks damp as he walked across the apartment floor, feeling the loud slap of his feet hitting the sea. Slap! Slap! The sea was awake for him. The sea was alive, and it wanted to consume him.

He sweat, his forehead as wet as the sea.

He tried to stay on the island near his couch, the sand enticing him. Dry land! The winds bellowed towards his fragile bones, nearly blowing them away. His skeletal structure, his organs, his soul, they were lapped up by the hungry sea, as the water swallowed his apartment, the sea had crunched through the glass of his windows, civilization was dying as the sea had grown as it rained heavily, for 40 days and 40 nights, he knew. Heard of the stories, but never listened to them fully.

He wasn't sure if it was a hallucination. The water seemed real enough. The seagulls landed near his body and had tried to eat his remains as he stretched out on the island, his heart and stomach and intestines ready to be devoured by the white vultures.

The sun seemed so much brighter as he gasped and tried to keep above the surface, the godless creatures pecking him trying to devour his brain, the lighthouse never seeing a dead, shrunken body come towards its shores before.

He never felt lonelier here, on this island, with no one here, but death.

Death had awaited him, a stone sunk to the ocean, moonlit, albicant, a fake egg for a dragon long ago. He would drown with it. His gasps came out shallow as the sea had risen, the sun had knifed through his face and eyes, bleed! Bleed! Blood dribbled from his eye socket and chin. The sun was dangerous. Vicious! Merciless! His hand slapped against it, as the sea and stone tried to consummate him, and it felt so hot, the impact of a flaming hot stove curling his hands to dark ribbons.

He looked around his apartment. It was 3 PM. His hand was burnt. There was no sea or water, but only the liquor that drowned the stenched carpet.

Was it a third-degree burn? Has the sun made his injury caustic, his sins unforgivable? His glove was a pitch-black, like an aching hungry mouth.

He couldn't see the lighthouse that awaited him at the end of the ocean of buildings and cars in Buffalo. Over the people who walked to work and became drones, unlike him.

It had sunk away in the horizon. The blue sky that looked lamentable, depressing, with all the stucco blue. And he wasn't sure why, but he cried, before he tried to soothe his palm with cold water, wrapped it in a homemade cast and went to work.

The child who loved him so, he wasn't sure why she tried to cheer him up of his dreadful life. He couldn't be saved. Not by the deep sickness that Tails' parents had carried. Not with the sickness he was given, his understanding ruined by fog, a deep impenetrable fog that his brain had created, cause it wasn't automatic like the rest of them. It was made of broken parts. Parts irreplaceable.

He realized he was sick. The doctors had tried to inject him with lithium, with antipsychotics, but it only lead to a sore bottom and months of thirst and muscle-quivering and confusion. Telling the doctors of the side effects, he was only told to keep taking his medicine, ushering in the lie that it was all working, the machines inside the pills that were little gears to a brain that work like everyone else's. The machinery was intricate, those little green pills. The pink ones claimed they would make him "stabilized". The green ones made all the voices go away. But which one would make him bigger? Make him smaller? Both of them together made him the right size, but soon, he no longer took the injections. He was always so small, he wasn't sure if he could drive his car to work.

So big, so tall…he once was a proud hedgehog. A few years ago. But his mother's spirit returned. He was back to only mewing like a kitten.

Maybe that was why the little girl liked him. Cause he was only a cute little kitten to be adorned with a red ribbon and given to children as their first pets. Until the boy grew demented and hung it because the father kept telling them that if it kept making noise he was going to kill it.

His father wasn't abusive, but he had intolerance to animals making noise.

He was abusive to animals, in fact.

They once had a dog named Dash. When he was only a puppy, he soon turned out missing, and his mother never asked where he went. Sonic's heart mourned him, as he held his collar, and had heard rumors from the other kids that his father ran him over with his own van and claimed he was run over by another inebriated, ignorant man. He believed his father's lie, if only because he didn't want to bear to listen to the truth.

Mother bought a macaw from someone, claiming she needed more color in her life. Mother ended up letting it survive on the streets by itself. It was soon shot by someone. He assumed his father, yet that truth couldn't be born to listen to.

The kitten. He remembered it well. It didn't have a name, and it died nameless. He was only about eight years old. So young, so lovely, his pink collecting well in his fat cheeks, his mother so mad, so red in her lips and nails, her dress would be so shining and wondrous like the sun if it wasn't for the dirt and makeup that got from her face to the hems and seams. His mother once kissed him on those lips, had loved him, had cradled him when he was barely strong enough to walk and to hold a vial of milk to his mouth. Father was gone most of the time. Time seemed to slow down when he was in his crib, in his bed that had the walls dotted with his favorite athletes and his favorite videogames. Even when he was 8, his mother would sing him lullabies, give him a cup of warm milk, but strangely enough, the mother would say it came from her breast, because she loved him so. And she quoted from Where the Wild Things Are that she couldn't bear to see him grow up, or else she'd "eat him up, I love you so". She left with tears on every birthday. The kitten was a birthday gift, and he could catch his father never wanted to see him grow up, as the kitten had mewed for his attention so much that he threatened to kill it, he threatened to smash it with a sledgehammer. Sonic cried profusely and had screamed at his father that he'd kill it himself with dental floss, and he did.

He felt the house was always warm and rotting with animal corpses.

They suffered, but never the mother and father.

The noon sun was hot, his hands sweating underneath the gloves. He could smell the scent of grilling steak in the air. The Mocha Lounge awaited him, like certain death and epiphany, and he hoped that he didn't have to wear the maid dress. He could go in like any other normal male and wash the tables and dishes and picture frames like any other worker who wasn't forced to embarrass himself.

There were a few cars parked beside the employee's. It actually had a few customers.

He went inside, the sun drying all the tears on those same ruddy cheeks from his childhood, the feature his caring mother once said it was his best feature.

Several people were inside, talking, writing their books, gazing up from their computer screens to look up at him. They saw the casted hand, the drunken and swimming eyes, and the tiredness, the thorns collected in his lids. Shadow had approached him, looking at the hand, but trying to ignore the injury as he spoke to him.

"Time to put on that dress again."

Sonic was too tired to be indignant, though he asked the question of why he had to, and that one night was enough.

"I don't know what you're doing Sonic, but…" He shook his head. "Ever since you put on that dress, we had several more customers than usual. I think it's good for business, and it's apparently amusing to some people. Besides, you look like a total mess again. Go to the Marilyn Manson bathroom, clean up, and put it on. And try to be social. I think the customers would like it if you tried to make their day. You remember the girl who was here? You made her happy. And I think happiness can come a long way in business."

He sighed. If it was good enough for business, then it was good enough for Shadow, and there was no way arguing out of it.

He delved in the mocha-colored walls of the hallway to the bathrooms before Shadow stopped him again.

"Sonic?"

He said nothing, but faced him, hoping the tears were dissolved away by the sun by now.

"Promise me you'll start taking care of yourself a little better. You don't have to come in here looking fancy with a suit and tie and all that, but try to have some sense of professionalism. If you don't do that…"

"Then what?"

Shadow couldn't bear to say it. He turned, facing the wall, and only told him he would dock his pay by a few dollars.

"Tell you what, if you come in here wearing that dress and being pleasant with the customers and take care of yourself for a few weeks, I'll give you a small bonus. And hearing a little about you, you're probably going to need it."

He could only question his business practices as he was welcomed by the pictures of a bloody and Gothic Marilyn Manson on the walls, and he tried to clean himself of his filth the best he could. The filth of the alcohol he drank. Filth of the memories of the deaths of his pets. Filth over the doctors gossiping about his mother, how stricken with disease she was, before she choked.

He could imagine all the dirt washing off his quills and feet and hands as he tried to sober up in the sink, and he felt as if he underwent a holy ritual, that he had bathed in the Ganges River.

The day had loomed by, the sun ripping through the sky, gulping that depressing blueness with its pink and ruddy bleed. He had dressed in his holy work uniform, the white silk accentuating his spirit and soul. It had lied with some imaginary god he couldn't believe in, the shoes made of black velvet, teeth shining of ivory, the godliness shining deeply inside him. No one could make him cleaner than he was, as he smiled like a radiant opal in a jeweler's store, the customers looking with blank expressions, the shoes clicking against the hard floor, the ribboned underwear feeling tight, but he tried to smile, tried to remain pure, as he watched the customer writing his novel, which he could see the title, the cursor blinking against the screen, the font sizes mixed and matched with many colors and sizes, yet a new world was never made, characters were never born of clay, the seas never washed away the letters and created a world inside the reader's mind. Just a novel, talked about, whispered about, thought about, but never written. A blank, imaginary book and blank, imaginary riches from said "finished" book.

The novelist, a thin, bony man, wearing spectacles that made his eyes look much larger (he looked like a mole, Sonic thought) he looked nervous, his pores ached with sweat. Sonic asked him what he wanted his imaginary novel to be about.

"It's not imaginary! It's…it's really going to be a success. I have such a good idea, you really don't know! I could write so many words on my keyboard, I could become a pianist, an organist, make a symphony…make a song and seam those words into a great novel with my singing and my voice, you just don't know what I have here! I've been writing for an hour and a half! This novel really will be good, you just wait and see!"

"You're just messing with the fonts. You're not really writing. You're talking about writing but you're not really writing."

"Talking about writing is writing. Planning to write truly is writing. You're too blind to see the letters here. I actually wrote an entire novel in my head, with this magical font I created."

He glanced at the laptop screen, to see if his novel was written in white font, invisible ink so no one could read his magnificent words that would soon be published for the world to see and hail him as a creative genius. But the word count stated he only wrote the title and his name. The brilliant masterpiece was only invisible to his eyes and the other workers, as the man had formulated a novel in his head, but hasn't laid them out in physical form. A baby that was being created in the womb, but wasn't given birth to.

His cheeks still lit up, a vivid red in the browns of the Mocha Lounge. There was a man and a woman sitting and eating a muffin (which they said had tasted like paper with food coloring and extra sugar to resemble the blueberries), smoking cigarettes as the smoke had entwined with the windows and the eggshell walls that he could sense were peeling off the more they puffed. They claimed they were artists, looking to gain a new vision, but they had artist's block, and had come to a new location to gain inspiration.

Was there truly an artist's block? He thought. He played music for a long time, had even at one point played his songs everyday to add to the ear-nausea of his mother and father, but soon was led to mediocrity when he had to move out on his own and encounter the truth about the adult world: that he couldn't truly escape from his problems. They were always there, and no matter how much he tried to drown himself with a rain of vodka, it was never gone. It never went away. His problems grew worse. He had no contact with his mom and dad to bail him out of anything. He managed to get a scholarship to college, because he was too poor to afford anything else in his life and he convinced the board that he truly wanted to learn. He truly wanted to make art, no matter how painful the birthing process was.

He had several miscarriages after dropping out. He tried to make a hit song despite all the knowledge he learned, and had ultimately gained no mastery of his acoustic guitar and his strange little instruments: his xylophone and baby-rattles and Fischer-Price toys that lied strewn in his mini-studio. Planned on making a eulogy to his childhood, how innocent it all seemed to be, before his mother went insane. Before his father was too stressed out to help him. He broke some plastic toys to make them sound like he had died in his childhood, as the toys croaked and squeaked underneath his feet and his screams, peeping only when he was done with his tormented rage. The toys could never comfort him. And soon, music, and the entire art process, couldn't either.

He wondered if these artists had suffered as much as him. That some sort of revelation, their pain and wounded souls and their crying minds completely sick with mercury that's excreted by the Bipolar Flower, the same flower that struck his mother. It was why she didn't eat for days. Why she would never sleep with both of her eyes closed. Her body was a machine that malfunctioned and recovered quickly, as the processing information in her brain's CPU was either very quick; able to pick up things in a snap, or was infected with viruses and spyware, and she ran as slow as her black depression, the river that continued to flow, with barely any waves. It just sucked you in. And drowned you for several days.

"What's with the getup, sir?"

They were commenting on his dress, which he thought had got much bigger and more brilliant each day. The dress that carried his own form of medicine. He could see them sucking down cigarette after cigarette, as if they were always hungry for nicotine, tobacco, and cancer filling their lungs. Sonic explained that it was apparently good for business. It was possible, however, that Shadow was being superstitious, or just wanted him to wear something to embarrass him.

"You look ridiculous. I would paint a picture of you. A crying hedgehog in a maid dress. Make the entire picture an oil painting, a stucco blue with a few whites and blacks to complete it. I could make it abstract too. I could make it talk about how we're ridiculed as a society to follow this capitalistic imperialism this president prides himself on. To wear the most fancy dresses money could buy, even if you were a man. Drink wine, have wine glasses hooked to your hand, have red lips and shining opal teeth, a pearl necklace, elaborate haircuts, an undying faith in American luxury and patriotism, to support the war going overseas, to secretly love North Korea that you slept with him, that you want the world to fall into a nuclear wasteland. And you want socialism, but you can't have it. Communism is locked away. It can't be obtained by simple methods. And by God, will you do anything to get it. Even wear a dress. The owner of this shop is a Communist, isn't he? I knew you weren't a capitalist pig like the rest of us."

He tuned out half of his words, turning the knob on his brain getting only static and mixed signals. He could imagine the madness continued to run, the machine that made his heart steel and metallic, made him believe in no fantasies and to succumb to this capitalism the man had talked about. But none of it, of what he received, made sense to him. It was only liberal arts college dribbles from his chin like a feeding infant, and he was glad he was out of college for one reason, and that was to avoid men like him, who were blind to the real issues: the issue was that no one truly cared about what he thought.

"You say a lot of bullshit for being an artist," he said. "Artists only speak about the truth in nature and politics and government and music and writing and all that. You think this dress is only a political statement? You think everything is literally symbolism for your bullshit paintings? Artist block doesn't happen from the blockage of ideas. You can remove it with nothing but a little hard work, and I used to play music every day. Novelist? You need to not be a hack writer, not talk about writing all the time, and actually start doing it. And you can't show off your little fancy degree in liberal arts. If you want to discuss the Truth with your fellow man, be honest and be open instead of being a close-minded bigot."

Shadow could hear the conversation echoing throughout the brown halls, as he stared at the picture of his once proud and standing father, hearing Sonic's voice ranting and rambling about the repercussions and the advancement that art had made in society all these years. The caveman paintings to the Mona Lisa to Salvador Dali and Picasso and Monet to the bullshit that New Yorkers would buy for the money they couldn't afford to stay in their wallets every time there was something they remotely liked: a roll of duct tape stuck to the wall in duct tape. A dog made out of green grapes. Art that any child could do, but yet these adult children were paid by the millions for their hackiture. And Sonic felt he could sniff them out, the man who couldn't compose a novel with his keyboard though he always talked about it, and an artist who claimed to be politically-involved but never knew what any of his words and stances meant.

He was losing customers! Out they went, petulant children! The Mocha Lounge had lost two great artists, one who would write a novel that was critically acclaimed, as he told children that they could imagine the book to be anything they wanted, any story they wanted to read, and the man was paid millions despite never written a single word on his glorious gold-leafed pages that was supposed to be his novel. The political artist drew a blue and white and black picture of a hedgehog in a dress crying after North Korea had wiped out the world in a beautiful Prussian blue, and while it wasn't a success when it was first conceived, it was a year later.

Sonic wished he had his guitar, able to string it and strum it, the strings made of celestial stars, and he would sing how the artistic world truly wasn't fair to the likes of him. Hacks always got far. The true artists always committed suicide before they ever found out they were geniuses. So it goes.

Shadow had listened to the clamor outside of the main room, the workers complaining that Sonic's uprighteousness had killed business. Slain it with a sword as if it was a beast. Stone said if he was the boss, he would fire him immediately. Brenda said that Shadow was an idiot and should've fired him already, and that they would never be quite like a Salvation Army. She said the dress had done nothing for business and it was only luck two customers had come in.

"And you reek of alcohol again! What did you drink this time? Smells like Corona and schnapps. Do you literally drink anything you can get your hands on?"

His color had vanished from his face. The cheeks no longer glowed vibrantly with his embarrassment and charm. The dress no longer shined. The fur seemed to rot like the wall paint, curling up, turning a sickly yellow. So were his teeth and even his eyes, contracting lupus from his liver malfunction.

He wondered why Shadow had even hired him at all. A drunk when he first saw him, unkempt and unprofessional and ignorant and slack-jawed. Shadow insisted he stayed here, and even promised him to pay him extra if he cleaned up his act.

Yet he never appeared out of the hallway. Marilyn Manson continued to glare at him with his moon-scarred eyes. Night was beginning to bloom like a white lotus flower, and the other workers were ready to leave, while Sonic yet again wanted to stay here longer, to take care of business before he discussed art and was seen as pretentious and a hack.

He only made one album, and it never sold more than ten copies. He never got anything back from the people who bought his album that they liked it. Claiming he knew everything about art, Sonic thought. He knew nothing at all. He only knew his emotions, and as clear and as both pure burning white and darkening black they were, they never translated to songs right. His sadness was never weaved into a passionate, angst-ridden song, or had used his happiness to build something upbeat, catchy, and would always play in the bright smiling mornings of local radio stations. O how God had loved him! He had hands, he could construct something, but his ideas were never big enough to make anything worth glancing at with wondering eyes. He was a hack like the rest of them. A hack that wasn't worth burning millions of dollars for as if you didn't give a shit at all where your money went.

Stone, Brenda, and Emery left. He was alone, cleaning the nicotine off the walls. He sopped up coffee spills and had dusted away all the pieces of bread and sweet treats and the gum that was stuck by teenagers believing that gum would become illegal once North Korea had vanquished capitalism, and he cleaned the piss stains on the Marilyn Manson urinals. Just like how he always wanted them to be. Clean and tidy, for the men to continue to drip their waste and cum in the bathrooms.

His lids were beginning to close like the stars that were soon obscured by the clouds. He had to go home and rest. Shadow told him to stay for another half-hour.

"And why the hell should I? I basically fucked up your business! I made everyone hate me, and I'm pretty sure not another customer is ever going to come here again! What could you possibly want me here for another half-hour for? I haven't slept in nearly twenty-four hours!"

"I don't sleep either," he said.

"Of course you do. Everyone sleeps. Everyone is going to go to sleep dreaming they're kicking my balls over and over again."

Silence filled the Lounge. Shadow's eyes also had veins growing like vines in the corners, as he sipped another mocha cappuccino. Tasted like chocolate piss, but he couldn't ask for anything better.

"I don't sleep. Not these past few days."

"And why not? You got nothing to worry about. You got a good business here, before it was fucked up by me. You got good employees, except for me. Why did you hire me? I'm a drunk. I smell like liquor and blood and sweat and piss. You don't need me here. It was nice working for you, but…"

"Stay," he said.

"And why?"

"You…I don't know how to say these things."

He gazed at him, his eyes, red, sore, lack of sleep drying them, the night making him await mournfully for the bed, the bed he would lie in while many CDs covered him, the silver-ribbed blanket.

Couldn't say anything. The night dipped down, the stars shook the sky, glitter in a child's art project. Blood-rimmed, the prospects of getting another good night's sleep with another person willing to make him feel not so lonely, morning bleeds with a pierced wound, cry! Cry! He expected Shadow to say something, but he couldn't. His lips were too sore and sick.

"I feel too lonely sometimes," was all he could say.

"Me too. Join the club. Now I gotta leave before this business is pushed underneath in all this damn weight."

"Do you know what your son has? I'm the only one who could help you pay for his treatment. No one else will hire you and your music sucks."

"Nice rubbing it in, boss."

"What does he have? I'm sure the treatment costs a lot of money, and if you're willing to scrounge up anything you can get to help pay for his treatment while buying yourself a couple drinks to off yourself with while having some suicidal ideation, then I'm the only one who's willing to keep you drunk. Although you need to really stop drinking until your liver malfunctions; no one is willing to talk to you when you're in your deathbed. Do you expect anyone to help you after you lose your apartment and lose your son and lose your job and lose your possessions just to have a couple drinks in your system, and you're in the streets throwing up and covered in vomit and you're a drunk lunatic? Do you want that, Sonic? You have practically no choice but to work for me."

The cloth stopped cleaning the table of all its pasts' devourations. He thought of how lonely he was, living in this cafe, in his apartment, with a boss who only wanted him to keep working cause he knew he had no choice. Never had a choice, he reminded himself. His music was horrible, like the mead he drank not too long ago; looking to get some cheap liquor instilled in his machines. He vomited it up afterwards, the pickled-piss taste still remaining on his tongue. He needed something sweet. Like a cappuccino. But pickled-piss still latched onto his mouth like a sea creature with tentacles.

"You can have a cappuccino or two on the house. You can have three. After drinking that mead that my father once drank years ago. He wanted a cheap fix too. It didn't work. He threw up, just like you."

Sonic didn't want to ask how he knew that he drank mead before coming here. Shadow probably saw him before he went into work. Or maybe his father reminded him of so much of his alcoholism that displayed so proudly like a peacock in front of the cafe. And the millions of eyes kept staring back at him, wondering how sick was he that he had to sink this low, to look like a little girl's doll in a coffee shop (With the little ribbons and the trimmings, the silky underwear and the fluffy crown he wore to tell people he was only their slave), and he wondered if next he would be conducting sexual favors in front of his boss, have the lollipops licked like lusty children after sugary treats, he wondered if he would soon be like his mother, the mother that was mostly like a child, with her illness so prominent in her rimed and lice-infested brain.

The night slowly turned over its body, the naked woman that slept peacefully midst all the summer rain that collected in her hair. Shadow shook his head, and continued.

"My father has secrets. So does my mother. My father always had a lot of secrets. And so does my mother (Why was he repeating himself, Sonic wondered.) I wonder if you were one of them. I wonder if he knew your mother. Your father. That much I don't know. But there are more things in this coffee shop than piss-flavored drinks. There's more to me than there is to you. I am more than me than you are perfectly you. Living by the garden and by the sea back in California, my mother was a rich woman, and she invested in fine artifacts and believed in Fay-like riddles and rituals. Very spiritual. I don't know why she chose my father as her husband. He's as atheist and dull and unbelieving as you are. He constantly told her there was no God. He told her that prayers were only useless, hopeful whispers. He said if there were gods, they were deaf to hear us, because we are so further from their grace and glory nowadays, that it isn't like Greece and the stories of Beowulf and the stories the woman told to the man who wanted to kill her for 1,001 nights, we are so despicable and disgusting that the gods decided to no longer hear our voices and instead only install them as white noise. There's so much noise we can only block out until the world is suddenly silent. My mother knew about the world of today. The advertisements that gave men no free will, their consciousness weak. She knew about how art was now barely classified by art except for the hipsters who come into this cafe. She thought everything contemporary had to be destroyed, yet preserved in its destruction, its last few shards dusting the floor. Therefore, my mother has something buried deep in this cafe, in the memory of my father, something that will shape society as we know it. In other words, calling upon the gods and making it to their own image. And you know what my mother said? The gods wouldn't change a thing. They liked us stupid. And my father chimed in that's how we believe in these outlandish myths in the first place."

Sonic tried to shape all the words in his sea-drowning head. Shadow also was rambling. Rambling as fast as his mouth moved when he believed in his little comforting psychotic delusions. A couple shots of scotch in his coffee along with Coke, he could imagine. Shadow, the drunkard, the Spaniard that believed in all these lies that historians made up so history would still be alive. There was no history. There were only lies. Lies that Buffalo used to be something else other than some sort of pissing contest between those who lived in New York and those who lived out of state. The hipsters, the businessmen that would tell him so much of the glory of New York, how magnificent it all was, with its empirical buildings, its cuisine, its sense of inflated importance. And Shadow had rambled about all this too, had said that New York was only a fantasy land made up of wistful Americans and immigrants, and it, in fact, was a shithole, the public pay toilet for all the celebrities to shit and bathe in.

New York, New York…his father had lived in New York before his wife had become pregnant. They soon moved to Buffalo, cause his father said he couldn't stand for his son to be tainted by the splendor of New York, its extravagance, but yet couldn't move too far away from his work, until the towers fell years ago, and he soon was laid off, paranoid of any other building falling like shed skin.

He then grew a sensible mind, divorced his mother, yet never cared to have the custody over Sonic, as he was about 16 at the time. He moved to Atlanta. He never came back and never contacted either his wife or his son again.

He denied Shadow's story. There was no story. As much as there was no God. Cause there, truly, was no God. He knew it. He saw Him, and He said He only existed to those without eyes. And so, he felt that his were torn out, and were replaced by those that were coveted by blurriness, the alcohol feeling as if he was underwater, trying to dive deep to find God again, but nothing. Nothing could ever prepare him for the possibility that his mother was as blind as Shadow's mother.

They were both spiritual lunatics, he knew that. They knew each other, possibly. They never knew that God actually lived underwater.

Shadow yawned, his back arched as if he became a thousand years old, and he could feel yet another summer rain coming. Smelling the air always gave him the hint of whether it would rain. And even in the cafe, with its coffee overpowering everyone else's senses, he could smell rain. And it calmed him. He often liked to sit back with his typewriter, reflect on the sound the rain made on his screen outside, on the ground that was parched for water, the heat that was now cooled down to a breezy drift, and he thought more when it rained, and he came up with his best ideas when it rained. His mother prayed when it rained. His father didn't go outside and drink when it rained. Raining was a good thing, and he prayed for it everyday.

Shadow's lids were half-closed, the warmth of the building ushering him to a culled sleep, as the rain was often his sweet little lullaby. Since he was a baby, when his mother sung mantras to him…

He cleaned up the last of his employee's messes, the coffee rings they never bothered to wipe off the counters, the bubble gum he knew Brenda kept underneath the tables along with other sugary bubble gum pop teens she was friends with.

A shadow to himself was as useless as himself. He was already dark enough to never be seen by the world.

He felt sad. Blue, as the radio played a somewhat melancholy blue song. Listened, waited for Sonic's reaction. He thought he looked cute, in that dress. It was another reason why he was in it. Cause Sonic didn't look as nearly as good as he did in a dress that made him seem like Alice from Lewis Carroll's book.

Sonic sat on one of the brass chairs, listening to the music that crooned on the station. Sonic recognized it as "Heaven Beside You" by Alice in Chains, Shadow unveiling a cigarette from a pack of Newport's and igniting it with the flame on his Zippo lighter, watching as the stars danced across the canvas of the screen doors, listening to the midnight rush of drivers coming back from work and going into work, to get a fill of fast food in their stomachs and a couple of beers, and crickets chimed in the lush grass, blackened and shaded completely in the dark liquid of night.

He often thought night in Buffalo looked like his own cup of coffee. Black, with many lights surrounding it, maybe things swimming in it too (at least, he hoped not).

Silence, as no sounds escaped from their lips except the extinguishing of the smoke from his cigarette. Sonic thought he could have a cigarette too, but despite his desire, he thought he would be a bad influence on Tails, and he couldn't bear to see him smoke either, having another sickness he had to worry about.

"I have a lot of hope for you, Sonic," Shadow said.

He crushed the cigarette on the leather seat, his voice growing quieter the more he spoke certain syllables, the night cascading further into more obfuscating darkness. Sonic wished he could go home. It had been so long since he had another drink, another taste of schnapps on his tongue…

Shadow continued to speak, as each second was voiced from his lips, his lidded eyes stung from the smoke, the black coffee keeping him up all this night. He denied in everything he said, though his brain was vied to believe in it. About the mysteries of his father. About his mother being a bit too snooty to love him fully. Father was too drunk to notice him. Replaced the addiction with a coffee addiction, drinking 7 cups in one day, hurting his heart to the point of a heart attack, and soon, he could never remember his misdeeds, and only remember his father once being a good man. Until he thought he was so thirsty he couldn't be ever parched.

Sonic tapped his fingers to Shadow's CDs. His Alice in Chains and Harold Budd and Steve Roach and Nirvana, he listened to a eclectic mix of music, and soon it was about 2 AM, where Shadow was finally too tired to speak of his family woes, and too tired to even drive the truck home.

He spilled a half-full cup of cappuccino on the floor, Sonic seeing it as his blood, his passion towards keeping the memories of his father alive spilled out to him. Except he wasn't sure if he could listen to his quiet voice. He cleaned it up.

Why was he here? Why did he make him stay for several more hours than he needed to be? Why did he reveal about his family history, the snooty bitch, the drunken bastard that only loved him when he drank coffee, he wondered how the dress cast a spell over people to tell their problems to him, as if he was a therapist. The little girl told him about how lonely she was sometimes. Shadow also related that problem to him that he only had one girlfriend and they broke up after a month of dating. So many things he listened to in his career of working in a coffee shop, or he had to admit to himself, he probably was the same as a male stripper.

Just like mother, the men cowered to her and told her their secrets. How they wished to kill their sisters and brothers, how they once killed the family of goldfish in their aquariums, set the house on fire, never finding a good enough job to sustain them, so they sold drugs and tried to get high on 8-balls and meth. And The Mother welcomed them into her warm cove, allowed them to sleep there overnight, comforted after their drink and food was garnished and cared for, The Mother was a holy land unto itself in her magical van, where men could come and be nourished all they wanted from her ponds and streams as long as they provided the dough.

The Mother soon died. By choking on her own vomit. He saw her choking. He held the phone firmly in his hands, the three numbers ready to be pressed, his fingers shaking as she gargled for his name and the pleas for him to help.

He smashed the phone on the floor and walked away from her. When the police came, he told them that yes, he knew his mother was dying, but no, he didn't want to help her. He could've been charged, but the police saw his pupils dilated, as he carried around a canteen of vodka around his neck. They decided to ask no further questions and just take The Mother to be cremated.

Like a Jew in a Nazi oven, he said, smiling.

Shadow lied on the floor, his body wrapped with the dress that Sonic discarded to warm him, and he left, before the morning ached to be free from the dark's clutches.