Straight Lines

At the Irish bar, heavy smoker and drinker Keane was drinking his fifth dark beer. He was wearing a skirt classic for a woodcutter and old, dirty jeans. His brown hair was greasy, and his weight was giving the chair a real challenge.

Sabina entered and saw this huge back, huge muscles on Keane, and instantly recognized him from Sophia's story.

"Hi there, big fellow. Are you waiting long?" Sabina asked with a bright smile full of sunshine.

"Ohh, hi, hi. Take a seat. Noo, I am not waiting at all. I came to warm up a little bit."

Sabina asked what there was to drink here.

With a voice like from the bottom of a barrel, Keane told her, "You have beer, wine, and schnapps here. The beer is the best option. Other stuff is made in some dirty bathtub probably."

Sabina smiled. "So there are no cocktails here?"

"I'm afraid there are not."

The waiter came with a face obviously confused about what this type of person wanted here.

"I will have what he is having."

"Give me another as well, mate," Keane said.

Sabina drank five beers now while Keane drank more than 10 at this point.

They talked about art, about movies, bedroom activities.

"Look here, miss, I think you are nice and everything, and you are much nicer than Sophia could ever be. But after these three beers I drank, I don't think I could go to your place."

"What are you talking about? You drank like all the beers in the bar, not just three," Sabina said, laughing from her belly.

Keane asked the waiter for a pen and paper.

Then he drew two stick figures and showed them to Sabina.

She nodded.

Then he took the pen again and started drawing something again. Then he showed his drawing to Sabina.

Sabina laughed so hard she almost fell from the chair.

Keane drew on one stick figure a big round circle for a stomach, and then an arrow and skull representing that his weight would crush this other stick figure.

Sabina drew an arrow and wrote her name with a question mark on the other stick figure, to which Keane nodded and laughed through his big beard.

Sabina flirtingly asked Keane, almost through a whisper, "Do you want to come to my place then?"

Keane took a sip. "Negative."

"What?"

"Negative. Can't be done."

"But why?"

"I had a nice time, miss, but that is all. I am pretty much not interested in bedroom activities anymore. I am old enough and lazy enough to just sleep now until the next day. Also, I need to go and eat like two or three kebabs so that beer doesn't fry my liver."

"Okay, I guess. You are such a weird guy. I didn't expect you to be like this..."

Keane was getting up, hugged her, paid the waiter, and then went his own way.

Sabina was hammered from these dark beers as ever. She tried to stand up, but her legs were giving up. She went around the bar and sat at random people's tables, asking for random guys' numbers. Saying a bunch of drunk nonsense, like she didn't like white wedding dresses.

She then collapsed on one table and knocked everything from it, which resulted in the waiter kicking her out of the bar.

She was standing outside. In her head was a dark mess. She felt empty and erratic. She wanted to fill this void inside of her. Devoid of happiness, that is my life, she thought. Can I just have fun with some random guy without it totally making me sad and depressed?

Sabina walked right to left, down to up. Some guy pulled over in a car and asked, "How much?"

Sabina flipped him the middle finger, and then asked, "Do you have cigarettes?"

She got cigarettes from some grandma that was sitting in this late hour on the bus bench.

Grandma asked her if she was okay.

Sabina lit a cigarette and, with watery eyes, said to grandma, "Never better."

Keane arrived home and just tossed himself into bed. Next day he found out that the kebabs he had eaten in the middle of the night, he had ejected into the nightstand drawer because the bathroom was too far. The drawer was now as good as trash. He also realized his TV was flipped around. He had no recollection of how that happened.

He went to the kitchen, sliced some bacon, put it in the pan. In a separate pan, he cracked 10 eggs and put a lid on the pan so that the eggs could cook nicely from both sides.

Keane was thinking about Sabina, how absolutely gorgeous she was, how cheerful and young she was. She knew much about movies and art, but she liked more mainstream stuff. Keane was open-minded towards new and mainstream art as well. He noticed Sabina didn't like older or some of the classics, some of them she didn't even know. He was surprised when she hadn't even heard about his favorite movie with Jean Reno, Gary Oldman, and Natalie Portman.

While Keane was eating this breakfast of kings, he for a second thought about seeing Sabina again, but then for multiple hours was just thinking about how his favorite actor Gary Oldman was so cool and how he wanted to be cool like him.

Keane was a data analyst and he worked from home, with this crazy deal to be almost always available. His Turkish female boss would always yell at him and his colleagues. She would organize a meeting and then yell at them for like one hour straight. He thought how Sabina was nicer than his boss, but he still would prefer someone like Gary Oldman as a boss. It would be cool if he had a side gig as my boss. That would be epic. Me and him, we would get along great. I can just feel it.

In the cake shop, Ludwig was swamped with work. The job of making cakes was his calling. He could make a dessert with his eyes closed and one arm tied behind his back.

Today was a busy day. He had a lot on his plate, coordinating his workers, making everything with precision and efficiency. Workers would sometimes have little time for cigarette breaks, which Ludwig hated. He would often even tell them no cigarette breaks until work was done. Ludwig was a strict boss, strict as it gets. But also he was fair, that is what all the workers appreciated.

When anyone had an issue, he would swoop in and deal with it in seconds. Everyone got to learn from him how to be prepared, efficient, and perfect. Ludwig's way was the perfect way. Each cake had the standard of being perfect, or else it was going into the bin.

Ludwig went into the warehouse of the kitchen to get more supplies. The warehouse was clean and well organized. Warehouses clean and organized to perfection like this probably don't exist anywhere else, he thought. And then, when no one was looking, on one dirty cardboard box he spread some lines of white powder.

When he got back into the kitchen, he worked even faster and more focused than yesterday. The kitchen was loud, the air was sweet, everything was colorful with white color being the canvas. The workers were in awe of how much energy and strength Ludwig had in his work.

Ludwig had envisioned this black cake with white decorations and thought about how he would show it to Sophia when she got there. He was working on this while helping others. He would zoom around the kitchen thinking, dancing like ice skating and grinding. Grinding for a better future for his daughter. Also for a better life for her. He wanted, and would think about it always, how he didn't want Sophia to end up alone like him.

He didn't know it, but Sophia was already there. She had arrived home and snuck up the stairs. She was in Dad's room, on Dad's couch with Wilson, secretly.