Prompt: You’ve recently started college and have found an extremely well paying job ad for a bartender working the graveyard shift. You arrive for your interview to learn that the bar is strictly for supernatural creatures and monsters. They hire you.
It was a month into the new job at Adam’s Amorphous Alehouse. I wiped down the counter, glancing around the empty bar. We opened in ten minutes. There were wooden and stone tables of varying sizes strewn about, some had regular chairs, others had mounds of stone, and others were just hunks of rock. Doorways of all different colors lined all three walls, while one circular one jutted from the ceiling. They were all crafted differently with different materials — some worldly, some not — while others had illogical contours or entirely new, incomprehensible shapes.
There was a chime off in the distance, signaling it was time to start. I dropped the rag into the wash bucket beneath the counter, then reached down and gripped the lever protruding from the floor. I inhaled, exhaled, pushing it forward. All the doorways pulled open, some whining as metal scrapped against metal, others grinding with stone against stone, and a few even let out guttural moans.
A fury of noise, of bodies, of shapes pouring out from the doorways, from the ceiling, seeping and oozing from the floorboards. A blur of colors and designs and patterns that an amateur to the bartending world or the world beyond would lose their mind to. Before my mind registered what was happening, I was taking orders, filling drinks with cheap beer and souls of the innocent, handing kegs brimming with golden elixirs, and goblets and basins etched with archaic runes, spilling with kaleidoscopic colors, to creatures that floated in the air, to monsters that hung from the ceiling by three of their thirteen sinewy arms, to shadowy beings that loomed in four-dimensional space over me as if I stood in an empty of plane of existence.
I kept my mind from reeling, kept my lungs from locking up, kept from crying or laughing or pissing myself. The rush was always the worst. After a while, maybe an hour, maybe days, maybe weeks — time didn’t work the same in the triple A as it did outside — everyone was calmed, sitting at the tables or floating above them, or existing in a place in-between their world and the bar. They would be gone soon, they always were.
I wiped the sweat from my forehead, sat back and poured myself a beer. The cold drink cooled my churning my stomach. My mind calmed and my hands gradually stopped shaking. It wouldn’t last long, it never did. The opening rush would start again soon. Five minutes here is fifteen years elsewhere.
The bar emptied and the doorways automatically sealed themselves.
There was a chime off in the distance. I set my empty glass down, sighed, then leaned forward and gripped the lever. I inhaled, exhaled, pushing it forward.
The doorways opened. They were upon me again.
Read my previous prompt, “A Party Ruined by an Undead.”
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Micah Castle 