RAKI AFTER DARK
Flash Fiction
The incessant fan on the roof beat the stagnant Bulgarian air into a paste. Ashamed bed sheets, twisted like sickly roll-up cigarettes between the fingers of sinners were strewn around the 10-bed dorm. Barefoot, I tottered around on unsteady legs, wavered, tried to remember why I’d got up and sat back down, head in hands. A thin layer of dirt on the cold tiled floor breached the gaps between my toes; another decimal point on an already terrifyingly complex hangover.
This one was alien: a Raki hangover. Classless, half-memories belched loudly into my mind as I considered my next move to fend off multiple crushing existential crises, far away from home. Will was horribly hunched over, sat on the edge of his creaky metal bed in the dim, orange light, most of the curtains still drawn, straight as soviet architecture. He’d managed to get one sock on in 40 minutes and all we’d said to each other since waking was ‘fucking hell’ and ‘I know, it’s bad.’ He chewed a nail off, spat it out, shook his head and mouthed a silent plea at me when I caught his eye; red as the skin on the back of my neck. The clank and chink of another missed breakfast bar being tidied away carried up through a window that wouldn’t open more than one inch. It was only right that the croissants had been left to people who deserved them; tourists who hadn’t been running around, arseholed in Sofia parks with a strange local who insisted on kicking things over, pretending to be Danny Dyer, giving himself over entirely to what he’d told us was, the way he saw it, an accurate representation of British football hooligan culture in Football Factory.
We’d kept quiet, didn’t want to upset our only hope of after hours booze. He lead us down a deserted alley, under a blinking street light. Two taps of the knuckle, then three on a pharmacy shutter at 1am. We watched, open mouthed as it slowly rumbled up; a hand and a probing pair of eyes. This puckered mouth in the darkness muttered something in Bulgarian. It sounded angry to me, but the Raki still got handed out. Things got murky after that. Swirling horrors.
I stood up again. The fan continued to smack the humidity. Then the rattle and scrape of metal on metal, key stabbing at lock, coming from the dorm door. We both jerked, our overcooked spaghetti nerves disintegrated. Somebody was about to try the handle.