a fifteenth new story...'empire state'

It shouldn’t have, it wasn’t, was never meant to happen like that, BUT ... it did! Ha ha ha ha ha!

Gerald sank another cocktail, propped himself up on the bar again.  ‘What are these called?’ he slurred to the bar girl, polishing wine glasses. She told him he was drinking an ‘Old Fashioned’.  ‘Yes’, said Gerald, hiccupped and ordered another.

Macy had always been a flighty one, but perhaps, thought Gerald in rare recent moment of clarity, he had mistaken Macy’s flightiness for charm? Whimsy? And in front of all those people!

Gerald dimly imagined sightseers returning to their hotels and gossiping about that failed proposal at the top of the Empire State.

‘Nevermind the view’, they would say, ‘you’ll never guess what we saw!’

‘Did he throw himself off?’

‘No, he just collapsed like a bag of bones and curled into a ball!’

And then the women would gush about the time their spouses had proposed to them, and the spouses would exchange glances, smile wanly and sip their champagne?

Well fucking done!

‘Would you like another, sir?’, the bar girl asked somewhere in the background – Gerald lost in an alcoholic cloud of remorse (the juke box playing Sweet Caroline).

He turned slowly and unsteadily around on his stool, looked at the bar girl as if she had just stepped from the spaceship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. ‘Colours’, he spluttered. Red, green, blue - on, off, on off, on, off, onoff, onoff, onoff.

When Gerald came to he was back in his hotel room, fully clothed, sprawled like a drunken sailor across the double bed in the now presumptuous honey moon suite. Gerald rolled over, saw his thick, red features in the adjacent free standing mirror. His tie was around his forehead. Uggh! He lay motionless for an hour, whole body paralysed with booze induced lassitude, blinking stupidly – half human, half slug.

Some time, any amount of time later there was a knock at the door and a cleaner came in, followed by a member of staff from the hotel.  The cleaner started up her hoover, and after some smart remark about Rambo lost against the ensuing din, the hotel member of staff slid back out of the room, leaving an envelope on the side table. Gerald closed his eyes, but not too tightly because his sinsuses hurt, tried desperately to forget he was still alive. Perhaps he had jumped? Perhaps he was dead? Perhaps this was purgatory?

Nevermind! Nevermind!

So to the letter: ‘I have gone to stay with my sister in Boulder, MA. Don’t follow. I will know you are coming’.

Gerald ripped it into little pieces, let them fall over the edge, dead confetti, and to the horror and amazement of the assembled crowd, stood up on the parapet, spread his wings and dived like a pelican, his coat tails lifting and catching a terminal air current as he hurtled towards gridlock on 5^th avenue.