Giant Gerald V (Kill Her with Kindness)

            These thoughts raced through Gerald’s head while he continued hastily cleaning the cocktail glasses.

'What if I was a faggot?' he thought to himself. 'I would've been even more offended!'

Turning away from the moment and the rack of dirty glasses, he looked Barbara up and down in appraisal. There must be something, one thing, worth complimenting about her.

She wore orthopedic shoes that resembled hospital issue slippers. That meant her feet were swollen and rough as hammers. Nothing worth mentioning there.

Her face was pale and greasy looking from overuse of anti-aging cream. No compliment there either.

Her breasts hung like flat tires atop a junk heap.

She was a human train wreck from head to toe. Even her insults were witless and ignorant at best.

Then he found the one thing that time could not steal from Barbara.

“I never understood how eyes that lovely could harbor a frown underneath everywhere they go.”

Now it was Barbara who was dumbstruck. She looked up at him with the confusion of a small child just discovering its reflection in a mirror. Gerald, having successfully gotten her attention, just said, “Only the girls call me G.G. The guys call me by my name.”

She didn't know his name and he knew this.

“What did you say to me?” she muttered after a lengthy pause.

“Your eyes,” he said. Then he echoed a line she heard ages before, from a young man with a poet’s heart whom, until that moment, she had simply regarded as another notch on her proverbial garter belt.

“They’re blue like the sky after a rainstorm.”

The patrons at the bar overheard the exchange and backed up a little, like they were about to witness a fight.

“Resembling,” he continued. “tiny eclipses of the sun.”

Gerald kept quiet after that and went on about his business, deciding to quit while he was ahead.

Barbara was clearly taken off her guard. She finished off the glass of cheap red wine that sat directly in front of her as though it were a shot of whiskey, grimacing afterward in reaction to the rush of tannins. A tear ran from her eye and she hid it, adjusting the makeup she wasn't wearing.

She had not heard a genuinely kind word in ages.

“I’m going to the restroom.”

Her voice sounded crippled.

“Could you please pour me a glass from the reserve bottle for when I come back?” In the history of her patronage at that bar, Barbara had not ever said ‘please’ to anybody.

She entered the ladies’ room, waited patiently for a woman in there to finish  her business and leave, then sobbed openly in front of the mirror. She washed her face profusely, anticipating that someone might enter at any moment and catch her in the middle of a nervous collapse. When she finished, Barbara went into a stall briefly to masturbate. She truly could not remember the last time she'd been touched. This emotional disaster a human being exploded within contact of herself and felt beautiful all over again for ten seconds. Then she remembered that, even as a curvaceous man-eater, she was ugly then too – that she had always been ugly.

Barbara washed off her lipstick and face cream, deeming them, and herself, ridiculous. She collected herself and went back to the bar. Gerald sensed progress on his part and did his best to continue on the same note. He was not at all certain where this was going, but he didn't intend on backing down. This was all out war.

“Enjoying the finer thing, aye, Ms. Barbara?” he said, referring to her selection of wine. For Barbara, ever since her fall from supposed grace, it had always been the cheap stuff. From well liquor to black coffee to house wine. Everything was for effect – not for flavor.

“Might as well taste it.”

She smiled, her voice was still weak, and her mind still in shock from her miniature episode in the bathroom.

“Might as well enjoy it,” Gerald concurred.