It usually took an awful lot to rouse me once I had half a bottle of Wild Turkey in my gullet, but on the night of the nastiest Christmas thunderstorm I’d ever seen, it didn’t take more than the rattling of the cell door as it glided open to admit the newest short-term resident of the Timberton Parish drunk tank.

I couldn’t see very clearly, but the guy was kind of big. Not tall, but stocky. The sort of fella who never met a Big Mac he didn’t like. He was as bald as a pearl fresh-shucked from an oyster, except for a neatly-trimmed ring of hair surrounding his mouth. He was also squinting. I remember that, sort of like a man who couldn’t see well. Normally I’d say that was just because of the waves of vodka I could smell belching off him, but the thin light strips of skin on either side of his nose said to me this man lost a pair of much-needed eyeglasses at some point during the night’s festivities.

The stinking drunk man -- even I appeared sober by comparison -- crawled onto the center of the plastic bench that ran along the back side of the cell. He was halfway between me and Barry Deets, who was often my roommate for these yuletide vacations at the parish’s expense.

The man curled into a ball on the bench and began hissing something that sounded like, “my fault, my fault, all my fault...” I suppose it should have sounded a little loony to me, but it wasn’t an unusual sentiment in the Timberton Hilton.

“What are you in for, Hoss?” I asked my new cellmate.

“He warned me,” Baldy said. “He warned me, I wouldn’t listen, he warned me...”

“Hey, buddy, you wanna sit there and feel sorry for yourself that’s your business, but if you’re just gonna keep me an’ Barry up till Santy Claus gets home we’re gonna have problems.” I really should have only included myself of course, at the moment I didn’t think Barry would stand on two good feet if a fire broke out.

I thought that was going to be the end of it for a second -- thought Baldy was asleep, even, until he managed to focus his pinched eyes in my direction and chirp, “You don’t know a damn thing, you worthless rummy.”

I managed to laugh at that -- the high, drawn-out cackle of a man long past sober. “If I’m a rummy, Hoss, what does that make you?”

“A world-league dumbass,” he said.

“If you’re waitin’ for me to argue, Hoss, you’d best stretch out your legs and take a nap, because you’ll be here a while.”

He waved his hand in a gesture my daddy used to make when he wanted me to shut the hell up, then rolled over to face the wall. If I were a smart man I’d have let it go right there. If I were a smart man I wouldn’t have been in that cell in the first place.

“Now don’t be like that, Hoss. We gonna be roommates, we may as well get along.” I flapped a loose arm across my body and stuck it out to him. “Come on. My name’s Frank.”

He peeked up over his own shoulder. His eyes clenched, then softened, then he took my hand and shook it. “Carl,” he said.

“Good,” I said. “So, Carl, we’re all friends here. What you doin’ here on this nasty Christmas Eve?”

“Take another look, Frank,” he said. “The weather’s over.”

I pushed myself to the side so I could see out the single, barred window in the drunk tank. When I was brought in, I knew it had been storming and raining and thundering like the twilight of the friggin’ gods, but now the sky was cool and crisp and so clear that the thin crescent moon flooded the tank with light. “Well I’ll be damned,” I said.

“Get in line,” said Carl.

“Well then, what brings you here on this fine Christmas Eve, Carlie?”

“You wouldn’t believe me,” he said.

“Now what makes you say that?”

“You aren’t drunk enough.”

The man pulled himself up to a sitting position as he said this and stared me right in the eye, and he may have smelled strongly enough of alcohol to knock out a cow at ten paces, but I swear to God at that moment my new friend Carl was stone-cold sober. And so was I.

“You watch movies, Frank?” he asked.

“Hells yeah,” I said, although I doubt Carl was thinking about my kind of movies, where cars blew up and women’s clothes were smaller than their brains.

“You watch Capra?”

“That the new Stallone flick?”

Carl shook his head. “Let’s try this a different way. Did you ever think sometimes something happens to somebody and it’s so weird he writes a story about it, and maybe that story turns into a movie?”

“You mean like ‘Pearl Harbor’?”

Carl groaned and buried his face in his hands. “No, Frank, no. Geez, forget it. I just... did something stupid tonight.”

“What’s that?”

“I wished I’d never been born.”

I laughed with a snort so loud my nostrils hurt. “Well Hell’s bells, Hoss, what you wanna go do somethin’ like that for?”

“Because I’ve done everything wrong in my entire damn life,” he said. “At least, I thought I did.”

“Like what?”

“I haven’t seen my son in 25 years,” he began.

“You think that makes you special, Hoss?” I asked. “With the kids I went to school with, that’d make you one-in-five.”

“You didn’t have a dad either, Frank?”

“Had one. Died ten... twelve years ago.”

“You’re what, 27? 28?”

“29.”

“So you got to grow up with one. Mine didn’t.” His voice was very dry, but he managed to swallow anyway. “Wife left me.”

“Yeah? What’d she do that for?”

“Couple of reasons.” He actually chuckled then. “She didn’t like my houseguests.”

“Sweet young filly with an ass that wouldn’t quit, right?”

“Couple of brothers, actually. Good kids, but they had a tendency to bring trouble with them. That wasn’t it, though, not really. I just never got entirely out of my old job like I promised her I would.”

“What were you, a fireman?”

“Closer to a cop.”

“Close enough, Hoss. So what happened? Little angel came down from the sky and snapped his fingers and Poof! made it so you was never born?”

In my entire life, I don’t think anyone has ever given me a look so totally sane.

“What,” I said, “are you serious?”

“Look at me, junior. When’s the last time you think I told a joke?”

“You’re a nutjob.”

“God, I wish. I’m not crazy, Frank, it’s the rest of the world that is. The little guy did just what you said, told me I’d never been born and all of a sudden it’s stopped raining. I don’t believe the little guy, so I go home.”

“Only I guess you don’t live there.”

“It’s not even a house, it’s all swamp. I went to my brother’s house, but he doesn’t live there either. I don’t know where he is. I go to work, to my department, and it’s like no one there ever heard of me.” He grinned. “I had my first few drinks by then. At least I got to crack my idiot boss in the jaw.”

“And the whole world is a terrible place now because you were never in it?”

“Sounds conceited that way. But my wife is a damn fry cook. My department is falling apart. I can’t find my brother anywhere.” He let out a disgusted chuckle. “I don’t even have Adam’s stupid flower anymore.”

“Adam?”

“One of my houseguests.”

“Yeah? What happened to them?”

“I don’t know,” he said, distantly. “I think one of them is dead. I know Jessica is.”

"Jessica?" I didn’t know who she was, but I doubted she was one of those brothers he was talking about. I slid across the bench, getting as close to the wall as I could. “You’re out of your mind,” he said. “You’re drunk.”

“Little of both, Frankie, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“So why don’t you just go back?” I said. “Tell the little guy to snap his fingers and make everything all right again?”

“I can’t find him!” he howled, and for the first time he sounded actually desperate. “If I could, believe me, I’d be out of here, I’d be gone.”

“And if you were gone? What’d happen to the rest of us?”

“How the hell should I know?” he screamed. “Maybe you change back! Maybe you cease to exist! Maybe your world just keeps going on and I go back to mine. God knows I’ve seen stranger things.”

“Shut up,” I said. “Ain’t nobody that important.”

“Yeah? You ever read a newspaper, smart guy? I paid a little visit to the library before I hit the liquor store. You want to know some of the things that happened somehow because I wasn’t around?”

“Go to Hell.”

“Sixteen people died in this parish in the flood of ‘95. Nobody was supposed to die, did you know that?”

“Be quiet.”

“Or how about that car crash last year on I-310? Twenty cars. Four of them actually fell off the bridge. Didn’t happen before!”

“You’ve totally lost it! Guard! Hey, guard--”

“Or that fire at the Shell Refinery! Killed half the workforce! That never happened!”

I stammered, unable to even scream at him.

“What the hell is your problem?” he spat.

“How did you know that?” I said.

“Know what?”

“My father died in that fire, you asshole! How did you know that?”

His eyes grew ten sizes. “What was his name?” he asked.

“What?”

“Your father! What was his name?”

“Jake! Jake--”

“Danigole,” he said, and I nodded, with no words available.

He broke then, slipping off the bench to his knees on the floor and gasping in heavy breaths I realized were sobs. “My brother,” he moaned.

“What did you say?”

“My brother, I killed my own brother...”

“You’ve lost it,” he said. “You’re insane.”

And he way well have been, because at that moment he lurched his head back like he’d been hit in the face with a baseball bat and screamed, “Virgil! Take me back, damn you! I want to live again! I want to live again! I want to li--”

A bolt of lightning ripped the sky in half, an explosion of thunder bursting the air at the same instant, and by the time my ears stopped ringing I could hear the driving sound of rain beating onto the parish jail again. I didn’t even have a second to look out the window before I was completely drenched. For a minute I thought the lightning had shattered the glass, then I realized the sprinklers were on, then the door to the cell was sliding open.

“We’ve got a fire in the cafeteria!” the guard shouted, grabbing Barry under his arms and hoisting him to his feet. “Everybody to the yard! Get ahead of me and behave yourself, Frank!”

I just nodded and rushed out as fast as I could over the slippery tile. We got outside, with the rain coming down even harder than the sprinkler, and I wondered how on Earth anything could burn. I saw the smoke rise from the cafeteria and thought about the lightning, how loud it was, and decided the building must have taken a direct hit that somehow dodged the lightning rods sticking out of the roof every few yards.

We were out there for quite some time -- an hour, maybe more, and at some point I realized that my buddy Carl was nowhere in the prison yard. I checked with a couple of the guards but they brushed me off -- had bigger things to worry about, apparently, and the only other guy who would have seen him was Barry, who gained a little sobriety thanks to the rain but didn’t seem to remember a third in our cell.

Eventually they got the fire under control and we were escorted back to the cells -- in my case to wait for a ride to pick me up and bring me home. The water had drained but the benches were still wet. Didn’t really matter, of course, we were all drenched too.

I sat down in the cell, just to the right of where Carl was when he screamed that he wanted to live, and was about to kick at the air when I saw something that should have been washed away by the sprinklers. I knelt on the floor and brought my face as close to the ground of a prison as I hope ever to get.

Where Carl fell there were two knee-shaped puddles, gleaming silver in the moonlight that now poured through the window at just the right angle to illuminate them. And surrounding the puddles were soft, silken flower petals, thin ones, in a ring of red, black and gold.