Wild Geese

It seemed like yesterday when he would go to the pub and find himself surrounded by older people and feel mature in their company. But now, whenever he went out, it was the other way around. People his own age were supposed to have had children by now, and while there were pubs full of men older than himself, and sometimes he would pop into one of these pubs for a half by himself, he had no desire to join their ranks as a regular yet. For one, he was a bachelor, and the prospect of pulling in one of those pubs, as everybody knows, is slim. He had loved, and in the future he hoped to do so again, but by then, who would be able to tell what the outcome would be? He was optimistic. But then being a bachelor at his age had its frustrations. For one he was, by now, fed up with going into the same bars all the time. Whatever order he entered them, they all blurred together to become the same place in the end. If he were married, he sometimes reasoned, not taking into account all the married men to be found in pubs, he wouldn’t have to.

Vice fiction issue, December 2009