Drinking Beer Backwards
(a love story in bad taste)
by Philip J. Lees
“Up bottoms!”
A dozen clumsy bodies heave themselves up from skewed benches or from untidy heaps on the floor. Two dozen empty tankards are raised, then tipped forward as they fill rapidly from as many gaping mouths, which then exhale noisily as their owners blink, look around, and grin vaguely at their neighbors before they set their steins back on the long wooden tables and sink back into their seats. A dirndl-clad, green-complexioned serving girl whizzes around, removing the full flagons and substituting empty, froth lined replacements. After a few minutes’ cacophony the cycle is repeated. With each iteration the lines of benches become straighter, as do the participants’ backs and gazes.
“Here’s to Airava B!” The annual New Munich stef reeb is once again unwinding itself.
Airava B, in a stretched elliptical orbit around a black hole, experiences two weeks of time reversal each perihelion, so it is here that the cargo handlers, the cooling vane scrubbers, the recycling system laborers, come to sober up, to cleanse themselves of the year’s accumulated slip gut and toxic build up in the liver and kidneys. And it is here that Pip Deed chose exactly the wrong time to fall in love.
(At this point you may wonder, dear reader, whether Pip Deed is male or female, so that you may adjust your sympathy level appropriately in advance. Well I have to disappoint you: Pip Deed, at the time these events take place, is, was, or will be neither.)
Nevertheless, it was early in the stef reeb that Pip Deed, clad in little but reeb goggles and suffering from severe stella vision, disengaged from intimate involvement with another under the long table; at the same instant both realized they had found their soul mates.
As they wriggled back into their coveralls, the overwhelming burn of lust began to abate. Squirming up opposite sides of the table they slid back into their seats. Their eyes met and it was as if an electrical charge seeped from their bodies into the malt-laden atmosphere and dissipated itself in a moment that, for Pip Deed, was laden with clarity. The first doubts began to creep in. But as prudence dawned, so did another sensation: an urgent need to recover a quart or two of gastric ejaculate from the latrine.
By the time Pip Deed returned to the festivities, feeling considerably less inspired, the partner of a few minutes before had disappeared, leaving behind nothing but a faint feeling of longing and emptiness.
No matter. Pip Deed knew from experience that filling a few more glasses of Airava B’s excellent slip would surely put a beginning to that!
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© Copyright Philip J. Lees 2010