Live from the Aquarium Lounge

flash fiction

Jim Esch
3 min readDec 7, 2021

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Her fingertips delicately hold a red plastic cup as she tramps past the VOX amp and stands near a six-foot tall roadie with seaweed hair, tipsy drunk, leaning into the music waves. Pilsner dribbles over the lip of her cup to the sticky floor.

An iron suit approaches behind, crab fingers dancing the tarantella up her back, approaching the border of her buzz-cut blonde hair. His metallic blazer and vacant eyes like bicycle reflectors — none of it adds up. She doesn’t know him, can’t recognize the species crawling over her. She wants…

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