Leah Mueller
creative nonfiction
The Ghosts of St Elmo’s
by Leah Mueller
St Elmo’s bar stood empty on a Tuesday night, except for two customers. An inebriated woman writhed on one of the stools. As I approached the counter, she grinned, displaying a row of uneven, stained teeth.
“I’m Cheryl,” she slurred. “Are you into women?”
I flagged down the bartender, then slowly rotated towards Cheryl. “No. I’m into men. Unfortunately.”
Cheryl lifted a shot glass into the air and smiled. “Here’s to men.” She tossed back the shot and turned towards the other customer. “What about you, Carl? Are you into men?”
“Naw. I’m not into anybody. I thought you KNEW that.” Carl threw a couple of wadded singles onto the bar. “Here’s what I owe you, Buck. Gimme another.”
The bartender placed a can of Old Style in front of Carl and shook his head. “I’m gonna start a support group here next week. You two can be my first members.”
The pair erupted in laughter. “I’m afraid we’re beyond help,” Carl said.
Carl and Cheryl had probably been living in Elmo’s for months. Both possessed the bloated skin and sickly pallor of seasoned alcoholics. Carl’s ample stomach protruded from the bottom of his tee shirt. Cheryl looked as though she’d gone through a series of unemployed boyfriends, hundred-dollar cars, and mildewed shotgun shacks.
Elmo’s wasn’t the sort of place that attracted folks who wanted to sip on microbrews after work. The bar had stood in Bisbee’s Brewery Gulch since 1902. It served as a living remnant of Arizona’s infamous past, when the Gulch overflowed with prostitutes and drunken cowboys. The area still retained its seedy charm, which made it a magnet for tourists. Bisbee’s citizens despised tourists but were completely dependent on out-of-town revenue.
“You a tourist?” Buck asked me. His tone was not unfriendly. “I haven’t seen you around before.”
“I don’t live here, but I’m not a tourist. I mean, my mom lives a few blocks away. Or, rather, she did. She died a few weeks ago. I’m still wrapping my head around it.” I took a swig from my pint glass. Although beer had been my constant companion for the past three days, I hadn’t been able to achieve a decent buzz. A hypervigilant part of my brain kept holding on to the remnants of my sanity.
“Sorry to hear that.” Buck slowly rotated a rag around the inside of a pint glass, set the receptacle on the bar, and stared at me. “What happened to her?”
“She was a chain-smoker.” My tone sounded flat, devoid of emotion. “After a while, it caught up with her.”
My mother had died in January after a bitter struggle with throat cancer. I didn’t know much about cancer stages, and she didn’t talk about them. For two years, she drove herself to and from Sierra Vista for chemo treatments. Polly favored pickup trucks made for rough terrain, but she rarely left her house. Twice-weekly clinic trips took her past several shops that dealt in succulents, She always stopped to purchase a few cacti for her yard.
I wasn’t sure if the two of us had ever loved each other. My mother was violent and chaotic, even after she quit drinking. Twelve years of sobriety hadn’t mellowed her much. Cigarettes served as Polly’s one defiant vice, her fuck-you to people who wanted to breathe.
My immediate response to Polly’s death was to disassociate from it entirely. No one expected me to act as the new family matriarch, anyway. My two siblings spent most of their time watching televised sports competitions. They liked to rate the contestants.
“That was one hell of a back flip,” Josh said, as he crushed a cigarette into his half-empty dinner plate.
“Not so great,” Ericka replied. “Why are you smoking, Josh? Cigarettes killed Mom, you dipshit.”
I envied their closeness. Born a year apart, they’d often been mistaken for twins. Neither of them could stand me. Whenever I visited, I spent as little time with my family as possible. Josh and Ericka lived in Polly’s Bisbee four-flat, but I had long resisted our mother’s strident calls for family unity. Not even the promise of free rent could tempt me into that snake pit.
Bisbee was a fun place to visit, if nothing else. I remembered happier times at Elmo’s, evenings when I spent hours dancing to bar bands. Now, the flickering lights and scent of stagnant beer made me so depressed that I could hardly move.
“I quit smoking ten years ago,” Buck said. “Of course, I still breathe in other people’s fumes all day.” He tossed a coaster in front of me. “So, you decided to take a break from grieving and go to Elmo’s for a cold one. Very judicious.”
“She’s been gone since January,” I explained. “I came to Bisbee to put her building up for sale. My home is in Washington state. I’ve already been here too long.”
“Lovely area.” Buck’s tone sounded almost wistful. “Do you visit Bisbee much? Meet any new friends? We’re certainly a friendly bunch.” He nodded towards Cheryl and Carl, who were huddled together at the far end of the bar. “Ain’t that right, guys?”
“Ain’t WHAT right?” Cheryl yelled.
“You’re friendly, aren’t you?” Buck yelled back.
“Hell yeah,” Carl said. “Friendly as a pack of fucking bulldogs.” He rose to his feet and stretched, revealing a bulging expanse of pink skin. “I’ll take another beer, when you’re done chatting with the pretty lady. Miss, you gotta watch out for Buck. He’s a dirty old man.”
“Aren’t we all.” Buck slid a can across the bar, then turned his attention back to me. “Don’t mind him, he’s always jealous. Besides, I’m not that old.”
Arizona people aged quickly. The relentless sun fried their skin into strips of jerky. Buck looked pale, like he spent most of his time indoors. Though his head was completely bald, he showed no sign of sunburn. I couldn’t quite determine his age. Maybe forty-five, or fifty. Elmo’s wan bar light made it hard to tell.
I took another gulp of beer. The room’s outlines looked softer, like someone had blurred their edges. After three days of drinking, the alcohol was finally starting to take effect. “I know a few people here. None of them well. My mother moved to Bisbee in ‘92. I’ve visited every year since then. Last January, I came out for her funeral and had a fling with a local guy. Picked him up at a poetry reading. He lived only a couple of blocks from Mom’s building.”
“That sounds pretty nice,” Buck said. “A little distraction can be good at times. But you seem rather down about it.”
“Yeah, because I’m married.” My confession fell onto the bar like a sack of rocks. “Well, not legally. The two of us own a house and have a daughter. That’s marriage in my book.”
“Oh, you poor girl. Came to Bisbee and made a mess of everything. You wouldn’t be the first, of course. Just go home, resume your life, and don’t look back. You can’t be blamed for what you did. Especially if nobody finds out about it.” Buck poured another pint and placed it in front of me. “This one’s on the house.”
“That’s not even half of it. I saw the guy again when I came back to town this week. I’m in love with him, but he treats me like meat. It’s pathetic.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, that is pathetic.” Buck sighed and shook his head. “Who is the lucky guy, if you don’t mind me asking? I know everyone in town, so I’m sure I’ll recognize his name.”
I’d already divulged the worst details of my transgressions, and Buck hadn’t flinched. Morality seemed even more porous at Elmo’s than it did in the rest of Bisbee. Malicious name-dropping wouldn’t hurt my reputation. Nobody knew me, anyway.
“It was Sam Forrest.” The words seemed to erupt from my body. “He’s a writer and a guitar player. As well as a junkie. But you probably know that.”
Buck placed both hands on the bar and stared at me. “Sam Forrest? Sam fucking Forrest? Oh God, another victim of his alleged charms. That slimeball.”
I felt a weird combination of embarrassment and relief. Other women had done the walk of shame from Sam’s bedroom to Elmo’s, so I was neither first nor last. I had wanted to believe that Sam derived some meaning from our brief affair, but he’d stuck me on a conveyor belt behind a bunch of other idiots. What else could any reasonable person expect from a junkie?
The man loved heroin so much that he wrote a memoir about it. He devoted many pages to rapturous descriptions of junk visions he’d experienced during sweltering desert nights. To everyone’s astonishment, Grove Press decided to publish the book. Madison Smartt Bell penned a review of it for Spin Magazine, and Sam got his photo in the Tucson Weekly. His compass pointed towards literary stardom.
Like most guilt-ridden slimeballs, Sam sabotaged his luck. After his long-suffering girlfriend dumped him, he retreated into a matrix of cheap red wine and Percocet. Though clean from heroin, he hadn’t lost his need to get trashed. If he couldn’t afford drugs, he stole them. Once a junkie, always a junkie. Sam finally landed on his back inside a Bisbee drugstore. Glass shards protruded from his legs, and sirens wailed in the distance. It didn’t take long for Bisbee’s finest to arrest him and toss his ass into the town’s well-worn slammer.
Sam had been a free man for less than a month when the two of us first rolled around in his rumpled Muppet sheets. After his release, he found it difficult to secure housing. Finally, a couple of barflies allowed him to move into their dilapidated miner’s shack. The pair’s adolescent daughter had relocated to a relative’s home, so her bedroom was up for grabs. Poor girl still had a penchant for stuffed animals and Sesame Street characters. Another case of chronic arrested development. Sam added guitars and empty Carlo Rossi bottles to the mix, creating a surreal effect.
“I don’t know what the gals see in Sam, exactly,” Buck mused. “Bisbee musicians have caught on to his bullshit. Sam got all pissed off one day and wrote a letter to the local paper, saying that we’re elitists for not letting him join our bands. He whined about how he was better than everybody because he used to tour with John Cale. Even said that he wanted us to die from Ebola. Most of the townspeople just laughed.”
“Well, that’s the way to get popular.” I took a final gulp of my second beer and rose to my feet. “I can imagine Sam doing that. He’s an asshole, but I love him anyway. Or maybe I love him because he’s an asshole. Anyway, I need to head to the rest room. See you in a few minutes.”
I stumbled into the dank confines of the women’s lavatory. Its once-white walls were stained with streaks of dirt and urine. My reflection stared at me from the cracked wall mirror. Since my 41st birthday, I’d begun to exhibit signs of accelerated aging. People no longer mistook me for a much younger person.
At the end of the week, I would board a plane, fly home, and face my partner. Doug already knew about my tryst, so I wouldn’t need to hide anything. He’d discovered a poem I had written about Sam. A rambling diatribe filled with rage and hunger. Doug’s ensuing tantrum lasted for days. I wanted to dump his whiny ass, but I felt terrified to let go. My relationship with our daughter was already tenuous, and parental separation might destroy her.
I splashed some cold water on my face and wandered back into the fray. Carl reclined on the bar like a beached whale. He’d pushed his shirt towards his chin, exposing rolls of mottled flesh. Someone had filled his navel with a caramel-colored liquid. Rivulets overflowed onto the floor, but nobody seemed to notice. Instead, Cheryl and Buck inserted a pair of straws into Carl’s bellybutton and began to suck with wild abandon.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said.
“Belly shots.” Buck’s voice sounded gleeful, like slurping booze from a man’s stomach was the most enjoyable activity in the world. “Want to join us?”
I took a few steps backward. “Um, no. I mean, not today. Perhaps some other time.” For some absurd reason, I felt the need to decline politely. Buck had been kind to me. However, he could turn on a dime from confessor to debauched party boy. It was the sort of duality that could only exist in Bisbee.
Carl quivered on the counter. “Hurry up, guys. The surface is wet. I’m gonna fall off.”
“I think we drank it all, anyway,” Cheryl said. “Hop down. It’s my turn.”
Carl hadn’t done much hopping for the past few decades. His pudgy face wore a panicked expression. Cheryl and Buck grabbed his wrists and hoisted his bulk from the bar—slowly, as if they were lifting a refrigerator with a crane. Carl staggered to his feet and pulled his shirt over his stomach. “Now for my favorite part,” he said. “Somebody bring me a straw.”
Cheryl crawled onto the counter and shoved her blouse towards her neck. “Have at it. I ain’t got all night.”
“I think I’ll head out,” I said to Buck. “Thanks for listening to my story.”
Buck put down his straw and stared at me. “Remember what I told you about Sam Forrest. Don’t have anything more to do with that guy. If you know what’s good for you, that is.” He returned his attention to Cheryl’s stomach. “Stay right where you are, darling. I think we’ll go with a different kind of booze this time.”
I yanked open the door and stepped onto Brewery Avenue. A couple of cars rolled past, sputtering loudly. Then the street became silent. Polly’s building was less than a mile away. Josh and Ericka were probably still parked in front of the television, staring at flickering images of automobile crashes and improbable gymnastics. They were even worse at grieving than I was. Our mother had trained them well.
I could still hear raucous laughter, emanating from behind Elmo’s half-sealed door. Perhaps I shouldn’t have left so quickly. I’d wanted to view myself as morally superior to the drunken revelers. In fact, I was afraid that if I downed a few more drinks, I’d be lying on the bar with the rest of them.
It would take twenty minutes for me to get to Polly’s house. Then I could creep up the well-worn steps to her second-floor apartment, throw myself into her abandoned bed, and try to catch a few hours of rest. I longed to submerge myself in the effluvia of sleep. Anything felt better than grief.
Leah Mueller's work is published in Rattle, Best Small Fictions, Certain Age, Writers Resist, The Shallot, NonBinary Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, New Flash Fiction Review, Does It Have Pockets, Outlook Springs, Your Impossible Voice, etc. She has received several nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her fourteenth book, "A Pretty Good Disaster" was published by Alien Buddha Press in 2025. Check out more of her work at https://substack.com/@leahsnapdragon
instagram | threads | facebook | duotrope | chill subs