Tattoos and meteors

The generously tattooed Joan Holloway type occupying your second-least-favorite bar stool is called Hannah. Boy, can she can sing an’ dance. Crimson manicure. Band aids offset the discomfort of her wedges.

Bows of pink ink line her calves, a circus act on each ankle. On her left shoulder, Dorothy is showing the tin man how to tie a tie.

Hannah is going to the meteor shower later. She knows it peaks in the wee hours of the morning and then she’s due at the station at 6 am, but it’s also a way to prove for sure that she’s alive.

She hopes to be an eyewitness as Earth hurtles through space garbage of the recent past. Unassailable, that’s living. And besides, Mars hasn’t been this close to Earth in 60,000 years.

She’s post-money. It’s not like she has so much, more that she’s lived long enough to know, seen enough coroner’s vans to know that, at 34, the most limited resource is settling on a thing worth her attention.

For now it’s barroom jazz. Dark is still hours away.

Stars-and-stripes bandanna bro plays stand up bass and reminds the bar this is old hot music played by breathing mammals. Not robots. Hannah wonders if that’s been a big issue lately, robots playing swing.

Over her neighbor’s shoulder and in the glow of his phone she learns he’s recovering from a breakup, reeling from being blocked on social media. Facebook. Instagram. Friendster. Each a fresh hurt.

Across the bar, hipster Leon Trotsky in a full length cardigan canoodles with a sassy Australian.

She can see how it happens now. Sit on this bar stool a few minutes. Be here first and you belong, can displace recent arrivals with one well-intentioned glance.

A pair of leather jackets saunter in and flag down a beer.

So many times she tried to quit drinking. Hey do you have any shitty beers? I’ll take the shittiest one you got. Even that didn’t work.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome up to the stage a very special guest, Hannah Trowbridge!

58 palms. Golf claps. She smiles big and in a few long strides she’s right up there with bandanna bro and the rest of them and the washboard goes a clackin’.

If there was a penis in this bar that could escape her spell, all of that has changed.

Her voice is gravel and honey. The crackle of vinyl is nearly audible.

Hours later, atop Mt. Tam in her cocktail dress, Hannah thinks about fear, how we spend our lives worrying, collecting and then protecting, when the biggest risk is boredom, that nothing interesting ever happens, that you came online as a human, rooted for the local sports team and died alone.

She lights a cigarette. A meteor streaks across the dark canvas above at 159,000 miles per hour. With her right hand, she touches herself.