“Whiskey, on the rocks, please,”, the stranger asked the bartender. The man wanted strong liquor, but he already looked wasted beyond his limits. His eyes were sunken down, his clothes looked dirty and grimy, and he looked dazed and confused. It is almost as if he was lost in another world. You could say he was dead. It looked that way to Jerry, the bartender and owner of the bar. Jerry looked behind him and reached for a bottle of Jack Daniel’s before he retracted his hand from the bottle firmly believing the man, he now was facing away, was trying to kill himself. Jerry stood turned away from the man.

  The hand he had used to reach the bottle was now at his side. The silence started to settle in the room even with a quarter-full bar. The man began to rapidly tap his finger on the marble countertop of the bar waiting for his drink. His eyes seemed to get droopier as the seconds rolled by. Jerry finally gave in when the man stared a hole in the back of Jerry’s head. It felt like a catastrophe was staring at Jerry, not a man but a companion of Death himself had come to Jerry’s bar. Jerry reached out again but this time he grabbed the bottle of whiskey and turned back to face the catastrophe that was staring him down; “Run Jerry, run away from here and never come back if you know what’s good for you.”, he thought to himself and wanted to listen to his inner thoughts but after a moment passed he shook the thought off and poured the gss but he only poured it half-full. When Jerry retreated the bottle, the stranger grabbed his wrist.

  With a low guttural growl of a noise that somehow turned into a voice (or rather a whisper), the stranger had spoken.

  “Leave the bottle…please.”

  The stranger let go of his wrist and Jerry nearly fell. Jerry was scared out of his mind, but the stranger looked unconcerned with the fear on Jerry’s face. The man poured the gss full. A foot tall, whole twelve inches, filled with alcohol. Jerry, after regaining his bance, gained the courage to talk to the man he knows as the Confederate of Death.

  “Are you alright?”

  “No.”

  “Would alcohol cure it?”

  “No.”

  “Care to expin?”

  He looked at Jerry for a moment before he answered coldly, “No.”

  Jerry could only shrug as the man drank away whatever life (if he had any to begin with when he walked into this bar) away. If Jerry didn’t see it, he wouldn’t have believed it but in a fell swoop, the man grabbed the bottle, tipped it upwards towards his lips, and drank the bottle to the st drop. “You’re gonna kill yourself!” Jerry truly believed the man was trying to die and he expected the man to agree but he didn’t.

  “No, I won’t.”

  “What’re you talking about? Downing a whole bottle of liquor is insane! You can die!”

  “I won’t,” he groggily admitted. He fumbled with the bottle a little bit before he finally sat it back down where he grabbed it from. “I have something to do, I won’t keel. Don’t worry.” Don’t worry? How could Jerry not? A man was about to die in his bar, and he knew he would have a horrible death on his hands. Cops would surround the bar, Jerry would have to close down, and his conscience wouldn’t let him forgive himself for the rest of his life.

  Jerry started to imagine his future and how this event would impact it when a vague whisper, no, another growl slithered through the air and into his ears breaking his fantasy if only momentarily.

  “Another one…”, the strange man said, his voice a low, gravely rasp that seemed to scrape against the very air. Jerry, his eyes focused on the strange man, felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. Sweat beamed off his forehead, very visible on his face. “I…want another…please.”

  Jerry had to deny his request, but he only managed to stutter out a few words, “I-I gotta cut you off.” The man was wiping his face when Jerry managed out those words, he stopped halfway down his face just above his nose. He looked up at Jerry with depressed, sunken eyes like Jerry said the man’s father was dead.

  “Please…I want to forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  “Everything.”

  The man’s face changed, it was getting wrinklier and excessively tired like he was aging before Jerry’s eyes. When he entered, he looked 40, when he sat down, he looked 45, when he asked for liquor, he looked 50, and now as he sat here he looked a hundred years old. His eyes. Jerry hadn’t noticed in the past few moments, but the man’s eyes were…empty, void of life like something snatched his soul from him. Gone was the frightening look of Death and here was an empty shell of a man.

  It was like someone left the curtains in his mind open and Jerry could peer inside. It was cold, empty. This terrified Jerry even more. Is he dead? he thought. Jerry went to touch the man on the shoulder and slightly pushed him but the man did nothing. Oh My God! He’s Dead! He’s Dead! Jerry pushed harder on the man’s shoulder. Nothing still. “Are you alright?”

  Jerry used his whole hand to push the man hoping his reality hadn’t come to pass. Hoping he wasn’t dead. Jerry pushed harder, harder, harder, until he was close to pushing the man off his stool.

  “Hahhhh…” The man groaned loudly but it didn’t sound like a groan but more of a cry, a whimper. Then Jerry realized the man was crying under his breath. “I’m sorry guys…I’m so sorry…But I can’t…” The man stopped talking and continued to silently sob. Jerry felt bad for the guy. Here he was, thinking this guy was some kind of dead man, but in reality, he was just sad about something, maybe a tragedy. Jerry didn’t know, or more properly, he didn’t want to know. Jerry patted the man on his back. Was he trying to comfort him? Why? He had never seen this man before, and here he was, trying to help a stranger through a tragedy he didn’t even know about. It’s not that Jerry isn’t a good guy to his friends and doesn’t mind, no, he insisted on helping his friends, but a stranger? He usually wouldn’t but something was pulling his hand, guiding it over the crying man’s shoulder to comfort him.

  “Are you in some kind of trouble?”, Jerry said. Wait, he said that? He couldn’t have. He could’ve sworn his lips were closed tight the st time he checked.

  “You could say that”, the man said. He had finally quit sobbing, and Jerry pulled his hand away. The man never looked up at Jerry again. From what Jerry could see, the man was…smiling. Now this wasn’t a typical smile, it was a smile of recognition and nostalgia. His eyes were still as distant as ever, but it was like the man was reminiscing about something. The thousand-yard stare that went past the bar walls and went back in time itself. The smile was a stark contrast to the aging eyes he once held, it was a complete 180-degree turn from earlier. Instead of the years rolling by on his face, they were moving backward now. He wasn’t a hundred anymore, no, it seemed like he was 20, maybe 40 years younger now. Strange enough, if it couldn’t get any stranger than it already was, his face started to look like that of a child. It was as if Benjamin Button was sitting at his bar, de-aging so fast it’d make the Fsh jealous.

  Jerry had to question this, and he opened his mouth to speak but the stranger spoke first, “You know, back when I was a kid, I had five friends, five incredible people who I loved with all my heart and never had the same friends, no, same kind of people since they left. since I stayed”, What is this man babbling on about all of a sudden? It just came out of nowhere and Jerry normally wouldn’t listen to his patron's sob stories, he had too many things to take care of. However, this particur sob story was different, it was something Jerry was craving to hear about. He let the stranger continue, “When I was little, crazy as it sounds, I met a werewolf. Well met is a weak word to describe what happened, I survived against a werewolf.” His face dropped and he looked down at his empty gss, his face stretched out, his eyes bulged, and his mouth left agape like he wanted to scream but he couldn’t.

  His face remained that way like he was stuck forever in the etches of the horror that was on his face. His eyes scrambled around like they were looking for a way out of the situation his mind is currently in and yet it failed over and over. The sequence went: his eyes rolled around for five seconds, and it settled on.

  Without warning, or maybe there was one, and Jerry just didn’t see it, the man lifted slightly and grabbed a brown leather wallet from his back pocket. He opened it and reached inside to grab four twenty-dolr bills, which he pced on the bar. The man stood up and still not looking at Jerry, he gave a ‘Thank You’ nod and groggily walked out the door. Jerry saw the man around town after that, but never did he see him again with those horrible sunken eyes as if Death itself was using him as a vessel.

  It wasn’t until May of 2025 when he got diagnosed with stage four liver cancer, that he understood. Understood what the man who entered the bar that day, Chris (information he found out right after the man stumbled out the door from a regur of his), was reminiscing about. He was reminiscing about the good days, the days before something came into his life and brought death with it. Jerry found himself doing the same thing one day when he sat down on his bed after receiving the news that he was gonna die soon. Death had entered his life, but even still, he believed, even up to his death in November, that whatever kind of Death was brought into Chris’s life, Jerry found himself thankful that he didn’t have that kind of death in his. He was thankful to God that he got the easier death. To some extent, that was true.