Clara

Clara couldn't remember where she had been an hour ago. It didn't matter, because she knew damn well where she was right now. The alley was practically as dark as the damp asphalt beneath her. The lamplight glinted morosely on the wet grime of the pavement. It was too damp to ignite a live cigarette, but Clara scrounged around in the depths of her jacket pocket for a match. As she held the think stick in her hand, she realized that it was her last match. She struck it against the cold wall of the alleyway. It did not light. Clara sighed, and cast the blunted match far into the darkness of the alley. She knew that she had probably stumbled out of some nearby bar in a drunken stupor. Clara laughed, for it is the strange habit of the utterly defeated to do so. She lifted her hands before her, so she could study their shapes, the only symbols of humanity in the empty night. She slowly came to a platonic realization of the metallic band on her left hand. Memories trickled back to her with the slow ebbing of a muddled creek, then with the merciless ferocity of a great flood. Images materialized before her, like the frames of a slow motion picture.
         Clara had grown up carefully cultivated in an upper-middle class community. He hailed from the rough side of the town. He was of the wild, devil-may-care sort, with a switchblade as sharp as his words.
         "For your sixteenth birthday, Clara," he had said. With that, he had drawn out a little ring made of twisted fence wire.
He started hesitantly, then said, "It's nothing to look at, I know. I made it from the fence on my father's farm. Look...it's no ring a man should give a lady, but if you accept it, I promise that we will be as strong together as the links on the fence this ring was wrought from. I give you my word."
She had taken his promise, and the little ring of metal. She was sixteen, and he was seventeen. And so they were married, sitting atop a rotting wooden bench of a parking lot at exactly midnight.
Their first few months had the rash beauty of youth, full of fire and invincible, in the sort of doomed way that a fire burns, never giving a thought to its tinder. But when the wild summer began to dissolve, he began to disappear every Thursday night. Soon his weekly absences turned into straight days. Clara never asked about his disappearances, even when he would vanish for weeks at a time. One day, he left and never came back.
Now that Clara had thought back on it, his word was as good as the still-unlit cigarette in her hand. By the time the leaves on the trees fell away, his promise had withered and died. After she realized he was never coming back, Clara had run off into the streets.
It's been a year, at least, she thought, as she looked into the starless sky. Clara struggled to her feet and staggered to the source of a faint, yellowed artificial light.
The bartender never gave a second thought before pouring the girl a drink, for she carried a weary, defeated aura far older than her sixteen years. Clara stared at the drink in her hand. For a second, she paused, letting the pictures of her past play before her.
Then she lifted the cold edge of the cup to her lips, tilted her head back, and forgot again.