An Alcoholic's Ballade

He couldn’t feel his hands anymore. He could see them as he watched them tremble, fingers closing around the half-empty wine glass, sloshing its sweetness over the sides and down to the floor.
Everyone was laughing for no reason. Feeling no pain. Crushed by their own dreams and wishes. So they had turned to an old lover to warm them up on the cold night of New Year’s Eve.
Everyone laughing for no reason, and he was about to join them.
He could taste her on his lips as a smile danced across his tongue. In his fantasies, she was wrapped around him like a snake, like a cat. Always purring softly in his ear. It was just enough to tip the balance.
He could remember when she’d shown up, just shortly after nine. Hand in hand with another man, smiling, she’d taken the room by storm.
He’d watched, vaguely interested, as she worked her way though the room with all subtlety of a burlesque show.
The man who had entered with her was the first to fall, and then down they all went. No concern about age, gender, or sexual orientation, for they were all lured by her warmth, her comfort, and the promise of something more to come, later in the bedroom.
Soon, she’d turned to him, and with the encouragement of his friends choking him by the neck, he’d given in to her.
Glass by glass was swallowed in the deliberate drunkenness of time, as she danced across the wreckage, stepping over bodies while singing tunes of death.
They were laughing, some dying, in a ritual older than the era.
He couldn’t feel his hands. In some part of his mind, he could still move, could touch her as she moved over him, gently undoing the buttons and the wrappings of a promise.
There were no bells to ring as the moments between the years dissolved. The sirens of contemporary time echoed thoughout the city, spinning out across the graves of those who would die that night, seduced and abandoned.
She’d left him there, alone, unsatisfied and wanting mores. Intoxicated with all the possibilities of a lifelong romance blooming though him.