The Gargoyle Bar

Warning: references to violence, gore and abuse.

  He limps into a bar on Gargoyle Street. This wretched little bar is home. Something like a home. Three little tables confer with their orbiting chairs. Regulars normally stand, exchanging conversational barbs, live rounds of ammunition. He thinks back to the tracer rounds that arched through the night sky in Iraq. Brilliant comets of light. 

  The bar is called the Ave Maria. Reminders of a Catholic childhood spent wishing for the love of The Virgin, but meeting the hand of a loud-mouth father with as many habits are there were rings on his fingers. With architectural finesse, erecting chapels from empty beer cans. 'Till his older brother bowling balled the baseball into his creations. 

  It's an escape. Iraq was an escape. Until you had to start picking up pieces of your comrades from off the road side. You don't know horror until you've seen a person you love turned into a jigsaw puzzle. Anthropomorphic confetti. Pasta, spaghetti. After he left the army, he found that he couldn't eat meat. Total aversion, especially to steaks swimming in a plate of blood. That made him viscerally sick. 

___

  Nobody here asks too many questions. You can be alone with a glass in your hand if you want, just like your father. The wise old patron of the bar is a feeble man charged with a kind of strength Mull - his army nickname, derived from the German word for trash - never really understood. The capacity to control the souls of men with the slight lift of a bushy, grey eyebrow. Some of the veterans of the bar refer to him as The Shepherd. They his damaged flock of misfits and miscreants. 

  Many a night some misplaced maiden wanders into the bar. He mostly just watches, like a man in a desert staring at an Oasis. His lips long for cool water and the calm that comes with hearing another heart beat next to yours, in the dark, in the rain. But he is terrified of his own fragility and inviting someone in. Fears so much that the running, leaping, shooting, killing Monster is not so bottled up. Still remembers his 16 year old self strangling his father with a telephone cord after he heard him slandering the memory of his late mother. Can see the violent reddish-purple of his father's head, matchstick hues, the flammable web of combustible veins on the cusp of throbbing into a final slumber. 

  He cries at night sometimes when he thinks about his father. Brain damaged. Alone, rotting in some care facility with underpaid staff who make malicious jokes at the patient's expense. Do they tie them up and piss on their faces? His father's care home. Iraq. 

Reviews

[catwriter]

What sad, horrific images. War is the pit of hell, followed closely by child abuse and the damage it does to the soul.

I was utterly engrossed and touched by many of the images, for example: Can see the violent reddish-purple of his father's head, matchstick hues, the flammable web of combustible veins on the cusp of throbbing into a final slumber.

Wow!

I did personally have some problems with the incomplete sentences. Your story is POWERDUL! I believe you'd be better served by working up some of its grammar. Just a thought.