Cigarette smoke drifted coyly through the otherwise torpid air, hanging in loops and spirals that wafted to and fro, enjoying a brief moment of individuality before joining the grey, vaporous mist a few feet above the surface of the bar.  The bar itself was grey and smoke-stained, the grain of the wood long since rendered invisible by successive layers of grime and graffiti.  The dingy, ill-lit place was known to most locals as ‘The Swamp’s Mouth’, as the sign over the door proclaimed its name to be, but to Jim McConaghan it was merely ‘The Bar’.  People went to The Bar to drink, smoke and otherwise relieve themselves of their daily stresses.  Jim McConaghan had gone there to die.

It was the same routine every evening.  He would arrive at The Bar at roughly six o-clock, when the sun was struggling to pierce the smoke-stained windows and the barman was lighting the candles.  The barman (Jim had no other name for him, to him the burly figure behind the counter needed none) evidently felt that placing a number of cheap, machine-made wax candles around the room gave some sort ‘atmosphere’ to the place, hoping that this might attract more custom, but Jim would have spent his evenings at The Bar regardless of its cleanliness or perceived sophistication.  It had occurred to him on occasion that there might be other regulars at The Bar with their own opinions on the subject, but if there were any other hunched, gin-soaked figures that frequented the Swamp’s Mouth Jim made no acknowledgement of them.  He didn’t go to The Bar to socialize.  Jim McConaghan went there to die.

When Jim had arrived that The Bar that evening he had done so in the same fashion he always did, shuffling disquietingly in at some point between five-fifty and six-fifteen and sitting down at his usual place in the corner.  The barman had brought him the newspaper, opened to the crossword page, and a bottle of The Bar’s cheapest gin.  He had sat there for some hours, watching the glow of the sun sink below the window pane, occasionally filling a word or two into the crossword puzzle, and downing glass after glass of cheap alcohol.  This was his home.  This was his life.  This was his breath, his sustenance, his vice, his virtue.  This was Jim McConaghan.  This was where he went to die.

There was a large, cigarette-stained oil painting hanging from the longer wall of The Bar.  Within its crumbling frame was the single most colourful point in the room, a tantalisingly lifelike depiction of a woodland glade, soft brushstrokes of late afternoon sunlight filtering through the branches.  Jim stared at it blankly as he always did, losing himself into the quiet serenity of the forest.  In one corner of the painting, so small and inconspicuous that it was almost invisible, was a tiny bird, its feathers a glossy black, head cocked back as if it were singing.  Jim fixed his gaze distractedly on that, for he had never noticed it before.  When he had worked up the necessary mental fortitude to actually look at it, he suddenly felt a rush of something he was not used to.  The image of the tiny bird among the branches brought back a torrent of memories he had all but lost, images of just such a scene, of birdsong among the trees, of beauty, of peace, of love…

He turned back to the bottle of gin in front of him, drowning the memories in a tide of cheap drink.  As his gaze returned to the dull, grimy wood of the table he again caught sight of something unusual.  This seems a day filled with new discoveries, he thought, as he read the words that had been etched into the surface of the table by some drunk with a fuller grasp of literacy than most.  Jim supposed that it may well have been he who had carved those lines, in a moment of deviation from his usual reverie, but he had no memory of seeing them anywhere before.  Apparently etched into the wood with a breadknife, they read,

…for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a muted rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath…

Jim peered at the lines of verse again.  The poet, whoever it was, had obviously shared an aspect of his world view.  Jim McConaghan had been coming to The Bar to die every night of his life, sitting in a corner and drowning the grimy, cigarette-stained reality of the city in gin.  Whoever had sat here with a blunt breadknife and carved those words led the same dreary existence as he, had the same death wish, but a more comprehensive soul.  What a genius he must have been, Jim found himself thinking, to have been immersed in the intellectual squalor of the city and still find the right words to express his own misery.  

Jim glanced at his watch.  It occurred to him that it would be getting late by now, but the gin in his veins reduced the face of the watch to an illegible swirl.  The painting against the far wall was still clear, though, and he could make out the pattern of sunlight on the golden leaves as though he were standing amongst them.  The branches shifted gently in the breeze, the leaves rustling softly overhead.  Everything was bright and clear, pure, not like all those photographs and illustrations he had seen in any number of cheap, mass-produced publications.  The soft touch of the breeze against his skin was like the gentle caress of gossamer, the leaves under his feet were the feathers of russet-coated angels.  Jim could hear every movement, see every speck of bark-dust in the air, feel every breath of the forest.  He was the artist; he was the painter, the poet, the lover, the writer.  He could feel everything, knew everything there was to know, imagined everything there wasn’t.  He felt himself lifted up above his dreary, city-bound existence, watched as the world beneath him grew small and distant; saw from afar the beauty of the world with new eyes.

Jim McConaghan had come to The Bar to die.  Now he was alive.