Short Story

His Life Of Elaborate Poverty

Nancy's Notes 🖊️🎶

Written for Sue & Gerry’s Weekly Prompts
Weekend Challenge using the word ‘excessive’.
Here’s where the prompt took me.

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The champagne always came too cold, the women always stayed too warm, and somewhere between the second bottle and the third divorce, he lost count of what he was celebrating.

Excessive, they called it …. his taste for imported cigars and local trouble, the way he wore expensive suits to cheap motels, left lipstick-stained receipts in pockets like evidence at a crime scene where the only victim was his better judgment.

He was excessive in his excesses, a redundancy wrapped in silk ties, spending money he didn’t have on nights he wouldn’t remember with people whose names he never learned.

The bartender knew his poison. The bookie knew his patterns. The mirror knew the truth he paid good money to avoid …. that all this abundance was just elaborate poverty, all this motion merely standing still in Italian leather shoes, drowning in shallow water while calling it an ocean.

Excessive: the cigarettes at dawn, the lies at dusk, the way he loved everything except himself …. the man he saw when the party was finally over and the lights came on.


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This is “Life In The Fast Lane” by the Eagles

Weekly Prompts Weekend Challenge – Excessive

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