Ben wiped down the bar in front of him, the bar was empty but he knew it was unlikely to stay that way, so what cleaning he could get done needed to happen right away. He worked with the mindless float of someone in the midst of familiar manual labor. His well practiced arms moved fast, doing their best to keep up with his sharp eyes catching the most minute smudges or crumbs. Only eyes that had looked at the same bar top countless times before could catch such small imperfections in its sheen, and at such a speed.

Ben liked tending bar. He had been doing it long enough (off and on) that only someone who loved it would have stuck with it this long. He liked the sense of accomplished exhaustion he felt after a busy night, similar to how a runner felt after a particularly long and tiring run, but with a greater sense of accomplishment. He liked bantering with people all night, honing his wit into a scalpel. He even liked dealing with asshole drunks, building his patience up to rival that of the saints themselves. He had long since found that a successful bartender was one part diplomat, two parts comedian and one part police officer.

Above all, however, Ben liked bartending because it gave him the opportunity to start over, anywhere and at a moment’s notice. It was this simple truth, in fact, that had brought him to his current place of employment: a small dive on Mars called La Oveja Negra (The Black Sheep). He had been here for a couple years now, longer than he had been in any of the last several spots he’d lived. He liked the Oveja because it was small, it was quiet, and it was his (more or less). He didn’t own the place, Xavi owned it (pronounced “Chavy” he learned his first day), but he worked there often enough (and Xavi was there so rarely) that it might as well have been his. He liked the regulars, mostly a bunch of old retired drunks that came in every day, no matter the weather, and drank the same drinks and told the same stories. One or two were younger women who lived in the area, came in and laughed at all his jokes, sometimes smiling at nothing and staring at him. Ben would smile back, but politely forget to follow up on promises of hanging out sometime when he wasn’t working (to be fair, he was always working).

The life was simple, he came in to work, worked it the way he wanted to, listened to bad jokes, cleaned up, and went home tired. Wake up, rinse and repeat. Every once in a while he would get a drink with a co-worker or just head down the street to another bar and drink by himself. No drama, no hassle, no responsibility, and the job tired him enough that he didn’t have to worry about staying awake too many nights staring at his ceiling and remembering… well, remembering anything. And if he did have trouble sleeping at night, then there was no harm in having a few drinks to help him pass out. It’s not like he needed to be anywhere early in the morning, nor did he have a boss who would give a shit if he was hungover when he walked in.

All in all, this was a pretty damn good way to hide from the world.