She walked up the stairs and into Poe’s. Edgar Allan Poe was stationed at Fort Moultrie during the late 1820’s. The beaches, marshes, and creeks of Sullivan’s Island and its people inspired his story The Gold Bug, and legend said he wrote the poem Annabel Lee about a doomed local beauty. In his honor, the tavern’s walls were covered in every kind of Poe kitsch imaginable. Some defied imagination, like the rock in the shape of Poe’s head on which someone had painted his melancholy visage. Tipsy squeezed into the tiny women’s room and shut the bathroom stall door.
Why am I annoyed? she asked herself. I’m the one who isn’t being truthful with him, but ugh; he will not let it go.
Granna answered, as she was wont to do when Tipsy asked herself questions. He doesn’t seem like the type to quit until he gets a real answer.
Tipsy leaned her forehead against the wall. It was covered in pages from Poe’s books, all shellacked into place. The complete works of E.A. Poe, flattened bathroom version. She stared at the type before her eyes until it came into focus.
I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes which half led me to imagine she was not.
She read it again before washing her hands and returning to the table. Will picked at his French fries and watched cars pass down Middle Street. He’d pushed his sunglasses back onto his head as it got cloudier. She sat down. “I’ve got to tell you something.”
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