the bars never close

along the Port Martini docks.....so I was sitting on a chrome and naugahyde stool staring across the cultured rosewood bar at myself in the mirror amidst exotic bottles of trans-galactic booze at 0300 GMT, on a Thursday morning.....in the glass I saw a girl come in through the swinging doors off the boardwalk.....she looked lost....spaced out....

She sits next to me, nursing a Bloody Mary, still pretty lost and spaced seeming.....her story is bizarre.....she says she was on a ship that drifted over into another dimension....where she was captured by ghosts.....but some old dude from the 19th century had helped her escape....so here she was on the Frontier, in Port Martini.....a place she had last visited forty years ago according to the calendar.....but she could only account for three years having elapsed in her time.....

"Well" says I "Must be some kind of space-time trans-dimensional glitch going on here, I reckon."

She rolls her eyes at me and gives me a smirk...."Yeh, I reckon." she says....

The juke-box continues to grind out country-western stuff, and some kind of martian polka music.....mixed sparingly with ship-hop.....

"The government says I'm entitled to a pension....." she takes another sip...."I have to wait for a decision from some board or other before I know the amount...."

"Oh yeh? that sounds cool.....where are you staying now?" I ask, becoming interested......