Though the party had been a failure, the after was way worse. There were three people around the table in the dark, derelict room, one more of a character than the other, and a fourth mixing drinks. The Asian woman I certainly noticed first, not only because she spoke incessantly and in a high pitch, but also because she was brandishing a phone playing clips of her attempting to devour live octopuses and massive rhinoceros penises. But it was the man in the toga who beckoned me join.
Wait a minute—a what? A toga? Whatever forgotten bunker did this unshaven fossilized washout crawl out of, and why? I leaned in, trying to understand what he was trying to tell me, as people always have when I speak. “Don’t bother,” the other lady said, “nobody alive speaks his language”. While I was still trying to process where I knew the well-maintained older lady from, another brain switch flipped, as I scanned the man’s coarse features and lost expression—lost, for this was a man coming from a deep, deep past.
The fourth person served me a drink, though I hadn’t asked for one.
Night went on with me trying to dredge up high school classical Greek and the ancestor patiently trying to pick though my horrible, no-good accent until he went Look! The Chinese influencer had produced an icebox from which she was now taking out a live octopus. “I can do it, bitch!” she screamed at the other who spouted back in Hungarian something foul—but the online sensation was already biting into the creature that was face-grabbing her in retaliation with wet, adhesive tentacles and biting her back until she fell to the floor, screams muffled through not-to-be-fucked-with crustacean flesh and with that we all leaped to save her, him with a prayer to Zeus and me with liquid courage backing up into my esophagus, and as we were pulling and pulling I asked the Hungarian lady “have we met?” To which she replied “NO SHUT UP” and I was sure—this one was in the business while I was in the market. Woman with a past.
I came out of my funk to realize the crisis was over: the ancestor had taken the creature between his jaws and with a leonine roar had it separated in two. The one-time adult entertainer applauded as he kept vocalizing. The victim of seafood attack, meanwhile, was helped to her seat by that other, fourth person, who only now I could discern as a dude, a figure familiar, too familiar somehow, in a way that I didn’t want him around even though I didn’t know him or even manage to get a good look at him. “Who is he?” I asked the ancestor. “Οὖτις,” he replied, and in the recesses of my clouded mind I recalled the word to mean ‘no-one’, then sensed someone behind me whom I didn’t know yet had always been there, someone, or no-one, and holy shit will I ever wake up, will there ever be a morning after.
the Budafoki amended 