bull sigh

They held it once or twice a year in what used to be a schoolhouse just off the main drag. It was called, informally, The Aftershave Formal, as it was the only thing for which anyone in town got gussied up. There was a band, although one wouldn't really call it a band, technically speaking, seeing as they didn't quite play music, in the traditional sense, but just sort of meandered around the one big room, slapping their hands on tabletops and volleying between low, murmuring sounds and disharmonic shouts which abutted the territory of singing, just. They were also known as The Aftershave Formal.

Seasick Smith's dog, Bone Polisher was licking at a dark spot in the middle of the floor.

Tully Fine, who'd been hoofing it all over creation for the past nine and a half years, showed up barefoot with a suitcase belted to his back.
And Penny Archer cut her way through the crowd like a cannonball to meet him. She nearly knocked him over hugging him like that and swaying side to side, his name firing from her mouth in a tattoo onto his chest. Then she did knock him over, on account of his lopsided burden and the fact that she'd spent all of his years abroad wrapped up in a Tokay blanket and it'd done a number on her sense of balance.
Tully clambered to his feet, pushing away Penny's scrabbling arms, shouting for someone to remove this strange woman from his person. Tully, it seemed, didn't recognize the old girl, which was understandable when you take into consideration the years he'd been gone and the multitude of faces he must have seen along the way. Not to mention the vast difference in Penny's appearance since the decade past due to her having mothered half a dozen children (three girls, three boys. All of them named Tully. All of them with different surnames). That isn't to say there was much on the side of tangible alteration but just an enormously wearier air about her which made her unrecognizable. Although this may also have been from the hooch.
Whatever the reason, Tully didn't know her from Eve and, panicky, said as much.
Upon hearing this, Penny (whose heart had been bursting a moment before and was now cleaving itself into halves and taking up residence, not without protest, in her gut), with low, pained squawks and infrequent, staccato intakes of air, barreled over to the band (on break between sets now, after an encore of "Marmar Mummum") and liberated a bottle of Mercy Boku wine from the perpetually tapping fingers of Cincinnati Pleats. She finished the juice in one go and hurled the bottle at Tully.
Her aim was a testament to her name and it seemed the years of lifting bottles had made her drinking arm an impressive throwing one as well. After the missile bounced off his skull, the shoeless and shocked Tully Fine found himself once more knocked to the ground at the whim of one Penny Archer, of whom he possesed absolutely no recollection. Supine, with a spring of blood forming in the center of his furrowed brow and running down both temples, the half-concious and wholly-terrified man did start to recall his reasons for leaving this town on the first mark.
All of this was tremendously uncalled for, as the two had never, before this moment at The Aftershave Formal, formally met.
Penny, unbeknownst to either herself or Tully, was completely insane.
Bone Polisher, after finishing the spilled dregs of Mercy, began gently licking the claret headband of the softly sobbing man in the middle of the floor.