Fiction of the Week: "Bottle"

Here is the first installment of adding some fiction to the blog. Each short-short piece is based on a word my workshop chooses as a class, in this case, "bottle."

Patiently stoic on the oak slab shelves, reflected in the tempered glass, the bottles waited for her move. She leaned on the onyx bar, letting her elbows soak up other people’s drownings, a film of discarded inhibitions coating the cool marble. Reaching over the inner lip, she grabbed a cocktail napkin, a scratchier relative of cheap toilet paper, to pick at, occupying herself as she decided on a hero.

The cool porcelain Malibu bottle caught her attention first. Smooth in her palms she remembered, like a worn toilet seat. Even Malibu made her submit, her hands pressed where they wouldn’t dare linger if she were sober, making eye contact with her reflection in the dank water as the night’s contents emptied out of her inebriated soul. Mike’s pina coladas. Made expressly in his frat-room blender, with real pineapple juice and fresh kiwi, he promised. Blended, he’d reminded her, not the on-the-rocks shit. Gulping brimming cups of the icy booze one after another like Jamba Juice smoothies, pausing only to ease brain freeze, pushing the heel of her hand into her third eye for relief. They stopped when Mike went away. Cocaine. Gambling. He drank beer now. Bet on baseball instead of himself. She eyed the bottle’s persimmon sun dipping into black horizon lines, taunting the inky squiggles to swallow it whole.

She was onto Jager, a true German--harsh, angular, dark--when a sallow man with pock-marked cheeks tapped her shoulder.

“Buy you a drink, miss?” he propositioned her stereotypically. The bartender’s glasses clinking made her flinch.

Her eyes grazed him like steel wool, masquerading as gentle, before looking away. If only she could decide. Jager was too stern, especially in the morning when the brown liquid turned to goo.

She turned to the man. He couldn’t be younger than forty-three, blonde hair tinged grey, succumbing to age, thinning over the crown of his head. He’d be a monk by fifty. Securing herself to the bar, hand gently cradling chin, she murmured, matching his obviousness, “Whatever you’re having.” She heard him signal to the bartender and order two different drinks as she turned back to the bottles, now rows of anxious seniors taking their class photo.

Crown Royale was New York. A bottle with armor. Late night, B-listers at the Pierre. Interviews conducted that would remain whispered secrets into her Sony tape recorder. The tiny bottle from the gift bag she probably shouldn’t have taken clutched tight to her chest, the underwire of her lace bra breaking skin as she walked to the familiar station. To lazy to wait for a cab, she’d said, waving to the chic, black-clad publicists holding clipboards. Her thin wallet made little indention stuffed the back pocket of her jeans. She drank the bottle on the B line, from Rockefeller to 6th Ave, eying the handful of passengers warily, hoping no one would notice her, but almost wished they would. She was invisible. It stung.

A Vodka-Shirley Temple glided towards her, some kind of projected fantasy. Pink, transparent, bubbly. Weak. The man sipped his quarter-filled glass of muddied rain, cognac or brandy. She never knew the difference. Why didn’t bartenders just use a smaller glass when they weren’t going to use the whole thing?

“Come here often?” A smile lurked beneath the crinkled corners of his eyes, skin making paper accordions. She wanted a screwdriver. Lip-smacking, acidic. Made the nose hairs curl if the bartender made it with Popov instead of Kettle One, she remembered, looking at the clique of vodka in the cool kids’ corner. Bottles ranked by label, price, all as transparent as she was, apparently. Inside throat-scorching liquid dressed up as non-threatening water. “It’s my first time,” she said, allowing the words to float out of her mouth like clouds. The napkin, a shredded white flag in her hands. She guessed she could make five, maybe six, and keeping that in mind, the rest came easily.