Nostalgic buzz(kill)
04 March 2011 11:59 AM Categories: Fiction | Writing prompts
When she was ten, her pet rabbit – the dwarf bunny that was later killed by her cat, the day before Halloween no less – chewed a hole in the side of her box springs. This is where she later stashed the bottles, those 7-ounce Budweisers her boyfriend liked to buy, the Southern Comfort and Captain Morgan rum she chugged straight from the bottle as a joke, but also as a shortcut. He brought them to her and she would drink them after he left, but then there was the problem: what to do with the empties? If someone moved that box spring, pushed it from its sagging spot on the floor, it would have clanked and jangled with the evidence of hidden drunkenness, of early elusiveness.
The beer and the cigarettes, the pot and the crank. The nights made lucid by cocaine and whiskey. Do teenagers still drive around drinking beer and tossing the empties at stop signs and mailboxes? On black velvet nights in August, when meteors streak and arc past the stars, are girls making out with boys on the wide thick hoods of old cars, tasting the sweetness of pot, the bitterness of beer, still believing in the promise of an endless night, the perpetual summer, their hands intertwined forever?
Back then she could escape into the drink, the buzz, the waterfalls of laughter brought on by mushrooms and acid. She knew there was a future and maybe it included babies or maybe it was her alone in the city, the career woman. But now, in middle age, there was nothing but a stretch of time, the long lean years, the acceptance of fate, the memories of subversion threatening to be the only story she ever had.
From a prompt: I would like to hide it.
Image: Me and sliver of D, 1986ish. Blurry adolescence, informing this fiction a teensy bit.
The blog isn't going away, but I am starting a new one, something less depressed and more . . . active? I'm not totally sure yet. I'll still update here occasionally, including when the new one is up and running and when I feel a need to express the dark side. But I'm mainly going to try and deal with the dark side in other ways.
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