Read time: 2 mins.
Content warnings: addiction, abuse, religious trauma, implied self-destruction, mental illness.
Parker had spent fifteen minutes standing still in the dark holding the wine bottle. He wished the curved glass had distorted his reflection.
“The neck scruff no amount of shaving ever removes, the forehead crease marking how much life you’ve fretted away, the pointed cowlick in the middle of your head like the dunce cap you daily earn.”
He got as far closing his fingers around the screw-off cap.
“Couldn’t find a strong enough corked bottle?”
Feeling the cool metal made the Voice quieter. Sounds of tiny prongs snapping as the seals broke. He ran his fingers around the smooth ridges till they unscrewed the cap accidentally. The yeasty, sickly sweet smell made his eyes water.
“I don’t need this.”
“They don’t need you.”
“I can turn the Voice off.”
“Because you’ve done so great at that till now.”
He felt his lips but the bottle neck. His eyes shut. He could see his liver and kidneys embalmed beside his body.
“That would turn me off admirably. It’s where we’ll end up anyway, by whatever road, and what’ll you care once it’s done?”
Images of himself standing in church, clerical collar choking him, its sharp edges slitting his throat. His mother slapped him.
“That didn’t happen.”
His heart rate increased anyway. Hot blood marched through his ears.
He pictured himself on a fairground stage, a dove flying from his purple top hat to distract the audience while he changed from a patchwork suit into a sequined gown. In a blink his perspective shifted to the audience while strangers packed up the stage.
Ogre hands clenched around his chest. Their foot kicked his stomach.
“Too selfish to recite their lines; too timid to write your own.”
Images of his hand striking out. A slap for a slap. The image blacked out before contact.
“I’m sorry.”
Image of a ceramic vase breaking against a particle board wall beside his head. His father’s voice: “You sure are!”
“I’m not there anymore; I don’t have to relive this.”
“You know how to stop.”
A drop hit his tongue.
He upturned the bottle.
Silence!
His heart rate slowed. Did he have a heart, still? If he had blood, it cooled.
Guzzling from a garden hose back of the house as a sweaty child after hours of summer bike riding had felt the way chugging that wine felt.
The bottle noticeably lightened. The cupfull left in the bottom made a great maraca by the time a remembered squirrel video made him stop drinking to laugh.
He wanted nachos now. He put the bottle down to go make some. He’d’ve told himself a joke about that, but it would’ve been cheesy.
Semi-Random Reflections 
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