VODKA

A man looking after his dying father runs out of the alcohol he has become dependent upon.

 

The spare room, until recently no one had reason to enter it the piles of tat stacked high with the honest intent to one day get more use out of them; then over time memories of intent fade but the objects remain; rotting and pointless. This however was not true for all the things kept there, when Ken had returned to look after his dying father he made sure to bring along a supply of alcohol, just because he was spending some of his time in a dry state didn’t mean he should be forced to go without.

He was down to the last half of the last bottle,

the contents were vodka and it sat in that spare room, laying on top of what might have been an antique of some sort but Ken just needed a flat sparse space to sit his bottles on.

By this point the only remnants of the past drinks were rings that had marked the varnish, circle overlapping circle in an accidental homage to the Olympics.

Ken could feel the absence of all the alcohol that had come and gone, this lightness of this half bottle felt like a constant weight in his chest.

Not the water, hand gel or even the special sanitizer he had bought could remove the smell from his hands;

whenever his sister would complain about having the burden of caring for their father Ken could nod in agreement to placate her while thinking she was just been weak and vindictive, now here with his hands covered a foul thick slimy mess of sick and products that promote themselves as being the sort of thing to get that sick off he wanted nothing more than to walk out the door and leave all this hassle to someone else, someone who wasn’t so much him.

Paper towel after paper towel were used against his arms down to his hands, cheap and unreliable they broke apart and congealed into cartoon cigar shapes before their jobs were completed; failed attempts being tossed aside on the counter making a white and green desert of stinking dunes.

The talking from the radio didn’t drown out the sound of the washing machine and it soaked and swirled the bedding, the receptacle for this all but dead dad’s excretion, thinking of the foul soup of vomit and suds filling the drum gave him thoughts of never using the thing again, as if somethings are too stained to ever get clean and in the attempts at such you merely ruin the tools.

6:54 he watched the time for so long that it ticked over; 6:55. Now with his supply running low he had taken to rationing, since it was most effective at getting him to sleep he would save it for that purpose, a self prescribed tonic to get the night's over with. With much care he eased his nose close to the hands and sniffed, still had that acidic punch but he was done, one of the stock glasses from the kitchen would have to take place of the preferred vessel to save that from being blighted by this scent.

The wrongly shaped glass was placed on the makeshift bar top and the precious remaining colorless gold poured into it.

Everything then was returned to its previous resting place save for the newly freed booze that would find its time from captivity all too brief as Ken emptied the glass in three gulps.

Then with a head that felt as though his neck had become a spring he collapsed into bed, expertly getting between the covers with his trajectory.

The orange light of nighttime played in patterns across the ceiling, he had been awoken by a noise that by the time he had gained consciousness had already subsided; now nothing but silence. The patterns appeared to speed up and slow down, at points a rhythm and logic could be deciphered in the random color and at others it was just the light of street lamps coming through the thin curtains.

Ken’s mind replayed all the worst regrets, all the better lives he could be living if he had not have fucked up as much as he did, the TV or radio could drown out these tormenting ideas but either of those would also stimulate him, pushing the chance of rest even further away; he didn’t want to listen to other people talk about art or the news, didn’t want to hear music or to watch some late night talk show, he didn’t want to be anything, he didn’t even want to be at all, he wanted these hours to just disappear, he wanted to skip ahead in his life as quickly as possible.

After what felt like days of normal time he knew the war of attrition against the night had been lost, the only solution now was more alcohol.

In the slow motion of tired muscles a creeping stumble was made to the spare room, after much trouble and leaning against the frame the door was then opened, half way to the half empty bottle it was obvious even to a half asleep drunk that something had changed, there was something in the bottle.

Easing down onto his knees and looking in what he saw inside would in a snap wake him more than any radio or TV show could have.

Floating in what was left of the vodka was an island, one forest mountain, an edging of beach across one part of the curve, and from this impossible place thin white smoke trails led his eye down to fires.

This wasn’t some toy or prop; he could see those fires and around them houses with people in them, they were too small and too far way to make out in detail but enough was visible to impress upon him the situation, his vodka was now home to life, lots of it.

When he was done with the routine of daily care for his father he would take the seat that was next to the death bed and drag it over to the spare room, so he could spend the rest of the day watching the world within his vodka bottle.

After having enough of straining his senses a collection of tools had been assembled, a magnifying glass that worked like a flip out knife; so the eye piece was hidden in the handle till it is pushed out at which point it snapped into a position in line with the handle, the other main tool was a stethoscope; it was tacky, horrible and pushed to hand into the ear holes but it amplified the sounds though the glass of the bottle, so a little pain was worth putting up with.

The stethoscope was an odd one Ken had no idea why it was in the house at all, too cheap to be used by a real doctor but too effective at its intended purpose to be a kids toy.

Observing these bottle people was still tricky, even when using the magnifying glass the inhabitants were only as tall as the white bits at the base of finger nails; with hours spent on the task the best he had managed was working out that there were two main groups, those near the beach who wore pastel blue and yellow trim clothing and those of a group who were bringing down parts of the forest and making more advance homes in the spaced freed up by the felling. While separate most of the time they would often intermingle but it was obviously always two distinct groups coming together.

speech of any kind was even harder to discern from these micro folk, taking off the bottles cap didn’t help any and most of the time nothing was audible, the few times the ache inducing stethoscope came in useful was when festivals broke out. The music was muffled but he could tell that it was comprised of many voices singing songs in unison, the droning type of singing that comes from tradition, songs no one likes but everyone knows enough of.

It was during one of these upbeat events that something from the group living in the forest caught his attention Ken noticed a balloon raise up, below was a little compartment that looked to house one of the bottle people, a daredevil.

The red and yellow striped hot air balloon of sorts was being guided to the neck of the bottle; they had noticed him, they wanted to make contact.

It came as a relief to a now panicked Ken when the balloon became stuck in a part of the neck that contacted slightly; of course he wanted to talk to his people but some time to think of things to say would be nice, and it looked like he would get it.

The seemingly endless energy of the festival finally faltered and the sad rescue of the messenger balloon took place some of those islanders decided to stay around to watch.

A balloon at least five times bigger and much less colorfully adorned came up after the dangling one; this gigantic, relatively speaking, one looked like the ships Napoleon brought to bear: rugged, powerful but still with some lines of beauty in there. While it was still a hot air balloon this one had impressive wooded rigging over the top, sides and bottom of it.

The door of the stranded balloon’s underside carriage oped and the failed pilot tossed a rope down to the flat wooden platform that sat on top of the massive ‘rescue’ balloon, a minute later he has put foot on varnish then been taken down to the main compartment on the side.

Then after gently floating down and away there was a tiny snapping noise at it fired a micro projectile at the red and yellow embarrassment, popping it and sending the carcase plummeting downwards.

It was already the morning of the next day but as he was walking out of the spare room he stopped, turned and then screwed the bottle cap back on and then placed closed up magnifying glass on top of the that.

2:23 he blinked 3:28, these sleepless nights were dragging more than normal, without access to the last of the vodka he had been sober for four days and it wasn’t getting easier.

Dressing himself from the makeshift wardrobe that was the floor and grabbing a pen from the side table he made his way back to the spare room, pulling the seat even closer to the bottle for examination, it was just like how it was left; magnifying glass folded up and perched on top of the tightly screwed on cap.

It took a little while to notice the difference that had taken place inside of the bottle, the people there had started construction on pylons all over the island, sturdy, sparklingly white wooden architectures spiking upwards.

Even above that the island looked bigger than before, there were no new bits of coast but somehow it seemed to take up more space than it had last.

Taking the pen he placed it on the meeting point of the side of the label and the level of the vodka, pushing the nib of the pen hard into the label scraping it back and forth until the ink finally decided to mark the surface.

Before returning to the futile attempts at slumber Ken felt an edge to check on his father, turning on the hallway light, leaving the door open as wide as it could be and sitting on the bottom corner of the bed he watched as one labored breath after another came and went, on leaving this place almost two decades ago Ken had no desire to ever return; even when he came back for the funeral of their mother he went straight to the church for the service then left.

Outside waiting for the whole grim affair to start was the last time he had any real conversion with his dad, now all he could do was talk out loud and hope that there was something of the man left in there to listen.

9:50 while replaying over and over again one conversion that he blamed for ending his last relationship he heard muffled thuds; approaching the spare room again there were sharp flashes of differing colors stretching out from under the door, on opening that door he saw the inside now saturated in those lights, the vodka bottle at the far end of the room the center of it all.

The bottle people were setting off fireworks, brighter and more brilliant than any he had seen in the normal world; when he made his way closer the cause for their celebration became clear, the pylons they had been constructing and now had a level of rigging above them, connecting them all together, they were making a tower.

First nothing, then the balloon that got stuck attempting exit via the neck, now this; constructing a tower; even in his variously addled mind he thought he knew what they were trying, expansion.

They would push out from the confines of the bottle that defines the limitations of their universe and spread out, taking over the ‘table’ top, then the spare room as a whole, at that point they would be so great in number as to be able to increase the rate of their land grab exponentially;

taking multiple rooms at a time, using them as outpost and breeding grounds, raising a microscopic army that would would grow to carpet the entire world.

No; they had done nothing to him so far. He couldn’t take preemptive action, it was his bottle so they are his kin.

The light show did not stop while his decision changed course over and over, putting off formulating a long term, he ran his finger gently down the side of the bottle, from the glass over the ridge of the label and down to where the level had been drawn, marked more by indentation then ink it and the surface level of the vodka no longer matched, the vodka being a few hairs short.

Silent invasion or no they were stealing his drink, the pen he had used was laying next to the bottle in the same place where it had been tossed aside before. A new mark was made at the new level, it so close to the last indent that they would look as one if not viewed with an attentive enough eye.

Closing the door then rolling a cigar shape out of a towel to close the gap below the door Ken returned to his room, laying in his bed as normal apart from this time he needed sound, he put on the radio so to take the impact from the fire works and also to hear people's voices, it didn’t matter what they were talking about so long as there was talking, like zoos putting mirrors in with herd animals to make it seem like they are more of them, a simple trick for comfort.

Sitting in the kitchen with unfocused eyes aimed down the door of the washing machine he had become lost, transfixed in the colors and the shapeless motion, sober angry and tired the best he could hope for was losing time to hallucinations, there was more banging now; but unlike how most events were trending for him nowadays this emanated not from the spare room but the much more traditional front door.

Since it was visible from the kitchen he stayed sitting and leaned over to look, the door was solid wood but at both sides of it were long strips of glass with thin yellowing curtains, not much could be gathered from the far off muffled slits but at the very least whoever was standing there was a full sized human.

Not having gone outside in a while meant a small hunt of nearby table tops and shelf drawers for the keys, ending with half a hand being pushed around the back of a vase.

The door opened with a sigh of under-use, standing there was a middle aged woman, floral dress tucked into plaid trousers with an unseasonal knitted scarf, light blue with gold trim.

“You need something!?”

“Are you Harry’s son?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Isn’t June here anymore?”

“She…had to go back home, so I replaced her here.”

“That is nice of you, how are things with Harry now?”

“Who are you again!?”

“Oh, sorry, I live over the road. Me and Harry were friends, even went bowling once.”

“I never heard about him liking bowling.”

“For a while there he did it every few weeks.”

She was rolling the corner of the scarf between her index finger and thumb.

“Can I see him?”

It was boiling out.

“What?”

“Could I see Harry? please.”

Yellow trim.

“Look lady, I’ve been here for ages and sis was here for even longer before I got here and I have never heard of you, no one told me a thing about people visiting dad.”

“I just want to say hello.”

The blue of that scarf.

“He’s a f*****g vegetable, you may as well say thank you to a brick!”

He swung the the door on her astonished face with his shaking hand, turned the key and replaced it at the back of the vase; it seemed the right place for it.

Before returning himself to the joys of mindlessly watching clothes being tossed about and suddenly he watched as the human sized gray blur shrank and disappeared to the other side of the street, at least that part of the story was true.

He took his place in front of the washing machine and waited to be sucked in again.

“Who was she to you? you had never mentioned her before, were you and her friends? a Lover? did you hate her? or did you never even meet her? Hey ‘Harry’, why did she come here?”

Ken didn’t even realize he was speaking out loud, rocking back on the balls of his feet while peering out of the curtained windows of his father’s bedroom.

“‘Harry’ they’re drinking my vodka ‘Harry’.”

The street outside was completely devoid of life, house fronts hiding their contents, sidewalks going unwalked upon, roads without cars rolling over them, not even territorial cats posing off.

“Harry…”

He gave up on the outside and looked over to his father: silent, still, gray and with nothing of the man that Ken had grown up hating, this ever sleeping thing could not put him down with words, mock him, make him feel like nothing, could not beat and wound him.

There was a sudden bang, he stopped to pay as much attention as possible to it, then a few seconds later a repeat; the front door again.

Back to the window he moved the curtain aside, no care or thought anymore for being surreptitious even with an improved view he could see if anything was at the front door.

“Damn.”

Walking down the stairs and expecting the lady to be back instead Ken found the front door open; smashing into the flimsy table that sat between it and the wall, doilies and papers vortexing around.

Grabbing the edge of the door he pushed against the air pressure until it finally popped shut, the keys were next to the now overturned vase just reachable from his position, this time after using the keys to lock the door he caressed the coin shaped protrusion of the key making sure that this time the event would stay in his memory.

“I locked this… I locked this last time, I know I did!”

A warm unpleasant tingling swept through his sinew and the desire to check the bottle dominated his mind.

On coming to the spare room there was no noise or pyrotechnics just silence and darkness.

Inside everything seemed fine, until he realized the magnifying glass wasn’t on top of the cap anymore,

hoping for an innocuous answer he looked around, the window, a gust could have caught the magnifying glass just enough to nudge it off, sadly not though, the window had been shut since he arrived and it was a question all of its own if the thing even still could be opened anymore.

He moved closer, and saw that the tower the bottle people had been creating was now finished, many feet dug firmly into the ground with all joined together by the platform then from that rises a long pyramid that started out with clean simple lines then twisted in on itself and spiraled as it reached up into the neck of the bottle with a single finger its sides flush with the inside edge of the glass, this lead his eye to the top of the cap and it was a little to dark to see but something was wrong, he ran the curve of his index finger over the cap and felt a tiny hole.

“Where are you!?”

He bellowed out of pure frustration but it got unexpected results, in his silence after the outburst could be heard a scratching, from the surface next to the vodka bottle, almost invisible if not for the long shadows streaking across the wood; many straight little lines and at the top of each one was a running bottle person, on instinct he grabbed one of the many books from a shelf and smacked it spine down in the path of exit for the escapees.

The same few thoughts had been revolving in his mind to the point where it began to feel as though his skull was filling with paste, clogging and expanding to encompass every space stifling his consciousness, limiting him only to those self same thoughts; violent ones, destructive and definitive.

They had taken his vodka and grown off of it to a point where they were taking the initiative; from a cute, mystery in the spare room they had become the only concern on his now fractured and shaky mind, the ability for action wasn’t the issue he was after all so much bigger than them that he could lift their entire world with ease, the problem was should he.

The act of simply throwing a quarter full bottle of vodka away would now be both an attainable solution and an act of genocide.

This one question was not something answered so readily and he spent sleepless nights and drowsy days replaying the same scenarios over and over, the repeats coming and going often with no changes made whatsoever, carbon copy imaginings by a mind depleted.

The occurrences of him talking in long one sided rambling conventions increased each day, the atmosphere of the room becoming denser and more putrid as time went on.

To try and give himself something else to wonder upon the desks and shelves had been raided and any interesting contents piled in the middle of the living room, on top of all these in terms of interest was Harry’s old diary, while dating back decades it still had entries right up until the point where his health weakened to the point where holding a pen was too much.

That last memory held in paper talked of June, how she had put her life on hold help him in what everyone thought would be a short sickness, and how by that point it had been close to a year, reading it Ken knew he should be sad but didn’t know if he actually felt that, the smothering blanket of tiredness and paranoia having monopoly over his emotions.

One of the towering piles of books and papers toppled crashing into the ground and suddenly tens of flies scattered out in uncertain, bobbing paths, after a period to orientate themselves as a loose collective they spiraled upstairs Ken followed as if they were tracking dogs.

Bumping against then slipping under Harry’s door they moved with a terrifying sense of purpose.

Opening the door and for the first time in a week actually looking at his father he saw that the flies were just coming to meet up with their friends, hundreds of them climbing over what used to be Harry, spilling out over the rest of the room, a black crawling blanket on top of a dirty cloth one.

The fog over his mind parted and let the full horror of the sight in, the black creeping void where his eyes used to be, the small glyphs of flesh under the movement and a face in a single held expression; one so pained and sad that it was fitting to have larva being dug into it.

An answer had been reached.

With any hesitation held down within his gut he stomped to and shouldered open the spare room’s door without missing a beat.

The bottle was just sitting there like always though this time the sunlight was hitting in such a way as to make it glow, he grabbed it; one hand firmly grasping its side, he had meant to at this point simply fling it against a wall and be done with it, but this was not theirs he hand bought the bottle then brought it here, they had no ownership of it and with the kill order out he could finally drink.

With the other hand he spun removed then cast aside the cap, saw a wooden platform on the inside of the neck that the escapees must have used, dismissing it without even a tut he tilted the bottle towards him; normally this would be a painless exercises but he was a witness to the destruction of the island one degree at a time.

The tower that they had taken days to build was the first to fall bending, twisting and then finally snapping up and down its length till nothing was left to show of its Constitution save for the few bits that were form fitted to the inside of the neck.

The island took its damage seconds after the fall of the tower, cracking against the glass beach first, high waves of vodka and rocketing heaps of sand and rocks raining down on the tents and houses, with the impact and motion of vodka around it the island was forced into a spin, whole forest's worth of trees split and were flung with horrendous force into whatever was in their path.

The island was already beyond the point of being uninhabitable by the time the vodka had started over and down the neck of the bottle, but before the relief of alcohol could meet him an uncountable mass of the bottle people sprang from the platform that lay across the inside of the neck.

Unable to control their path some landed directly in his mouth but the luckier ones landed in the bushy unkempt hair around it, from there they could use climbing tools to venture upwards, hundreds of them digging serrated hooks into his face, every single tiny one stung like hell and the pain was multiplied when the vodka found its way out, straight into his left eye and all down his blood spotted skin, the drink took many of the bottle people with it to its deadly journey to the ground but some still hung on, not many but enough to coordinate themselves over to his right eye.

Ken scratched at his facial hair where a small diversionary group was doing what they could while the main force made it to his eye, when talking a foe that is more than a hundred thousand times as big as you a suicide mission is the only option, and so this main force knew they had one chance, they formed a line around his eye lid then the leader gave a brief countdown; then they charged using specially sharpened spears to dig their way as deep as possible into the soft whiteness.

The instinctual blink that followed churned them into mush, their mass of guts and crunched up bones, muscle and sinew mixing with the juices spilling from the eye wounds, it was now that there was a loud knocking from the front door. Their mission was a success and that eye had been rendered useless, Ken focuses his attentions on his other, the vodka hurt like hell but it wouldn’t have done permanent damage.

A few panicked wipes later he could see well enough to aim for the door, before he could exit it started closing by itself, then he saw why, hundreds of thin lines of string had been tied to the back of it that led up to shelf where there was a field of the bottle people tugging as hard as they could, laughing defiantly he was about to mock them for how easy it will be for him to open the door like normal, but the words never had a breath to carry them, as thousands of harpoons were shot into his chest, the same threads attached to them then the very next instant the legion of harpooners ran off the other  shelf on the other wall and and spiraled around him over and over, he had no time to figure out what was happening; the door was still open and he could make it, his first step though was a cursed one and it sent him crashing down unable to even use his hands to soften the landing, the harpoon tethers had wrapped him up tightly, so much so that he couldn’t even breath properly.

The door and the frame had almost met the light beyond started to intensify Ken could only wobble so that he was facing it and he shouted as loud as he could, weeping he begged to be saved, started to apologize and hoped to be able to reason with someone, then the door was shut.