death and wine
Wine playing the role of Drink
An acquired taste; bitter and unforgiving until it sets in. Originally: a replacement for water.
Wine playing the role of Symbol
Blown glass carafes. Screw-off caps. Manual aerators. Cardboard boxes. Specialized glasses. Candlelight. Cheap cigarettes. Sommeliers. Plastic spigots. The electric lightness of being tipsy. The radioactive freedom of being drunk.
Wine playing the role of Birthblood
No one cared that a thigh was a horrible place to be incubated. No amniotic protection—just pulsing veins, flexing muscles. No all-encompassing womb for warmth, no cradle. Heartbeat coming in indirect and distant. So much jostling about, with no cushion to dull the shake.
Some believe that there’s an inherent trauma in birth, in being torn from safety into the cold maw of the outer world. It is the first reason for tears.
Dionysus was born twice. Surely no one could have expected him to be sane.
The first time: separated from his mother for her foolishness, for asking a question that should not have been answered. Dionysus’ mother, just another in an unending line of beautiful, expendable mortals, had asked to see Zeus’ true form. His godly form, in its true glory. all light and heat. Surely, Zeus had known her vessel could not handle the sight. Perhaps that is why he showed her, despite knowing she would perish. It was a matter of pride. There are many matters of pride for gods.
She did not bleed. Did not burn. Just turned straight from woman to ash.
Zeus had known of her pregnancy, as well. Perhaps he only decided after the fact, upon seeing Dionysus’ tiny, desperately dependent form curled up amidst the black pile that was once his mother, to save the boy. And for all of Zeus’ male lack, decided to incubate the child in his thigh. The gods do not need reasons. They can live by their whims, justifying nothing to anyone. Remember, those with power are always right.
The second time: Zeus decided Dionysus had been in there long enough.
Wine playing the role of Vengeance
Dionysus didn’t want a second difficult beginning. Birth had posed enough of a challenge. But life—if an immortal existence can deserve the word—had other ideas for him.
The king of Thebes, and in fact the majority of his mother’s mortal family, refused to recognize his godhood, that he was son of Zeus, instead believing that Dionysus’ mother, who had died a pointless death he had never been allowed to grieve, had lain with a mortal man. Her absence, and Dionysus’ presence, were of no importance, and it was more convenient and far simpler to paint the woman a simple harlot than to accept the young man claiming to be her son as a god.
But to Dionysus, this was no crime. It was a sin. Crimes are committed by humans against other humans. Sins are committed by humans against gods. And though Dionysus fumed at his own treatment, for his mother’s own family to cast her aside—
Dionysus decided they must be punished—all of them—even the few who did believe. In making an example, what purpose is there if it is not grand?
And so his revenge ensued: the sinking sun, the red of blood and precious stones, pulling on the loose threads of a city’s tapestry until it was just one long, lonely string. The women of the city beautiful in their wineless revelry. Dewdrops clinging to skin, intermixed with perspiration, a sacred elixir; a potion of freedom never to be drunk, but lived.
And of course the blood, which of course spilled, urgently and furiously, upon the king’s attempt to pull the women from their spell of madness. And of course the royals’ acknowledgement, which, when it came, was not enough. Of course the remorse was not enough. It would never be enough. ‘It’ being nothing, everything.
After the King of Thebes’ demise at the bare, dirt-crusted hands of the king’s own mother—a fitting end—Dionysus cast out the rest of the royals from their birthplace, in true godly fashion, a strategy echoed later by another popular divinity. It’s worth noting again that these royals were relatives of his late mother, and thus were his own family. His only living family, since we’ve already established that gods are not really alive.
Some stories say Dionysus turned the royals into snakes—maybe that’s where said divinity got the idea to put one in that storied garden—but Dionysus did no such thing. To turn them into snakes would be to deprive them of their consciousness, their awareness of their deed, their concept of home. Home, then: tended gardens, carefully arranged stones, animals that did not balk at their voices. Home, now: a place to which they could never return. The weeds would overtake the flowerbeds, the stones would crumble, the animals would forget them and die. Life, now: endless wandering under a different fraction of sky, the memories soaked in lies. Their—his—lineage doomed to mediocrity.
***
Wine playing the role of Facilitator
Morning will come anyway, so why not pass the night here? A bed is a bed. Warmer if someone else is in it, even if that someone is the short deliveryman from work, whose incessant requests she finally caved to this past week. She has been so lonely lately. So staggeringly lonely.
The body heat is made hotter by the rosé from dinner. Bought by the glass—it seemed cheaper that way, at first, though much less so after six glasses between two people. Even if in unequal parts. You seem to like it so much, her date said. Let me just get you another glass. Oh, your glass is empty. Let me get you another.
And she’s too hot now to keep her clothes on and maybe it’s because he’s turned the heater in the corner of the room all the way up but maybe she really does want to be naked with him. It’s hard to tell. Wine is the puppeteer, and she, a mere puppet. He’s smiling, has been for a while. Like a knight in a fairytale? No—more like the Cheshire cat, but wait, maybe the light in his irises isn’t being reflected from anywhere, and he’s lit from within—
Sometimes darkness is so much warmer than light.
Wine playing the role of Performance
She missed the driveway on her first day, months back. The tasting house is hidden between two massive redwoods, their bark splintering and shadowing the ground below, the dark gravel path hardly discernible from the cracked asphalt of the road.
She is used to the routine by now. She lays out a faux fawn skin as a tablecloth, one she’d brought in from home when her manager asked for ideas on increasing the rustic feel of the tasting room. The skin alludes to that human primitiveness inherent to hunting without the gunpowder or cracked bones or butchering that really comes along with it. The hairs feel wiry to the touch, as if they’ve never been tamed by anything. Of course, she knows they’re made of nylon. It’s not a crime; no one needs to know the truth. Perhaps the guests know, anyway, and everyone is colluding in the performance, and truth has never been the point.
She fetches the bottles from the back of the temperature-controlled storeroom, lining them up ascending by year on the olive wood countertop. She waits until fifteen minutes before opening before slicing the array of cheeses, arranging them onto unwaxed boards before the wine bottles, suggesting pairings. She swats at the emerald cluster flies and wonders how something ostensibly beautiful can be such a nuisance.
Wine playing the role of Death
Perhaps Dionysus had a change of heart, though there have been whispers throughout the Pantheon that he doesn’t have one; only so many organs can incubate inside of a thigh. He decides to pay a visit to the old family line.
He surveys the area out back: the tufted grass with its dry gaps of sepia, the swing tied to a branch with molding rope. The deck overlooks an evaporated creek, its waterless bed filled with rotting leaves. Brown, not black, not red. A gentler kind of death.
The door leading indoors is slightly ajar. He pushes it open, setting the decorative plastic vines rustling on their rigid stems. The ever-ripe grapes shine under the light of the fluorescent ceiling bulbs.
When she spots him she thinks he looks like her grandfather did in the Navy photo albums her own father used to show her every Veteran’s Day, except she can’t confirm this because she can’t seem to look directly at him; her vision cannot, or will not, focus on him. He catches her looking, or whatever she is doing. He nudges his way through the sparse crowd, who pays him no notice, to where she is standing near the counter. He leans one elbow onto the wiry fawn skin, and she thinks about how little pinpricks will be imprinted on his arm for several minutes once he moves.
“Tell me about these wines,” he says.
“Well,” she begins, still feeling like she is somehow being blinded though trying her best to conceal it, “we grow them here, well, not on these premises, but nearby, in Napa Valley. We pride ourselves for our small-batch production, to reduce waste—”
“Now why would anyone ever waste wine?” he asks.
She is regurgitating a script and she doesn't know what to tell him, doesn’t know whether the waste is from the production process or whether the wine itself is wasted. Somewhere past the range of her sight he smiles. Light needles into her vision.
“I’m only joking,” he says. She pulls the corner of her lip into a smile. He leans forward, marvels at the moldy cheeses, the loose dried cranberries. His skin just barely brushes the corner of the cheese knife. He picks it up.
“What a frivolous little thing,” he says. “It could never pierce skin without an entire arm’s weight behind it, and by then, it’s hardly the knife accomplishing the task.”
She says nothing. She is suddenly aware that her lungs are just empty space.
He’s still staring at the cheese knife. “I like frivolous little things,” he says. “Impracticality is a small step towards madness.”
She finds herself laughing, though she doesn’t recall finding anything he’s said funny. Her eyes begin to water, just at the outer edges.
“Have you ever thought about killing anyone?” he asks.
“Once,” she says. She’s never consciously recognized it until now.
“Who?” he asks.
The words leak out of her. “Just this guy I went out with one time. I don’t think I really wanted to sleep with him.”
“Did you think about how you’d do it?”
“No,” she says. But in her mind the deliveryman’s back is against the heater. She’s holding a little cheese knife.
He seems pleased. “Now which of these wines is your favorite? I’d like to try a glass.” 7
Normally guests are only allowed a sip’s worth, for tasting, but she pours him a full glass. Not to the typical one-third line, but to the edge, so full there’s a meniscus convexing above the rim, threatening to spill. Part of her wants to see it gush over the edge, waterfall onto the floor, like a long-dammed river finally freed. It would be her job to clean it up, but nonetheless, she wants.
“Tell me about this wine,” he says. Before she answers, he begins to drink it.
“This, well, this is one of the vineyard’s classics,” she says. “Notes of citrus, without being overwhelmingly sweet, notes of earth without being overwhelmingly bitter.”
Her voice sounds far away from her. She keeps speaking.
“The earthy notes—well, in some batches they’re metallic, almost. Like iron. Like blood. People say blood is thicker than water.” She swallows. Her breath snags on her teeth. “But it’s not thicker than wine.”
He finishes the glass. The wine disappears into the darkness of his throat.
She blinks once and she can see him, now. His hair is spoked with gold. His eyes are completely empty yet entirely full. He is smiling as wide as the equator.
“Where is home to you?” he asks.
She doesn't want to tell a strange man where she lives, but she is compelled to answer.
“I—I live about fifteen minutes from here,” she says. It is a guesthouse she is renting from a new-money family. They kick her out on holidays and when their parents visit, but the rent is reasonable because it is under the table, their own home a rental with a sublease-barring clause. Their dog recognizes her, he doesn’t bark anymore when he sees her, in fact he canters up, his long ears trailing behind her head like flightless wings, puts his front paws on her stomach and maybe that is the closest thing to love she has felt in years. The family preferred their own decor and she had to get rid of everything she owned when she moved in, even the duvet she got as a gift in middle school, with its tattered edges and clip-art cherubs.
Until now, she has never thought about whether she considers it to be home.
“Interesting,” he says.
She nods, at once full of glee and overwhelming sorrow.
“Tell me something,” he says. “What do you think of yourself?”
“I wanted to be a singer,” she says. Her eyes have betrayed her and she is suddenly crying. “I wanted to see a crowd below reaching their hands up for me, only for me, night after night after night.”
He makes a quiet sound of contemplation and twirls his hair. He begins humming the first song she ever wrote.
“Your life is so short, you know,” he says. “So mundane. So pointless.”
She begins to laugh, so loudly and uncontrollably that her boss peers his head into the room and looks over at her. It is clear he thinks she is frightening her precious customer, and she’ll be scolded for that later, perhaps even receive a write-up, but really, does it matter? Has anything she’s ever done mattered at all?
Others are looking, now. She has begun swaying to the rhythm of her own laughter. Tears are still leaking down her fire-hot cheeks. She stacks the cheese cubes and stabs them repeatedly. She runs her finger along the rim of the wine bottle and licks the little droplets from the labyrinth of her fingerprint.
Then the man opens his hand and drops his glass.
She looked down. The glass has shattered. Everything has shattered and the air of the room is tight around her shoulders. Her temples throb.
The floor is chemically sealed, but the remnants of wine have begun seeping into it anyway. She could have sworn the glass was empty before it fell.
“Why did you do that?” she manages to choke. She’s not sure if she wants to know the answer, or if she somehow already does.
“Just to hear it break,” he says. “Just to hear it break.”
Ray Miller (she/her) is a writer from California. She recently completed her MFA at Columbia University, where she was named a Felipe de Alba Fellow and served as the Managing Editor of the Columbia Journal. Her work has appeared in F(r)iction, JMWW, Stanchion Magazine, The Gateway Review, Moot Point Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a finalist in The Gateway Review's Annual Magical Realism Flash Fiction Contest, and her fiction has been nominated for the PEN/Robert J Dau Short Story Award for Emerging Writers.