IS THAT WHISKEY? / @jehster
The confused cacophony of a city awake past its bedtime floated up and lingered like storm outside the building’s top floors. None of the calamity sounded far away. Sirens hooted, cars screeched, and voices hollered all as if they were all just on the pavement below or about to come around the nearest corner. There was a sense of pressure, of deliberate concentration here — the city in its entirety funnelled through a stethoscope’s limber body and poured out as pure chaos into the ears of anyone who would listen. In one window high above, there stood a body, but was it listening?
The body there was lean and kept cool in a cotton dress, unperturbed by the stifled air that shifted awkwardly between the darkness outside and the warm light inside; it wasn’t enough movement to constitute a breeze, not even a lenient whisper of one. In such stillness, it could be difficult to draw breath and this body, at ease though it was, did not appear to be breathing. Yet at the sound of his voice, it did turn! And all that entered Charlotte’s mind then as memory comes without origin, without explanation. “ Yes, it is! ” But she had not taken a sip of it herself nor did she pour it. How it came to be in her hand remained a mystery. “ It’s the last of it. Do you want it? ” It was best that he take it, for whiskey, even water - drowned whiskey, wasn’t something Charlotte was likely to indulge in, certainly not while she was in the throes of a living memory that was not her own. She did not extend the glass towards him, but rather kept it close to her own body and closed the space between them with a few soft - footed steps across the carpet. Now it was within his reach should he want it. Up close, there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with the whiskey or the glass it was in. Charlotte smiled and waited for him to take the glass from her, condensation coating her palm. “ Long night, Mr. Callaway? ”











