The bottle occupies the highest shelf behind the bar, where the streetlights turn its amber glass almost luminous after dusk. Its label depicts a woman in three-quarter profile rendered in the elaborate engraved style of another century. Beneath her portrait curls a name in faded script, though the lettering changes depending on how long you stare.
Nobody orders the drink. The bartender pours it only for regulars, usually before their food arrives, one narrow glass placed on the counter with the solemnity of an invitation that cannot politely be repeated.
The first sip tastes of bitter orange and rainwater collected from stone. The second contains a kitchen I have never visited. Sun falls across yellow tiles, a radio murmurs somewhere near an open window, and my hands are peeling apples with the practiced irritation of someone preparing dinner for a person who is late again.
By the third sip I remember an entire summer beside a river whose name I cannot supply. I remember a lover’s habit of whistling through their teeth. I remember forgiving them for something terrible. When the glass empties, the memories remain with the stubborn emotional weight of experience.
Regulars describe the aperitif differently, although everyone eventually uses the same phrase: it tastes like an evening you were owed. Several drink it nightly. They speak lovingly of childhood bedrooms, marriages, funerals, journeys and reconciliations that appear nowhere in their actual histories.
One man has acquired memories of three daughters despite never having children. A woman who has lived above the laundromat for twenty-six years insists she once kept goats on a hillside overlooking the sea. Neither seems troubled by the discrepancy. Their real lives have become the stories they tell with less conviction.
I received my first glass last week. Since then, pieces of my apartment have begun losing familiarity. Yesterday I stood outside my own bathroom waiting for someone to finish bathing before remembering I live alone.
This afternoon I found an old photograph in a drawer showing the kitchen from the drink, complete with the yellow tiles and the open window. Someone had written a date on the back in my handwriting, forty-three years before I was born.
Tonight the woman on the label has my mouth. Her hair is becoming mine as well, though the engraved face still appears older each time the bottle turns beneath the light.
The bartender has started addressing me with a familiarity I cannot place, and when he reaches for the bottle, I feel an absurd flicker of homesickness for the high shelf.
Around me, the regulars raise their glasses with the serene expressions of people who have remembered themselves successfully.
I am beginning to suspect the drink contains no one’s past.
It may simply be making room for one.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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