Time in Decant

CW: cancer, death, grief, alcohol abuse



The crystal decanter casts rainbows of ruby onto the floor, where I lie, too. Red. Such a pretty color.

The prism to its left, however, isn’t a healthy thing to keep around, and I should honestly toss it.

It’s not that I particularly enjoy Pink Floyd’s music. Their discography holds a bittersweet, flagellatory interest for me now, but Carrie saw me spiral—or listen, I suppose, from her point of view—to Brain Damage, back when I let her see me at all, and decided to gift the little light-bender to me for my birthday. She thought she was being attentive to my interests. I thought she was being insinuative and cruel.

Time pours through the room. I move to increase the volume, then resume warming the floor with my back.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day…

If I was to become a genuine alcoholic, I’d thought, opulent sybaritism was the way to go about it. So—the wine decanter, yes, that was a healthy gift. My own, to myself, six months deep in the after.

In the before, my gift was poetry. A Pulitzer once beamed in that bedroom-window sunlight, until I replaced golden reflection with ruby refraction and entombed the medal in an IKEA file cabinet. The store label read Galant when I bought it, when words flowed well enough for me to fill drawers with drafts. A fitting name, a poetic one, for a lionhearted poet’s furniture staple—absent L in the name notwithstanding.

The lion in my heart roars only with heartburn, these days.

The phone rings, and I don’t answer it. The wine does, and I do.

Crystal clinks crystal, a one-woman toast, and I over-pour. Floor ruby light becomes floor ruby stain. I gulp. I gag. I gulp more.

The phone rings. Rings. Rings. Rings.

I had a ring, in the before. Just the one, as it should always have been. It lightened my ring finger flesh when I’d sun the rest of my hand around it.

…You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.

It’s ring-giver’s mother ringing the phone. She’s concerned about me and doesn’t deserve my silence—but she lost him, too, and I just don’t have it in me to be her crutch. Not when I’m so preoccupied with using the wine as my own.

Sun turns to moon as I lie on the floor, listening to The Dark Side of it. Moon, then, to sun.

Cyclical, time is, like the spinning in my head, like the record in the player. Time—what’s the time? Aching creaks through neck and spine. Piercing migraine through crusted eyes.

I unlock my cell: 11:43 in the morning. Fifty-two unanswered calls, and a scarlet-wrapped three-digit number on a lime-green unanswered text app. The colors like Christmastime, like this second one in the after.

Jewel tones shade the past year. Garnet liquor, amethyst under-eyes, emerald envy of those unacquainted with despair. Or maybe it’s just Jewel, mother-in-law, who won’t stop calling—once more, now, actually—making me wax poetic, irony of all ironies, about gemstones.

I drink two-day-old nightstand coffee to eradicate my headache. I ignore the jingle of the phone, of the bells announcing the holiday from the church across the street from my brownstone townhouse. I pass time with Time. With Money, mourn my unemployed wine-wasting of it.

Endless ringing.

I curse. Lower the volume of the record player, increase my blood alcohol content, swipe the screen. “Hello?”

“Vera, thank God you’re all right. I was about to march down there.” Jewel pauses. “Merry Christmas, honey.”

“It’s not a very merry one, though, is it?” I fiddle with the decanter’s bulbous crystal cork and don’t allow her the opportunity to be hurt by my snark. “Merry Christmas all the same.”

“Will you be coming to dinner? I’ve been texting you. Our house, at six. We’d love to have you over.”

Down the gullet, more wine and more patience. “I can’t.”

“Oh, that’s a shame. Do you already have plans?”

I glance down at the decanter in my hand. “Yep.”

Her hopeful silence at my assumed re-introduction into society grates on my nerves. “I’m so happy to hear that.”

“Have a good holiday.” I put down the phone and turn up the music.

Steven loved Breathe (In the Air), back when he still loved me, back before he stopped obeying the command in the song title. I turn it off. I can’t bear to listen to the final lyric.

A changing of the albums, then. I stare at the wall as I listen to The Wall from the floor.

“He’s a charmer,” Carrie had said, when she introduced him to me ten short years ago. It’s a laconic description, but I’ve always agreed. Steven filled life with magic. He was more myth than man to most, and the myth married little old me. Months poured through my fingers when we were together, as every definition of wealth poured in. I taught him fine art; he taught me the art of finery.

We’d had a wine decanter of our own, once, until we didn’t. He'd bequeathed the bar and all its indulgent, exorbitant ornaments to his brother with a trembling hand from his cancer bed. I’d scoffed when he wrote it out, playfully arguing that the catamaran might be a better inheritance for a nautical man like Frank, but his gaunt face remained as grave as the one into which I’d all too soon lowered him.

He hadn’t wanted me to become what I now am, in the after.

An errant ray of rainbow sunshine blinds me from the windowsill. I palm Carrie’s prism and hurl it with all my strength at the wall, hoping it’d shatter as forcefully as I do daily. It leaves only a small dent in the wainscoting Steven had insisted we D.I.Y. in our bedroom. We’d argued about it: I hadn’t wanted to remove the antique wallpaper. He hadn’t liked the yellow. I thought it was a happy color for a happy couple. He thought a cigar-lounge atmosphere for the bedroom was cozier. Saucier, actually, was the word he’d used, animated with a wiggling brow and a suggestive lip bite. We’d compromised on a cigar-lounge bedroom and a lemon-yellow kitchen.

The prism remains rainbow. The empty decanter renders it redundant. I leave the bedroom floor for the first time in two days to refill it with red.

The family-photo calendar on our refrigerator—another Carrie gift from two Decembers past—still reads December, last year’s December, though, our last full December together. The picture memory of him smiles roguishly, his chin on my shoulder, his sand-grit hands encircling my waist, the sunburned and vacationing pair of us on a summer beach in Fiji. I’m tugging salt-wind wet hair out of my eyeball with one hand and cupping his dimpled face against my own with the other. We beam ignorantly above the oncologist appointment reminder on the 2nd, above his last breath on the 20th.

I went to grief counseling for a month in those early days of the after, but the route to get there was a too-familiar one. Steven would place his hand in my own as we drove down that street to pick up groceries. Steven’s ghost would not place his hand anywhere.

Self-aware alcoholism aside, it’s the reason I don’t drive anymore.

The bench of the breakfast nook in front of the bay windows becomes my new floor. I drink, and I spiral, and I listen to the winter birds.

We didn’t get a last Christmas; or, I suppose we did, two years ago, with the gifting of the calendar soon to hold the worst days of my life and the final days of his. Stage four pancreatic cancer popped up out of nowhere in its March month. We’re making goofy, tongue-out, exercise-exhausted faces from the summit of Mount Fuji on that page. The faces made while facing the cancer mountain were everything but goofy.

Incurable. Inoperable. A lot of we’ll do everything we can to make him comfortable-s and here’s a pamphlet outlining how to get your affairs in order-s and I’m sorry for your loss-es before I even lost anything. They were all toasting my soon-to-be-lost mind, maybe, with that last one. Here lies you along with him. Let’s pour one out for the pair of you. May you both rest in peace. Wait, no, no, you aren’t supposed to pour one in, Vera—

I gulp four mouthfuls from my glass.

Doctors had given him four gulps, too, in the form of months. Steven was never a lightweight, so he gave me an extra five. Stubborn as an ox, that wonderful man. I wish I could say I’ve honored his memory, that I took my pain and put it on paper and won an impossible second Pulitzer. But I didn’t, and I haven’t. I just drink it.

If I hadn’t bought the decanter, it might not have become this bad. I’m aware of that, and I don’t care. All the pretentious TV poets have one, and I was one, once; a pretentious TV poet.

Call it keeping up appearances.

Children shriek gaily as families enter the church. I can’t bear to be in a house where I can hear it. I’m claustrophobic. The bells. The ringing. The we miss you—please come to dinner tonight! texts from Carrie. She’s a good friend, my best one, but I hate her. A matchmaking demon.

I scroll through my phone while I drink and try to shut my brain off.

Merry Christmas eve! Carrie.

We love you! Come to Jewel’s tomorrow. We’ll all be there. Carrie too. It’s not good for you to keep yourself locked away in that house. Mom and dad group chat.

Merry Christmas! How are you doing? More Carrie.

I know you said you have plans, but if you CAN make it—do you want beer, wine, or something else with dinner? Any snacks? I’m making a grocery store run before the last one closes. Jewel.

Jewel says we aren’t doing gifts this year, so don’t bring anything…if you come. Please come. Carrie.

Do you think Steven would be mad if he knew I accidentally broke two of those expensive whiskey glasses he left me? Because…oops. Frank. I roll my eyes, my lips twitching in spite of myself.

I should go. I don’t want to, but I should.

I shower and shave and falter by the door.

I can’t, though, not when he won’t be there. Not when I know where he will be, instead—somewhere I haven’t been, not once, since one year ago to the day. I should spend the holiday with him. Besides, he always fixed my mistakes, when they were restricted to typos and spelling errors on a page. Always reassured me that I’d figure it out. Maybe he’ll talk to me, fix me this time.

I shrug on a coat, grab the wine, and carry both items alongside my grief to the empty cemetery. All life has found better places to hang out for the holiday. Quiet. Still. Dead. Everything I’m not, but wish to be.

Steven’s headstone makes a perfect backrest, the liquor a perfect quilt. “It’s Christmas again,” I say to the cloudy covers of my sepulchral bed. Steven doesn’t reply. I toast his grave and drink straight from the crystal bottle, a reprimanding blast of frigid wind causing me to shiver and make excuses. “Oh, shut up. I know you don’t approve, but I didn’t bring a blanket. Christmas wine is a tradition, anyway.”

I tuck my coat tighter around me. “If you’re listening, though, tell God, or Satan, or whoever to bump up the thermostat. Earth is too cold.”

Flurries respond. Maybe Steven does, too, in the form of a song worming its way into my wine-addled head.

Hey, you, out there in the cold, getting lonely, getting old…can you feel me?

Hot tears warm my cheeks, constrict my breath. “No, I can’t. You took every part of me with you, except for this empty body.”

Steven had been a presence; a physical force noticed by all, but mine, all mine, to have and hold. I never stopped feeling him, before. The strong fingers grazing the back of my hand. The uptick of soft lips when I amused him. The entwined legs under bed sheets during the happy ghosts of our Christmases past. Everything smelled of cinnamon and firewood and him before everything smelled of bleach and sickness and hospital chocolate pudding.

I snuggle as close to my husband as possible, telling myself that the frozen ground under my cheek is the winter-chilled pillow between us that he’d once dented with his left elbow. I make the memory my reality: I see the familiar lines of his body propped comfortably in our bed as he reads my first-draft poetry aloud. He’s brushing my shower-wet hair with his warm fingers as I follow each tender, smiling movement of the mouth reciting my words back to me. He winks and tells me it’s good work, but here’s how it can be better. I listen, and I win a Pulitzer. I give a speech, and he applauds louder than the rest of the black-tie audience. Dances with me, dressed to the nines, under chandeliers. Murmurs his affection in my ear. I used to be drunk only on him.

“I miss you.”

I drink.

“Come back to me.”

I drink, and I sob, too, and I finish off the bottle.

The contents of my stomach come back in Steven’s stead, and I sully the dead grass beside his grave with bile. He used to hold my hair through the aftermath consequences of our raucous college parties. Only death holds it now. Twigs, leaves, dirt—all blown in from the dead forest nearby.

I lie on this new floor for a while, working to sober up, taking a small measure of pride in how I've managed to find some variety in all my floor-lying today.

It occurs to me then that I don’t know the names of the dead people keeping my dead husband company on either side, and that this is something a young-ish widow might know.

Dead Person On The Right was Penny Almond. An insane cackle bursts from my lips. Steven hated pennies, was always complaining when he’d receive them as change…but nowhere near as much as he loathed almonds. And now he’s stuck rotting next to both forever.

Dead Person On The Left was Jeremy Maddox. My laughter morphs to frenzied, gasping tears as I read the epitaph.

Jeremy Maddox

1962-2023

Beloved husband, brother, and friend.

“Remember how she said that we would meet again, some sunny day.”

A line from Vera, from Pink Floyd, from Steven’s favorite band. Lyrics written to a song bearing my name as the title, from an album he would play on the stereo as we cleaned the house together on Sundays. Sometimes he’d skip the song, saying it brought the mood down. I’d tease that he’s skipping out on me? Really? He’d smack my butt with a wet mop.

I hear him, then. I do.

You’re with me, he says, his voice gentle. As I am with you. Always.

And I can’t believe you buried me next to an Almond.

I laugh through my weeping. My lip quivers as I caress his headstone. I kiss it—him. “Hey, at least I’m on the other side.”

Live there.

My throat burns. I nod against the concrete memory of him.

A child laughs as a dog bounds after a stray ball on the edge of the cemetery. The air is warmer as Steven tangles his winter fingers through my hair.

“Sneak one into the heavenly banana nut muffins he eats at breakfast,” I conspire with the Almond, wiping my face with a chilled hand. “He’ll hate it, but we’ll have something to laugh about when I get there.”

I throw a snowball at the dog on my walk out of the graveyard. His name is Syd, the child informs me, named after some singer his mom likes. I can pet him, if I want, so I do. His fur is as soft as Steven’s laugh on the wind. The boy asks me why I’m crying. I just hug him.

I buy a bundle of lemon-yellow roses on my walk to Jewel’s, and my mother-in-law smiles broadly when she answers the door, albeit a bit teary-eyed. I don’t return the happy expression, but I also don’t scowl at Carrie, Frank, or my parents as I relax into the warmth of the house.

Jewel takes the flowers from my hand. “These are gorgeous! But I told Carrie to tell you no gifts!” She smacks my friend’s arm, earning a lighthearted protest. “And—oh! You didn’t have to bring a vase. This is a beautiful one, though. Really unique. So thoughtful, thank you!”

Green, living stems replace the usual sanguine death of the decanter. I eat Christmas ham with it as the table centerpiece. I drink water. I cry as Jewel puts on Steven’s favorite record in his memory, and I apologize to everyone.

We decide to play charades. I arch my body into a rainbow. No one knows what I’m supposed to be, and I don’t either, but Time can keep filling rooms until I figure it out.