Lucky Strikes

TW: alcoholism, substance abuse

Spirytus Vodka

Lucky didn’t often drink. She drank only once a year for only one reason. The first few years after her sister’s death she drank alone. Her brothers and sister, they weren’t family. Not really. They were strangers, a group of orphans thrown together by chance.

But not Lucky and her twin. They always had each other. They grew up together.

She tipped the nearly empty glass around on its edges, eyes hooded as the weak pot lamp’s light bounces off the glass’s many angled facades. In each triangular chip she sees a memory.

Seven, and crying as they woke up to bloody sheets. Eleven, and learning the murder walk that had men running from them. Fourteen, and coughing from their first ever hit. Fifteen, and realizing boys hated them just as much. Seventeen, and buying their first pregnancy sticks. Twenty, and assuming the red light would save her.

Lucky chucked the red stained glass into the white-grey wall. There were four other spider cracks. One for each year she’s lived longer than her sister. Tomorrow she will clean up the shards.

Pisco Sour

On the sixth anniversary she went out.

Lucky met her sister at her bar. Her youngest sister paid for the plane tickets and kicked everyone out the second Lucky stepped through the swinging saloon doors, cigarette hanging half-lit from her lips.

After hefting a sealed Fontana Di Papa Red onto the black wood countertop, her sister flounced out as well.

Fontana Di Papa Red was not a vintage she knew, but it was at least red wine. Bars, or at least her sister’s bar, didn’t usually carry wine.

She liked that it was silent. It stank and the bar stool squealed as she pulled it back. But it was empty on a Friday night.

Her sister hadn’t left her a glass. Lucky picked up the bottom of her coat and walked around to the shelves stacked under the bar.

Champagne flutes, shot glasses, mugs, solo cups…aha! Crystal tumbler!

Straightening up, she set the tumbler gently – though the nicks and splotches in the wood tell her she needn’t bother – down next to the dark bottle.

Her glass half full, she heard heavy footsteps and a slurred voice calling out her sister’s name.

« Monnie! ¿Qué diablos es esto? ¿Por qué está cerrado el bar? » The man stopped, blinking blearily at a woman who had none of their father’s features so therefore had none of Monnie’s either.

 “You ain’t Monnie!” He shouted, shocked into sobriety and into speaking English.

Lucky took in the puke-stained sleeves, the receding hairline, the yellow stained teeth. He was definitely Monnie’s type.

Stalking towards him with a hollow smugness at the way he stumbled back, she chased him right back out the doors. Lucky looked down at him, sat on the side of the street in a slush-pool of piss, vomit, and God-knows-what-else, and rasped, “Shop’s closed. Come back another night.”

She didn’t wait to see him off. Back inside she brings her drink to one of the tables.

Red wine, all wine really, was not to be chugged. The taste of licorice-prune-tobacco had her gagging around the first mouthful and the second, third, fourth…until there was no more to drink.

Lucky grimaced and wrapped a hand around the neck of the Fontana Di Papa Red, and hesitated. The bottle was a gift and however much her disgust is justified, Monnie did buy her a bottle of red. It’d be rude of her to flush it down the loo.

She chucked the glass instead. The only memory she saw of her twin that night was her pale, clever fingers painted and glistening with gold. Tomorrow she will clean up the shards.

Vesper Martini

London was only slightly less miserable in the fall when the leaves stained themselves rancid.

Lucky squinted down at her phone. Her older brother had sent a car to pick her up from the private airstrip, but the foot traffic in the city actually seemed to move quicker than the vehicular. Both her and the driver scored a pack off some chimney sweeps when Lucky’s voice was deeper than all of theirs.

After an hour of walking, she knocked on the door of her brother’s townhouse.

“Is that your only coat?” Her brother asked politely as he hung it on his coat rack.

The tattered green trench certainly stood out from her brother’s sensible black greatcoats. It stood out on Lucky too, who, as always, was wearing a tight, red, V-neck minidress.

“We thrifted it.”

Her brother’s shoulders stiffen, and he said quite evenly, “Oh”, even as his hands didn’t shake as he poured from a gaudy decanter with a glass bat stopper.

The tea table had a pristine white covering with prettily crocheted edges and painted flower petals. The tea set matched.

He drank tea while she drank wine. This year’s wine was more palatable than lasts, though it was still worse than anything she’d have picked out herself.

Neither of them talked. The only sound was the bustle outside muffled behind two panes of glass, the ticking of a grand grandfather clock muffled up a flight of stairs, and the clinking of rings as the two of them daintily sipped at their respective drinks.

“Your sister,” her brother paused, arching his hairy eyebrows, “did she like red wine?”

Lucky stalled like a choking engine. No one had ever asked her that. No one had ever bothered. Her sister was dead and the only time she let herself mourn, she thought about the unhappy times.

“Lucky?”

“Yeah,” she wheezed, “yeah she liked red wine. She also liked doing this.”

Her brother ducked when she chucked the glass. A frown marred his aristocratic features, but he said nothing as Lucky listed other things her sister liked. Butterfly clips. Feeding stray cats. The Macarena. Little black purses. Winged eyeliner. Singing the alphabet out of order. Graffiti. Painting Lucky’s nails pink and green and silver. Thrift shopping.

Tomorrow she will clean up the shards.

Strawberry Daiquiri

“Karaoke? Really?” In the passenger seat of her two-seater convertible, her baby brother was basically bouncing in his seat.

“Yeah. It’s something I used to do with my cousin. Before she overdosed.” For a second, his face darkened before the smile was back, though dimmer and faker. Lucky didn’t know this cousin. They might be related but it was more likely they weren’t.

“Hmm.” Besides drinking wine and breaking dishes Lucky stayed away from things that reminded her of her sister. Maybe her sister and her were closer than her brother and his cousin.

“Oh! Here it is!” It shouldn’t have surprised her that they wound up at a bar. Though it is classier than Monnie’s and probably daylights as a quaint coffee shop for the quirky and nerdy. The flyers in the windows seemed painted on rather than taped on. OPEN MIC EVERY WED & SAT read the largest and by far the most ornate.

Open mic wouldn’t be as nerve wracking as karaoke, but when her brother dropped by her apartment, he hadn’t seemed like he minded whether or not Lucky actually sang.

Lucky got them a table off to the side. A passing waitress wrote down their order: red wine for Lucky and water and a basket of fries for her brother. He wasn’t underage here like he would have been in the States, but he waved her off, explaining that the drinking came after.

Many of the acts were mediocre. Lucky stole too many fries, so her brother bought a second plate.

Finally, it was her brother’s turn. She leaned back in her seat, ready to be entertained. The youngest of their father’s castaways possessed incredible musical talent. Whether it was rapping, singing, dancing, composing, producing, or playing, he could do it all.

Of course, no one would suspect that from the absolute caterwaul coming out of his throat.

A painful five minutes later he returned to their table, grinning, flushed, and ravenous. He dove for the untouched fries, ignorant of his sister’s expression and the annoyed stares of everyone else around them.

That exact song he butchered up on stage, he was singing – properly – in the car on the drive up. It had been deep, smooth, the kind of tune you play when taking a midnight drive to the middle of nowhere. She had only been paying attention because whenever the chorus came on, she thought her brother was talking to her.

“What,” Lucky hissed, “was that?”

“Fun?” Her brother raised his eyebrows. He at least had the manners to finish chewing before speaking. “My cousin sucked. Couldn’t carry a tune. But she really liked singing. And I really liked seeing her happy.” He shrugged like it was no big deal to continue a tradition started with someone loved who is now no longer around to enjoy it with.

Lucky had nothing to say to that.

Aperol Spritz

Thirty, Lucky sits at her dingy dining room table with a bottle of Sandbanks Sleeping Giant Foch-Baco Noir VQA with one brother filling out the crosswords and the other arguing with her sister about what colour the plaster should be to fill in the cracks in her wall.

« Tú eres una tan puta! » Monnie curses, punching their littlest brother as he squirts a vinegar and water cleanser at her.

“Takes one to know one!” He shouts back, bunny hopping out of reach.

For the first time in a decade, Lucky allows the smile to creep over her lips. Kat always wanted a big family. She wouldn’t have cared if they were related or not. She wouldn’t have cared that there was a fourteen-year age gap between the oldest and youngest brothers. She wouldn’t have cared that the sister mostly spoke Spanish and curses.

Lucky peers into the crimson liquid and ten years too late, remembers her sister happy.