Bottles

I awoke in a pool of red liquid.

Without my caffeine fix, I thought it was surely my blood, 

as after a night of shambolic wanderings round the seedy 

bars of Soho, I was in a bad awful mood.  But I did not 

bleed easily, as my parrot often told me.  Looking across 

the sheets, the smell of alcohol penetrating my sluggish 

senses, I realised with a shake that it was my precious 

cargo of late bottled rare vintage wine.

The empty bottles rolled across the duck boarded floor. 

Unbroken,  robust,  but truly empty of their juicy liquid.

The dawn now breaking in to the room and in to my soul, now 

sang out that all was now irretrievable lost to me.

My company charmingly called "Broken Flows" was a dead duck, 

and by the flimsy shake of my tail, I was sinking down into 

a deep depressive state that not even a stiff Americano 

could alleviate.

No, this disaster called for the sort of robust action that 

I had previously considered beyond me.  My client, awaiting 

the delivery of his consignment would probably even now be 

making his way to the hotel lobby.  The telephone rang.  The 

deep voice began to enunciate instructions and innuendo, 

soundings full of sensible, coherent utterings.  I hedged my 

bets and sold my soul, agreeing, pacifying and full of bravado 

I arranged for our meeting to go ahead as planned.

Replacing the receiver I surveyed the room and could not 

remember the how or the where or the what of the previous 

evening. 

Only the consequences remained, the empty bottles.  Yesterday, 

worth thousands,  now worth nothing, they may as well be empty 

hot water bottles.

 
Life is always juicy, I said out loud to the empty room.

The copyright of this post belongs to Valerie Rule