Orange Wine

It had been set in my diary in seafoam green ink at that point in my journey with the orange wine I’d begun referring to my schedule as my diary, not because I was British, but because my comings and goings and what-have-yous had become quite secretive, mainly to me to meet at the Olive Garden at noon.

I recognized the handwriting as my own. Effeminate loops. A plump, flirty bubble over the i in Olive Garden. My little black notebook housed all the signature flourishes that got me mocked in school, had me doubling back to see that some dick had signed me up for cheerleading auditions or, less subtly, written FRUITCAKE on my locker. I suspected it was the work of my sister, though I could never prove it. I also suspected my cursive was so exquisite it would make a founding father swoon, though I could never prove that either.

I had been looking forward to revamping my image at my high school reunion. Even mapped out which public restroom my wife and I would most likely be, “caught,” having sex in (the girls’ restroom, unfortunately, though if I was banging my wife I doubted anyone would have the gall to accuse me of changing my tampon this time).

As you can imagine, the divorce really bungled things for me.

Do you see me? I texted my date. I’m a pale, straight man. I hit send and then added, The paleness is a medical condition. I flagged down a waitress.

“Do you serve orange wine here?”

“What?” She asked. Sharing my wealth of experience could be burdensome, but it was the chief responsibility of the worldly, like recycling or getting weekly HIV tests. I read her name tag so we could bond.

“Charlene, it’s natural,” I explained. “Made of Valencian oranges picked by Spanish monks. They grow their fingernails their entire lives so they can peel the oranges in long, singular strips, to use as confetti at Spanish weddings and Castilian bat mitzvahs and the like. It’s sort of my thing.” On occasion the wisdom I imparted wasn’t exactly true, in the traditional sense, but nobody had the energy to contradict me.

“Just an opaque cup for now then, please, Charlene.”

I removed my Hydroflask of orange wine from my briefcase, prepared for the possibility that they wouldn’t sell the remedy to my paleness, my bottled sunlight, the very essence of the orange broken down into a single beam. Without my potion my briefcase’s innards were paper thin. My inheritance (from films I gleaned the sort of service I required clocked in somewhere in the twenty k or g or chiliad or thousand range), a postcard from my sister, and a coupon for two linguine dinners with clam sauce. Sipping on the orange wine created a cumulus of sunshowers in my empty stomach, and they rained buckets. Nerves. I’d never done this before.

“Excuse me, Charlene, do you know which party picks up the check at a business lunch?” Charlene sighed warily, withholding my cup.

“Are you telling me you can’t pay for your pasta?”

“Oh I can pay for my pasta, Charlene.” I extracted my coupon and waved it in front of her for effect. “Now please, Charlene, you’re the expert here. Do hitmen like clam sauce?”

“Sir, that coupon is for Red Lobster.”

***

I was a big coffee drinker back when there were things to be awake for. It was at a coffee shop where I first tried orange wine. This was the government’s cure for the sickness in our failing city. Shops, brains, the local tenement museum, kidneys, all slowly going septic. They started selling drinks everywhere to get us through, trusting liquid bread would become its own circus. I took a shot of Southern Comfort in line at the pharmacist. I sipped New Amsterdam on ice while renewing my car’s registration at the DMV. And then one day I decided I was going to wake up, introduce myself to a pulse and get a cup of coffee, and that’s when I first tried the orange wine.

“Care for a sample?” The barista asked me. It was either eight AM or eight PM because it was dark out and I hadn’t thought to turn my phone to military time yet. An ingenious system. Much more straightforward. The army knows only a fool resets himself at noon.

“I’ll take three bottles.”

***

Since my homeostasis had become reliant on the orange wine to maintain its perfect equilibrium, I started using the coupons as a compass and followed them daily-ly to their logical conclusions. This was structure, the necessary anti-spice of life. I’d wake up directionless on a bench or in my vestibule knowing my briefcase held purpose, answers, coupons. Open it and see just how far I’d gotten sidetracked from the two-for-one hoagie deal I had originally been pursuing at my local gas station.

Mixed up my fast casuals. Can u come to OG, I texted Hitman.

Booo. come 2 Red Lob. ALL U CAN EAT SHRIMP, he replied.

I took a black pen out of my pocket I must have lost the green one along the way, as I was wont to do with my possessions and scrawled a quick note. Charlene. Hitmen hate pasta.

After freeing the message from my notebook I either stumbled out of the Olive Garden on my own volition or was escorted out by management. Those were the only two ways I knew how to leave.

***

As for those first three bottles of orange wine? I brought those back to my apartment and debated pouring them all into my bathtub. My rebirth in a vat of fermented oranges. I could almost feel the fizziness circumventing my body, tickling the hairs on my ass as they propelled me towards the surface, the future, the whatever. What came after wasn’t important. A lone birth was what I wanted most of all. It was the very first thing in life I didn’t get.

Given the choice, I wouldn’t have thought about my sister at all, but she gave me none. Her holiday cards were of the postcard variety, an exposed collage of her husband’s expensive teeth, country clubs and palm fronds, disrupting the neat rectangle of bills on my countertop. Reminding me that she was the original, and I, the ghostly imprint, born six minutes later. To make matters worse, she went ahead and doubled us further. She had a baby. And for this, her inheritance quadrupled mine. Our parents’ last will and testament explained it simply: Your sister gave us a grandkid and you gave your mother permanently inflamed areolas. I oversuckled, allegedly.

But mom and dad were wrong, in the spirit of their message. I wasn’t alone. My sister might have a baby, and my mother had our father (to which I say, look no further for your nipple culprit!), but I had a whole building, when you thought about it the way I decided to think about it. With my orange wine in hand social bartering is an ancient ritual, dating back to the Mesopotamian era I opened my apartment door to see a child run past, wielding a green crayon, drawing a line down the hallway so that all the apartments looked tied together, as if a drunken orthodontist (were there any other kind?) was trying to unify the gaping teeth of our doors, and only one floor down from my own I came across what was either a very large family sitting shiva or a group of strangers celebrating Christmas. Perfect for networking. A natural pairing for my orange wine.

The next morning, while reviving my senses at the Vermouth sampling booth of my local laundromat, I received a text from a number I didn’t recognize. It was programmed into my phone under H for Hitman.

***

My hitman was actually a hitwoman. Or a hitperson. They didn’t, “care for gender,” which I found very progressive, not unlike my beverage of choice. After sucking a shrimp clean out of its exoskeleton, they told me to please stop calling them Dev. I poured the contents of my complimentary water cup into a pepper shaker, refilled it with orange wine from my Hydroflask, and told them to call me nothing.

“You’re definitely Something.”

I studied my hitperson. Wiry, with bleached hair curtaining off the left side of their mind and a patch above their right ear shaved down to a gentle fuzz. The asymmetry bled beautifully into their face. An unescorted dimple punctured their left cheek and one eyebrow looked down on the other. Their boobs seemed to be different sizes, too. If I got the chance I would weigh each in my palm, fold Dev’s body in half and hope no part of them lined up.

Dev asked why I wanted my sister dead, and I admitted I was on the fence about the whole thing.

“You see, initially, during the brainstorming phase of the operation, I was preoccupied by this party my neighbors were begging me to come to.”

“You were soused at my nana’s wake,” Dev said. “You asked the priest if murder was a sin if you outsourced it.” The server came over and I tried to steer the conversation towards clam sauce but Dev ordered another round of shrimp.

“You two look alike.” They pointed to the postcard. My twin was prom-queen pretty but really, is there anything more insulting than being told you resemble family? I didn’t respond and Dev didn’t care.

“I ate so much shrimp one time I got to shake hands with the chef,” they boasted.

“You mean the cook. Only the Red Lobsters in France have chefs.”

“You know what I mean,” Dev rolled their eyes. “J’adore a bargain. Speaking of which, twenty thousand is way too much. Murder should cost, like, half that.” I took out my diary and jotted this down, as it could come in handy for future vindications. Vermillion droplets splattered all over the black cover, as if someone had just been shot off frame and my heart sprang, but it was only cocktail sauce. Little fireworks of spiced crimson were erupting midair with every shrimp that cannonballed into the scarlet pool. Dev, slender and angular as a flamingo, ate like a shark.

“Flamingos are pink because they eat shrimp,” they informed me.

“I drink orange wine for my coloring. It’s sort of my thing. Natural, packed with vitamins,” I said. “Absolutely stuffed.” I took a hearty, youthful swig to prove my point.

“It’s not made of oranges.”

“Yes it is. It’s natural.”

“Yeah, but it’s not made of oranges. It’s orange because of the process. How they leave the grape peels in.” Dev continued shrimp-picking, working their way through the platter of fleshy, pink tendrils. My hitperson was smart, maybe even a genius, with the wisdom of an ocean of shrimp, which Dev said were high in protein and excellent for brain function. What was I doing there with them? As they dunked and munched, the answer became less and less important. Certainly less significant than the curved line of Dev’s nasal bridge. Less fascinating than the blade of their uneven jawline. Closer than their unbalanced mouth on mine.

***

When I awoke in the booth at Red Lobster, I wondered what military time it was and whether or not my sister was going to die by Dev’s hand. I couldn’t tell from the hard pillow of my briefcase if my inheritance was gone, but from my vantage point under the table I could see I was alone. All that remained was the bill ($18.99. A bargain, indeed!) and my sister’s postcard, which someone had taken a seafoam green pen to, skillfully adding a mustache to every grinning face. Even the baby’s.

I toasted the little soul patch and laughed.