Bottle-green, Bottle-blue

by Bryce Baron-Sips

That Old Nick would whistle, and the voice in every bottle would come alive. Bottle-green, bottle-blue, (bottle-clarity that usually meant you had reached the bottom) every soul hummed in his bottle rack before he’d even touched them.

Hand pinched like a claw machine, he picked one up by its neck and hugged it under his arm. Winced as he squeezed the cork out. The soul squealed a bit as Nick swirled the liquid inside, it probably saying that these kinds of things happen to other people, the stupid and the elderly. But a soul was a fish in a trap, you see: midway through an open hole it couldn’t find its way out.

He dumped the contents out into his distiller, let it do its job while he did his.

He plugged the cork back in with cheap wine, and followed those people at the fairground that were telling their children they’d have the candied nuts, the flimsy kites, some other time. The kites of the other carnival-children banged into people’s shoulders as they ran.

Nick followed them with his eyes. Counted them. Played the no-bite carnival barker, the obvious con artist. One, two, bottle-green, bottle blue… People rolled their eyes at him.

“Why, one sip of this and my uncle was a new man! Transformed entirely!”

That was the point.

“Transformed entirely!”

There’d be one woman, one woman with her shoes caked in mud and her hands red, and she would hang back a bit, and she would say,

“It hurts. Every day my body hurts and I can’t make it hurt enough each day to pay for it to stop hurting.”

Or,

“I’ll get the money to you, I’ll pay you back with interest. Come on Old Nick, you know me, you know my wife, my child, my somebody—”

Or,

“They all look at me wrong. I’m sick but I didn’t do anything wrong.”

That one. One, two… He’d say, Do you have any family that take care of you? And if they did, he’d tell them to take it in private, when nobody was around them. The government, the doctors, they don’t want you to know about this kind of thing. They can smell your desperation. They can smell what you want and dangle it right in front of you.

Bottle-green…

So keep quiet yeah? I’ll come get you another dose. Where can I find you?

Bottle-blue…

Old Nick grabbed their necks like a claw machine.

Where can I find you?

“At the bottom of a bottle,” everyone says.

Bryce Baron-Sips is one more in a proud line of gay receptionists. His fiction and poetry can be found in ALOCASIA, Strange Horizons, Wrongdoing Magazine, and elsewhere.