GIN: A DIPTYCH — By Wyatt Bonikowski

artwork by Sonia Redfern

1. NIGHTS ARE EASY

You fill the pint glass with ice and gin to the two-thirds line and top it off with tonic and a quartered lemon. If it gets low, you fill it up.

The rule is, never finish the drink and the drink will never finish you. At your next visit you will tell the doctor, Only one drink a night.

Every day you watch the clock for 4 pm. You take stock of the level of gin in the 1.75-liter bottle in the freezer, the numbers of tonic bottles in the pantry, the half-lemon in the refrigerator, the number of ice cubes in the ice tray. You can do without ice. You can do without lemon. You will use lime if necessary, you will use nothing. But lemon is better. Your wife taught you. Her mother drinks gin and tonic that way.

You make dinner, you play with the kids, you receive by means of grace streams of unrestrained feeling, you dress them in pajamas, you read to them in bed. If the letters blur and slide down the page, you close your eyes and tell the endless story you began long ago, of the girl and the visitor from another world who together travel to planets of amethyst and jade. The kids wake you when you fall asleep, prompt you when you forget the thread, laugh when you slip into a dream and utter a string of meaningless words. When the kids are asleep, you tell your wife you will come to bed a little later, you have some reading to do, some work you need to catch up on.

Mornings are hard, mornings are always very hard, but nights are easy, the easiest, smooth and bodiless. You wake up in the dark and think, Tomorrow, tomorrow it will be over, tomorrow it will stop.

2. LIGHT IS GOLD

The last gin and tonic you will ever drink reminds you of the time twenty-five years ago when you and your college sweetheart drank a bottle of Tanqueray with tonic and ice and slices of lemon on the back deck of her second-floor apartment overlooking the city’s rooftops and chimney pots all the way to the bay and watched the late afternoon light turn gold. But the night darkened and wore on into the early hours, until you found yourself alone and lost on a quest for a particular brand of cigarette—was it Dunhill?—and screamed into a payphone, I’m never coming back, and you walked up and down empty sidewalks and through dark shadows under menacing trees until you were back at the apartment, and the two of you lay in bed naked, sobbing over nothing, the past, childhood, how few defenses you had, how little prepared you were.

In the morning, sick, you stumbled through the broken glass on the kitchen floor, met the disapproving stare of the roommate, drank yesterday’s coffee, and dressed each other’s wounds.

You sleep until noon, wake up, make love, pass the day in a fog, in a dream of day, and you sleep and fuck and sleep and the light moves across the ceiling, turning gold, and it is the same warm gold that poured down over the rooftops and tasted of gin, cigarettes, gin, tonic, tears, lemon.

Wyatt Bonikowski's stories have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, HAD, Lake Effect, Necessary Fiction, New World Writing, Wigleaf, and other journals. He teaches literature and creative writing at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts.