>>5315632>>5316334>>5316660>>5317511You walked up to your sister and the bottle she unsentiently guarded. You put your hand below the bottom of it, pulling it further by its neck. Mary snorted but didn’t wake up. Her fashioned nails scratched the foggy brown glass—the sound doing the same to your earlobes—but her fingers slid off, botching to keep you from nicking it. She grasped at naked air. The bottle, like a favourite childhood plush, had abandoned her. You looked at your sister's distressed impression. ‘Sorry Mary’.
You smelled the grape juice: not only was it homemade, but it was also flat. You sighed, lifting the warmed bottleneck to your lips. You were not a wine fella, but it was the easiest of the bootlegs to get a hold of in those depressing times, it was the easiest to make. The shops in Compostela sold concentrated grape bricks, the clearest razz of the law that the feds could do nothing about. ‘After dissolving the brick in a gallon of water, do not place the liquid in a jug away in the cupboard for twenty days’, the label said, ‘because then it would turn to wine.’ You couldn’t say whether the -real wine- was supposed to taste like vinegar or not.
The D’Addario Family showed only mild interest in the squeezed wet raisins anyone made, they paid you for the hard liquor. You gulped the wine down, making do with what your sister left you with. Good. Sweet and acidy, the wine fell, caressing your throat with warm gloves. Water lacked the kick the start the day like a proper spirit. You finished the remains, returning the wine bottle into your sister’s hands. Your blood burning with ethanol, you felt ready to face whatever it was. You turned around to the room’s narrow entrance.
The thing knew how to open a door. Somehow, its black orbs were evident despite how dark the rest of the room was. It walked like a person, pacing from one foot to another. Its body resembled a poured-out orange jam, the outlines of it foaming and then falling like dawdling tides. Indeed, a human shape: an undressed and unfinished wax figure melting under the absent sun. In addition to hands and legs, it also had a bubbling feminine chest, gaudy thickened substances coasted beneath dozen layers of slime.
It stopped, noticing you. Below its eyes, formed lips, opening and closing as if the thing was mute. In one motion, the thing raised its hands and perked its fingers, tips oozing into malformed viscous appendages. Its hands were pointing at your head.
