Staying classy? In THIS economy?

Weekly Composition Post — "The Bottle"

(Poster image crop from original by "Malta Girl" used under CC 2.0 license)

So for folks who don't know, despite now being in media studies and game design, I started life (and even college) in music, but left it behind... partly for practical reasons, partly for traumatic ones.

I have attempted to get it back in my life and for the past few years have been making small electronic songs in GarageBand on an iPad.

As of this week, though, it'd been months and months since I composed anything, so I challenged myself to a little project to force encourage myself to compose more regularly... and maybe to be less hard on myself about what I DID compose.

My plan was to:

This week is the first week of that happening. I managed to put a song together, which I'll link in a second, but I realized part of the process of composing — because of the prompts — was building a mental story for this piece. How did I get from "list of semi-random stuff" to this?

I finished the song yesterday, and I realized an entire short story had taken form in my head... so I wrote it. I think I'm going to keep trying to do that, and apply the same rules. It doesn't have to be good, but it's a way for me to keep exercising the other creative thing I do with my time: writing.

In any event, this week's song is called "The Bottle". The prompts were: immersiveness, "D#m7 and the color green", and "oboe (the gayest instrument)".

The bottle of cordial had been a gift.

Whimsy, really; at the time, he hadn't even thought about what it might taste like. It was peppermint, the shopkeeper had said, and like many things flavored so, it had been colored a lively, almost glowing white-green, poured into a the most beautiful crystalline glass bottle he'd ever laid eyes on, its corners squared rather than rounded, faceted so that turning the bottle to the light sent little flecks of rainbow dancing at the corner of his eye.

He remembered asking the shopkeeper if the liqueur itself was any good, and was told — with a vaguely shamefaced smile, as if caught with hand in cookie jar — that he couldn't remember the last time someone had bought a bottle of it for the actual alcohol.

"I think the distiller found, many years ago, that it was cheaper to make pretty bottles," was what he'd been told.

He'd walked out of the store with the bottle, anyway.

The wet sand, as he and the prince had sat on the beach together, had the delightfully incongruous texture wet sand always has: abrasive and gritty, yet cloyingly viscous at the same time. He remembered it between his toes as he'd explained that story to the prince, who'd laughed and held it up to the light, staring at the liquid within while the faceted bottle cut prisms out of the air to speckle his amused face.

"So you bought it anyway?" the prince asked.

"Why not?" he responded, shrugging, the clay-like sand sliding between wriggling toes. "Isn't a pretty empty bottle you can look at every day more satisfying than some liqu-- hey!"

He hadn't even made it through the sentence before the prince had undone the stopper and taken a huge swig of the pale liquid. There was a moment where the prince's eyes were closed, as if in deep concentraiton, before he opened them and turned with a grin. "It's vile," he said, all smiles. "I love it."

The prince had leaned forward, eyes closed again, mouth slightly open. When their lips touched, he had to admit: it really was awful. Sweet in all the wrong ways, the mint flavor overpowering. All of it felt like, for a moment, it was going to overwhelm his senses entirely, as if it were an entire bottle's worth of experience compressed into a few moments of physical connection with...

~~~

The next time he saw the bottle was after the ceremony, when the prince was receiving guests. The new princess sat next to him. Achingly but beautiful but, he observed, very carefully not too much of anything: pale without being wan, fragile without being consumptive, hair long and shaped enough to seem stylish but not so overwrought as to be ornate. Everything just right.

She was holding the bottle in her lap, cradled in lace. The mint cordial it had originally contained long gone, replaced with some deep red liquid he couldn't identify in a closed bottle.

He was too professional, too politic to stare at it.

"We thank you for your service to our family and our nation," the prince had said, and his voice was warm, but only someone who knew him of old would see the tightening at the corner of the eyes, the brief thinning of lips. "This is a mere trifle of a gift, by comparison, but we hope you shall think of us while enjoying it."

"My lord," he'd said, bowing. He couldn't make contact with the lady-bride as he took the bottle from her; in court, later, gossips would comment on how this was yet another example of his sterling character and perfect manners. How he had remained unattached all these years, it was impossible to say.

~~~

By the time he made it to to rocky edge of the tidal pool, the chilly but bearable water was almost up to his knees.

Limned green with algae and worn smooth with time, the erratic ellipse of rocks was only just tall enough now to crest the water line by a few inches. At high tide, it would spill over, and the surprisingly deep, equally rocky hole would fill totally with seawater.

Yet the pool remained clear, somehow; almost aggressively so, as if some force was acting to make sure that someone looking down at the surface of the water over the pool — glass-smooth, despite the swaying of tides around it — could see all the way to the bottom and the circle of white sand therein.

It was many moments before he pulled the stopper from the bottle and, in one dramatic backward tip of his head, took a hefty swig of the dark red contents. Even above the heavy salt-spray scent of the sea, the false spice of cinnamon candy hit the air as much as it did his tongue.

The back of his hand wiped across his mouth, before the stopper was replaced.

"It's vile," he choked out, as if saying more would rip the very heart out of his chest. "I love it."

There was barely a sound as he dropped the bottle into the center of the tidal pool. Despite the thing's size and weight, it felt as if it floated, feather-light, to the bottom. As the back and forth of the waves continued to sound in his ear, he watched the faceted corners of the bottle made its new watery tomb explode in a cascade of ephemeral rainbows on the rocky sides.