Every night, the dining room chairs go unused. I prefer to eat perched up on the countertops with my toes dangling a few feet from the cool-borderline-cold ceramic tile of the kitchen floor. By eat I of course mean drink, because the dinner of the last few nights has consisted of whatever bottle of wine I find above the fridge, sitting enticingly higher than my roost, begging to be plucked and sucked and drunk.

Or is that me?

Either way, my roommate bought this wine aerator that she swears doesn’t make her look pretentious. I couldn’t care less. Pretentious or not, it actually seems to change the flavor of the drink – bringing out sweet notes of plums or a spicy muddled tang. These new tastes validate my liquid diet. We put on jazz and play house with her folding laundry and eating “real food” and me drinking deeper and wondering why all the lights keep winking at me, the flirtatious devils. Don’t they know I’m spoken for?

Wine sips drip from pore to floor.

I pour once more

and teeter bedward to succumb to the dreams that wine seems to bring. I go to bed with ruby lips and watch my teeth fall out.


Virginia Butler is a recent university graduate working as a writer and blogger for a small website. She’s on the ten-year plan of reading all of the novels that the scheduling demands of higher education prevented her from getting through these last four years and has enjoyed the newfound free time to write purely for the sake of it. Interests include: Thomas Hardy, Brontëan heroines, personal vices, and Oxford Commas. If you like what you read, more of Virginia’s work can be viewed on her personal creative writing blog - postgradpanic.tumblr.com.