Throwback Thursday: ‘The Drink We Spill Out on the Ground’ by Claire Humphrey

Summer’s End

Take a trip back to the Summer of 2023 — or sometime in the 90’s — with this nostalgia and magic-tinged feature story by Claire Humphrey.

Read the excerpt below, or pick up Issue 39 at the throwback price of $8 till the end of February!

The Drink We Spill Out on the Ground

Claire Humphrey

The perfect day looks like this: I wake up in the spare room at my boyfriend’s family home. I tie my hair in a messy ponytail and stumble downstairs.  Étienne plays his guitar by the window, sunlight filtering through the pine branches, a half cup of coffee on the sill. André sits on the counter, waiting for his toast, drumming his hands on the cupboard door. And I begin to hum along.

The perfect day is a snapshot beginning to crease, edges smudged with thumbprints. Me, Étienne, and André, together in the late morning, making music.

I remember thinking, the day I went down to the culvert, how lucky we were. Not even out of high school and already we had this.

I knew about change, a little. I knew I didn’t want it.

I knew how to make a wish and make it stick.

 

Cherry brandy, crusty around the cap, only a quarter full: it was from the very back of Mrs Thibodeau’s liquor cabinet. I tucked it in my music case when no one was looking, between a sheaf of loose scores and a practice book.

Once Étienne and André were busy with their PlayStation, I hopped the low wall at the back of their yard and handed myself down the slope, tree trunk to tree trunk.

Étienne showed me the way one afternoon while André was playing shinny. He led me down through tangles of wild grapevines and over mossy limestone blocks. We descended the crumbled face of what had once been an inclined wall, until my reaching foot met the arch of the culvert.

Étienne didn’t know what it was for. He and André had made a fort there when they were kids. Now that they were no longer kids, they went down there to smoke joints when their mother was home.

The libation wasn’t a thing to them. Étienne just didn’t like the last swallow at the bottom of a can. That first day, we only had one: a Labatt’s Genuine Draft he’d liberated from the guy who rented the Thibodeaus’ carriage house. We passed it around until there was an inch left, warm and foamy, and then Étienne emptied it onto the broken floor of the culvert.

I was the one who had felt the chilly air breathing out from beneath the city’s stones. I was the one who had studied the classics and knew how to get the attention of gods.

The brambles had grown thicker since my last visit. I could see where Étienne and André had kicked a pathway, but it stopped on the lip of the culvert in a scattering of cigarette butts. I paused for a moment to look down at the muscular curves of the river, and then I slithered down the bank.

Someone else had been here recently. The ashes of a makeshift campfire still smouldered. A sleeping bag had been rolled out on the rotted mattress at the edge of the light. An empty can lay beside the fire: alphabet noodles.

I couldn’t see very far into the dimness of the culvert. The person who’d been sleeping here could be there, watching me from the dark.

I fumbled my bag open and found the bottle. The cherry brandy tasted like hangover breath. I spat it out on the stones.

I made my wish then. I held that perfect morning in my mind’s eye and said this, this, this. For all time.

There was no answer. The slow breath of air from under the city didn’t change.

Maybe I needed to give something more.

I pulled out my wallet. It contained a single twenty. More than I’d earn for a gig, more than I’d earn for an evening of babysitting. More than a bus ticket to visit my mom.

I rolled the bill into a cylinder and tucked it in one of the rusting coils of the mattress-spring.

Was the air from underground a little warmer? Was that a distant train, that low hollow wail?

My nerve broke, and I fled the culvert for the fresh air outside, scrambling back up the slope.

But up at the top of the rise was the Thibodeau house and my perfect day, waiting for me to step back in.

 

I knew Étienne before I knew André. Étienne was in his final year: a year older than me. He and his buddies held court at the same coffee shop where a bunch of us from the music wing spent our spares.

Étienne and I shared a love of rock from the seventies. We both took our coffee black. We both wore our hair long and straight.

Étienne was the one who taught me euchre. Étienne was the one who brought me into his band when he learned I could sing through my flute like Ian Anderson.

André was the one I fucked.

 

Find out what happens next in Pulp Literature Issue 39, Summer 2023 …