〈 The Coolest Coke 〉

I had pills to take, but there was nothing in the house to drink with. All I had was that Coke, the one that had been sitting forever in the far corner of my desk, about one inch left in the glass. Not a single bubble. Flat, black-dark, only a thin skin of dust on top. Long dead. I thought about drinking tap water, but in my head, tap water had come through some two-kilometer run of twenty-year-old pipes, and for twenty whole years, too many things had died in there. Mercilessly. So then— option one: twenty years of death, coming out of a tap. Or just dead Coke.

While I was choosing between the two, from the bottom of the Coke, which I had already taken for fully dead, one tiny bubble climbed up the side of the glass, slowly, so stubbornly, pushing one speck of dust aside, reaching the top of the Coke— and there it is, flashing. As if— “I am still Coke.” Like a movie star. Cool as hell. And then the bubble gives one sad little pop and disappears forever. “You were the best-tasting and the coolest Coke I ever knew.” Mourning the dead Coke, I raised the glass high, and took it in one shot.