Fix by Naomi Rose Geraghty

This is a somewhat lamentable lack of foresight on my part, but no matter. In one clean motion I slap the radio into submission and knock the indicator light to the left, watching boredly as the pale green light flashes on and off like the rhythm of a dance. The air around me is stale and the restless humming of the car itches up my spine like a spider spinning glass. It is cold.

I have been sitting in traffic for thirteen minutes. This is rarely a pleasant activity and is no more so tonight given that at least twelve of these minutes have been spent resisting the urge to reach over and throttle a loud and bespeckled youth in the next car over with skulls in his ears and something vaguely obscene scrawled across his passenger side window. Slowly, calmly, I press the flesh of each individual finger into the wet white leather of the steering wheel until the skin beneath each unmanicured nail is blanched to the colour of bone.

Ahh, yes. Tonight is a night made for drinking.

It is November - too early. Up here, the nights are thicker than molasses and only marginally less hazardous to your health. The city streets stink like sweetness and platitudes, stink like apples left too long in a bag first forgotten then found, months later, with resignation. Overhead, strings and streams of November lights glitter and gut the skyline and proclaim the season stretched to the very brink of bearing with a cheer shipped all the way from Taiwan. Girls in white stockings teeter along the icy roads in their too-high high-heels and inhale the plastic fumes of the scene. The roof of my mouth tastes like last month's stale coffee, and I am wearing red shoes.

Yes. Tonight is a night made for drinking.

The lights cheerfully inform me that I have now been sitting in stationary traffic for fourteen minutes. The urge to brick Nameless Youth sufficiently curbed, I cast one Gorgon's eye over the mirror of my new reflection.

Tonight I've got my vodka face on and it is a thing of beauty; fat red lips as red and Russian as cardinals and blood, red and carved in a smirk that's not quite a smile. The eyes are green like the steppes after sunrise and hard as new beryls still raw in the mine. The tongue is a latch the colour of quartz but sharper than lime and the bridge of the nose is sterner than steel. I've opals in each ear and diamonds down my spine - rigid as hell, but they're keeping me straight. There is a bite in the air that sings margaritas and the fur at my neck smells like liquor, not booze. Tonight is a night made for drinking.

Headlights strike at my throat and I smile; I am an artist, really. It is a thought that rises with no small measure of satisfaction, a little like the distant bloom of heat from spilled coffee - black, bitter, utterly addictive - down one's thigh.

Matryoshka.

In the dim light of the early hours with the murmur of swallows sheathed in unanchored clouds, I carve myself a new complexion with scalpels and gouges all utterly my own.

I start with the mouth. A flush of damson-blue for work, something throaty and scarlet for anything else. Next, I shade myself in, a brand new colour like a child with new pens, a colour for every occasion. Each individual hair of each individual brush picks out each shadow and carves every feature now cleaved from the bone. A touch of red at each cheek - marionette - and I'm done.

I set myself in stark relief, the mirror and the mine of myself glittering like pauldrons in the shade. I am my David, newly etched in ebony and cut every morning from the memory of marble. The careful gradient of every inch tells each story in perfect dulcet tones, exactly as I want it to.

Chiaroscuro. I am a prize.

The minutes dribble by with metronomic regularity until - thirty-seven minutes of stationary traffic and seventeen minutes of movement later - I am out of the car on a street as grey as the muzzle of a gun, grey like Noir but never caught on film. The chill shivers down my hold-ups and picks out gooseflesh on the fat of my thighs.

I hate wearing tights.

Across the street is a bar named Joe's, a bar manned by a man named Eugene and owned by a guy known as Milt, but no one's complaining; it's three miles from the jingle-gin joints and a vodka's a pound-eighty-five at a stool that smells of new leather and communion, a smell like home.

I am not an alcoholic. Alcoholics do not hand over their cards at a quarter to nine and call for a cab at eleven-fifteen before sucking their way through a measure or twelve. Alcoholics do not sit on their stools with grammar-school spines and make deals with the bartender to serve them slowly. Alcoholics do not curl their hair over Faberge faces and make themselves Michelangelo before dousing the hatch with a year's worth of wine.

Alcoholics do not swing into a bar with a face made for liquor and wind up nostalgic and drinking red wine.

Tolstoy would turn in his grave.

I make horrible alcoholic. One moment I'm waltzing around with a mouth red for vodka and the next thing I know I'm staring into the prurient eye of something thick and scarlet that's calling itself Beaujolais and tasting your ghost at the rim. The glass is hard and indelicate between my teeth like the tumblers at that place you liked with dahlias in the gardens and ice-cream all year. I watch as bullets of cigarette smoke pit themselves against the quiet glass behind the barman and feel the smell of you boring through my skin.

Red wine has always reminded me of you, reminded me of autumns spent with secret glasses in your father's cellars giddy with the scents and smiles and maturity of wine to the bootleg spirits of the boys in the town that stripped their throats like turpentine. It is the flavour of burnished leaves, but more than this it is the memory of you alive on my tongue and singing again.

I imagine it's a sort of catharsis - not the sophisticated kind that sobs at Medea, the kind that sneaks up behind you with a noose and a knife and grapples you into a memory. Were I a proper woman, I suppose I'd hang your effigy between two irrational breasts and nurse the female malady at a bosom cleft in twain, but I haven't the energy for dramatics. Some nights I wear your bracelet and try not to feel too like Isabella, but that's about as far as it goes. I am not very good with catharsis.

It is nights like this that make me a little too foolish. It's the sort of night that I write things down on clean white paper and post them through a letterbox as bitter and barren as a womb, though I know you will not read them; I carve in rhetoric and expect no reply.

Flowers feel a little too much like goodbye.

I must have glazed over because the barman is giving me that look that says he's debating calling me a cab or leaving me be, so I smear on a smile and toast to your shadow beside me.

When he asks what's wrong, I make no reply. In twenty-six minutes when a tourist with a squinty leer like an irritable adder that's been stepped on too many times slurs to ask me if I am alone, I do not reach for the ghost of a ring or a locket still raw at my throat; I slide from my stool and say "No". I hold you in the casket of my mind like the final child in the womb of the first, like the ghost of a song long after the silence is still.

I leave the bar at quarter to ten with a smile of red wine and a letter to post through your door. I won't say what it says; you can read it yourself.

The next morning, work, Mark fails to notice the extra layer of concealer around my eyes. Philistine. When the receptionist tells me that I have no new messages, I am unmoved.

For though it is autumn, and I am drinking red wine, I do not expect any letters.