Brian Eckert

The old man is sitting on the back patio in his bathrobe, a half-empty bottle of wine in front of him.

He holds the stem between forefinger and thumb and swirls the wine around in the glass. He sniffs deeply of the blood red liquid, takes a sip, and lets the wine linger in his mouth before swallowing.

“Ahhh,” he says. “Good tannins. A bit sweet, but also dry. Wonderful dark color. Malbec is an interesting grape. It thrives in very particular growing conditions. The best Malbec is grown in the area around Mendoza, Argentina.”

“I thought you didn’t drink,” I say.

“I didn’t. Until right now, I hadn’t had a drink in 20 years. But I said to myself, you know what, why the fuck not? You have so little to look forward to as you get older. Why the fuck not?”

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“Before outside contact, New Guinean highlanders spent their entire lives within a few miles of their villages, and as far as we know, none had ever seen the sea, which was just 100 miles away. It seems likely the whole world was like this in prehistory.”

-Jared Diamond

I ask the old man if I can borrow his car to drive to the coast.

“No,” he says. But he will drive me.

The old man used to travel the world selling wine.

“Did you enjoy travel?” I ask him. “I’d like to travel more.”

“Don’t bother,” he says. “Most places are terrible.”

“I’ve always wanted to go to India.”

“The people shit in the streets in India.”

“What about China?”

“In China it’s just the children who shit in the streets. Did you know that in China they fertilize with human shit? Well let me tell you, you learn that the hard way.”

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This story published in fluland.com.

Roger knocked on the door. Yvette answered wearing a bathrobe.

“Hi love,” she said, turning her head to the side for a European-style double cheek kiss.

Roger hated the Euro-kiss. Yvette had picked it up from a new French friend. He took solace in the fact that the Euro-kiss phase would pass, like every other phase before it: the cat-eye makeup phase, the barefoot running phase, the tarot card phase, the feminist literature phase, the vegetarian activist phase.

This too shall pass.

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