Friday Flash: It has the subtle nuance of...

Please note: This isn't so much a piece of fiction as a set of possibilities. Thanks to Kevin Brooks for the conversation that sparked this piece of writing.

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If wine descriptions were more like life

1. This wine clearly has long lasting legs, surprising in something this cheap. I'm getting something floral and rather overpowering, kind of like the perfume you came home reeking of last week. It doesn't last long, but then again neither do you, and it's quickly leaving a rather sticky aftertaste with overtones of cheap vodka and nervous sweat.
   
   
2. It has the subtle nuances of graveyard dirt with just a touch of the bitterness you experience when you discover you were written out of the will. A lingering dryness on the palate to remind you of just how bad a child you really were and  how lonely you will be when you get old.
   
   
3. Indescribable, like the memory of your favorite summer of childhood, this wine has a nose heavy on cotton candy and grass stains. Tasting rather like your first furtive high school gulp of  Boone's Strawberry Hill, it slides past your tongue and leaves a lingering sense of something wonderful on the palate with a repressed hint of something else better left forgotten.
   
   
4. I'm sorry, but I drank the whole bottle, so it's a little hard to pick out the subtle details on this one. Let's just say it goes down easy. Really easy. This wine slides down your throat like a $500 whore who, just when you're about done, hits you on the head and takes all your money. You wake up with a headache like you wouldn't believe and are horrified to realize you lost all your cash on something you can't even remember.
   
   
5. If you were ever lucky enough to taste this wine, you would know that it has the mouth feel of silk with overtones of the scent of sunlight on smooth skin and a hint of smoky gazes at midnight. If you ever had the opportunity to hold the glass up the light, you would see that it caresses the inside of the goblet like a haze of excess, each molecule of wine clinging to the surface as though the hard and soft are one living thing. If you were some one else you would know that the nose of this wine, and this wine alone, seeps into every pore like a humid night redolent with tropical flowers and the coming storms. But you never will be that lucky, will you. 

(c)2010 Laura S. Packer