A wooden cork had been left in the bottle, and when I swished the bottle around, there was still some liquid left in the bottom of it. I twisted the cork out and smelled the base of it. It smelled sweet and musty. I handed it to Magda to sniff while I put my nose to the bottle. I almost keeled over, and she erupted in a fit of giggles.
“Gah! It’s like someone left a gym sock in a vat of honey,” I coughed.
“Lemme smell! Lemme smell!” Magda put her nose to the bottle, took a tentative sniff, and then shot out her hand that was holding the bottle with a force that I thought would surely fling it across the room. She made like she was dry heaving.
“Nasty, eh,” I questioned.
“Completely,” she agreed. And then there was more mischief in her eyes.
“We should try some!”
Before I could protest, she went bounding off into the kitchen and returned with two shot glasses. She thunked them down on her modest dinner table and started pouring out the vile alcohol into the two of them. It flowed more or less like wine, but where it splashed up against the edges of the glass, it would ooze down slowly in a way that reminded you that you were dealing with honey.
The stuff hit the back of my throat, and it was like warmth all throughout my body. The warmth spread to my eyes, and Magda and I were standing out in the middle of a blizzard. Spires rose all around us, and I couldn't tell if they were mountain peaks or the beginnings of glaciers. Away on a hill in the blue grey dark, a huge old wooden hall blazed with yellow light. But we had no need for it for we seemed to be warmed by the very blizzard's bluster. Magda stood before me, but the little auburn in her hair had set the whole of it alight in a deep red, and her curls were slowly distending: unfurling and flowing outward like boas lazily unfurling. I looked in her eyes and beheld myself. The faintest tint of rust in the scratchy thing I called a beard had spread, and it stood out in livid orange on forearms like tree trunks and the back of my meaty hands. There was something wild to me, like my ancestors a few generations back may well have been eagles or bears. Through her eyes, I looked back into my eyes, and it was an infinite regress of a universe seen clearly. In the tumbling reflections, every particle was numbered, and their chaotic paths mapped out in a web of fine filaments, which wound all back together into only a few thick strands beneath the world, where three women with one eye between them sharpened a set of bone shears. Threads that were also roots in a universe that was also a tree.
Who was the one that planted the seed?
Who was the one that sparked the fire?
"WHAT the hell was that," I exclaimed as if coming up for air.
It took Magdalena another minute, and I watched her twirl her hair like she was spinning it on a wheel for a moment, a look so far off in her eyes as to be completely absent, before she, too, froze and came back out of it, seizing what little of her curly hair there was up into a hand and inspecting it as if she thought it might have been alive.
"woooaAAAHHHH!" it built from her as she became more aware, a movement from amazement into panic. She looked at me with wide eyes, and I shrugged violently to let her know that I didn't have the first clue what had just gone down.
"Did you...?"
"Hair. Snow. A galaxy in a spiderweb."
"Yeah! Me too!" her mouth hung open for a moment as she tried to remember the sound that was meant to follow.
"Wooooah!"
The Viking boomed again on the other side of the wall, hurling curses in his lilting language. “I guess we know where he gets it from,” I said, staring wide-eyed at the dregs in the bottom of my shotglass. “That stuff is STRONG!”
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