The Purchase of Whiskey

The Purchase of Whiskey

        by Douglas Diablo Ben Gurian

Miranda. The gods call it home. The mine is now shut to the public after the explosion that killed ten. Prospero loved her too much, I now know that. On that mountain only ten have perished in the last decade. A happy consequence of improved technologies and superior techniques. In her the wicked queen saw herself and did not like what she saw. Snow White modelled her own beauty and her very movements through air on this personage. Gone for her father to town with a lantern, she lost her way in the blizzard and died. I am a great admirer, for she seems to my imagination to grace the world with the most winning smile, and the coyest of personalities. This company manufactures mustard by that name. Give her the boot and you show the courtly love tradition the road at the same time. For all the Mirandas. My cat once took that name from me and lived to a ripe old age. She died of natural causes, being flung down a set of stairs. This was a natural consequence of her positioning herself under my feet as I hurried to catch up to my responsibilities in the morning once too often. I bought a forty ouncer of Canadian Club in the Bahamas once and beside it, on the counter, was another whiskey of the same name that I had never heard of before. It must only be available in the Bahamas, I surmised. Sitting alone in the Miranda, thinking about days gone by. Hoping you'll see my veranda, where I am rocking to die. When the ship came into view, the Miranda showed first above the towering waves, then the hull, and finally the forecastle with the sailors waving hats and cheering to beat the band. Say it isn't so, Miranda. Miranda is not getting any better as we had thought for a time she was; the cancer has returned with a vengeance, and I, I lose all hope and lay about the house confused and desperate. As a new form of immune disease, it has surpassed all the others as a death threat to the masses. Given the shortness of life, Ma'am, could we just retire behind those willows down the river bank there and take off our clothes and enjoy each other's naked presence? Please? I wish I had called my first guitar by that name. She has that, had that, I'm sorry, quality of pretty self reflection. Miranda, Miranda on the wall, who's the fairest of them all? Break a Miranda and it's seven years bad luck. Mire is an especially disgusting root of that icing sugar name and I think that anyone noticing this fact should instantly be made to pay for that moment of imagination by being flung headfirst in a pig wallow brimming with fresh horse dung. And is better, but it leads to nothing. Take it out and you get Mira. Not a bad name, but nothing as wonderful as Miranda. I can picture her now, Lovely in her naturl get up, long legged, white skinned and smooth of features, plastic of hand motion, and refined of walk. Her dress flipping in a breeze catches the attention of larks above who for the quarter hour she bikes to school gauge the wind currents by it and float above her until she enters the red brick building. They wait around the flagpole for her until she leaves at lunch for a bite at home, where they hang around on the weathervane till she is done her repast and returns to school. I cannot but think that whiskey will never receive admittance to that coy mouth past those pink lips in all the years to come.