Creative Writing Assignment 3

This is my third assignment for my creative writing course at Birbeck University. The assignment was based on an object that we brought with us to class. I brought an empty Chateau Latour 1955 bottle. We were supposed to take a memory associated with that object, and use that as the basis for a piece of writing. I used the memory of taking my wine home. I don't know exactly where I will take this piece next.

    He brought home the paper bag, excited about it's contents, wanting to share his find with someone, just bursting with anticipation.

    "Honey, you will never guess what I've found!" he shouted as he came in the door of their small flat on the first floor of a steel-framed, 2-storey block.

    "What?"

    "A bottle of Chateau Latour," he said excitedly, "1955!"

    "So, is it good?" she asked, in a rather disinterested way.

    "Good? It should be amazing, 55 years old, one of the best wines ever, if it hasn't gone bad it will be amazing!"

    "Knowing your luck, it will have gone bad," she said dismissively, and actually quite unfairly to a person who had known amazing luck in the past. "I suppose you've gone and wasted a lot of money on it? Lord knows where you stash all the money you waste…" she said in a refrain that had been heard more than once.

    "No! That is the brilliant thing—It only cost me 1,000 yen!"

    "How come, if it is so good?" she asked with open scepticism. He also heard spite in her words, and it was too much for him.

    "Fuck you, and fuck your negatory ways, woman!" he shouted.

    "Is that how you speak to your wife?" she asked. This was also a common refrain.

    "We need to do something about that," he spat, "and soon. You are an unhappy, negative bitch and a half."

    "If you think that, why don't you just leave, you spineless dickhead," she said, not really asking a question.

    "Thanks for the invitation, I think I will do just that!"

    Ken, for that was the man's name, stormed out of the apartment, the whole block shuddering when he slammed the front door shut.

    His friend, Yoichi, lived just a few hundred yards away, with his mom. Still carrying the paper bag, Ken walked over to Yoichi's house.

    "Hey man, I have an amazing wine here, and you need to help me drink it," he said after Yoichi's mom had shown him in the genkan entryway and called Yoichi out.

    Yoichi, on a camping trip about a year ago, had pulled out a bottle of wine, one that he had saved since he was 10 years old. He had heard that wine got better, and more expensive, with age, and had put one of his father's bottles under his bed, to save, on his 10^th birthday. That had been exactly 20 years before the camping trip, which had been to celebrate his 30^th birthday. Though Ken knew little about wine, he did know that only certain wines actually aged well. Yoichi, bless him, apparently hadn't know that, or hadn't known that at 10, and had chosen to ignore it in the 20 intervening years, because he was absolutely shocked when his 20 year-old wine had been vinegar, and everyone had dumped their glasses. They had instead gotten paralytic on sake and shochu, playing cards until early the next morning.

    Though it couldn't be said that Ken had thought of that when he headed to Yoichi's house, the immediate reason being that his house was closest, when he remembered it, he thought it really appropriate to share his own amazing find with his friend.

    In Yoichi's room, they Googled the wine, and had found a similar one, from 1959, for over $3,000.

    "What is your mom's best dish?" Ken asked.

    "Mmm…I don't know…maybe tekka don…?" he said, referring to a bowl of rice with tuna sashimi on top.

    "Ok, cool, can you ask her to make one for each of us?"

    "Yeah, sure, it is almost time for dinner. Won't Aki be angry if you eat here, though?"

    "Screw Aki and how she feels," he said, looking down at his own stockinged feet.

    "Whatever…just a second, I will ask my mom to fix us tekka-don. I think she might have been planning it anyway."

    Ken continued to use Yoichi's computer to search for information about wine's online, and when Yoichi came back to say that his mom would be making her specialty, Ken asked "do you know how to decant a wine?"

    Yoichi didn't, so they googled that, too.

    They sat at Yoichi's living room table, a large decanter that his father had used, and that his mother had saved after his father's death, was in the centre, with the wine poured from it's resting place of 55 years, and into the large crystal vessel.

    The wine had a very mellow taste, and was in every way beautiful, no mustiness or bad flavour about it. And, strangely, the raw tuna, covered with soy sauce and wasabi, was the perfect food to eat with it, the bite of the wasabi, the soft flesh of the tuna, and the rice at the end all enhancing the flavour of the wine.

    At the end of the meal, there was still about a third of a bottle left, and Yoichi and Ken retired to the living room, wine glasses in hand, and had one last glass of the wine each.

    "This wine is magical," said Ken.

    "Yes, indeed. Thanks again, mate, for sharing it with me," said Yoichi, who was genuinely touched that his friend had shared such an expensive and special wine.

    "No, I mean this wine is really magical. Once I drink this glass," he said, holding the glass aloft, and looking through the glass at the setting sun outside the window, "I will be transformed somehow. I don't know how, but I just know this," said Ken with a certainty that had only come to him at that moment. He drank the wine, and that moment is the one where things did change.