Cherry Wine

Tommy was brought into this world in the back seat of his mother’s 1991 green ford station wagon. Rushing towards the only town hospital for miles, his father exited the world the day Tommy arrived. The vehicle went careening into a ditch when the back wheel conveniently popped on an old piece of tire shed littering the country roads. Lucky as Tommy and his mother were, occupying the driver’s seat, his father conveniently broke his neck when his body jolted forward. He died on impact.

Tommy was born into the darkness. The time was three am when he arrived screaming and crying into his battered mother’s arms. The brown leather seats were covered in as much glass and debris as they were blood and guts of the delivery. Other than the corpse left behind the wheel and the minor cuts and bruises covering the two passengers, Sherice and her baby weathered the storm without major incident.

Rushed to the hospital by ambulance, the nurses dressed Sherice’s wounds and tended to the baby before sending them both home swaddled in blankets and bandages in only a few days time. Following the mobile delivery, Sherice buried her husband in the local cemetery behind the town’s old school yard. She never really loved Jim in a romantic way, but the loss still hurt more than pushing out the baby in the backseat of the old station wagon. He was a good man, and there was something fitting to his ending as difficult as it was to accept. As the funeral attendants lowered the cherry wood casket below the earth, Sherice was reminded of shared glances across cherry red merry go-round rides on the schoolyard playground. 

Sherice soon came to believe her house was haunted. As a baby, Tommy skipped the crawling stage altogether. Once he could scurry on his hands and knees, the boy was on his feet, not walking, but running. Between remote telemarketing calls, folding the laundry, and preparing mac and cheese with hot dog slices, Sherice could hardly keep up with Tommy’s pace. What bothered her most was that when she called for her son, rather than run towards her, he always ran past her, through her as if she were a ghost.

The day Tommy turned three years old, Sherice made the boy a birthday cake. Her baking skills were far from renowned, but the baby loved chocolate, and so a plain chocolate cake with chocolate frosting was prepared. When she called the boy into the kitchen to blow out the candle and make a wish, it was like she, nor the cake, were in the room. The boy ran past his mother, utterly disregarded the cake, and greeted the open air behind her with a giggle, slight murmurs, and a glimmer in his eye. If she didn’t know better, she’d believed he was interacting with an invisible man.

From that day on, the incidents increased rapidly. Not only did the hauntings occur consciously, but they occurred unconsciously. Sherice would often wake at three in the morning to find Tommy standing at the foot of her bed, laughing and chatting casually with no one. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was sleep walking. He had no awareness of where he was, and he was difficult to wake, but he always remembered his conversation clearly, though never recalling with whom they were shared.

Sherice wanted to believe these visits to be none other than her kind hearted late husband, but the context of Tommy’s dialogue was often too dark, too mysterious, too misguided for Sherice to accept this theory. There were mentions of death and sorrow and of what comes after the after life. She began consuming red wine every night to ease her mind. When Tommy first caught his mother in the act, glass in hand, filled red to the brim, he said, “Blood, mommy, you’re drinking the blood.” And so, Sherice drank more because she didn’t know what else to do or how to cope when every night she too dreamt of blood.

Some nights, Sherice consumed a bottle, sometimes two, and she would dream deep, dark dreams of cherry red. The night that Tommy was born, the earth shook so hard that Jim slipped through the cracks and into the stratosphere, floating away from them both, disappearing into stardust. That night was so dark, she could hardly see her baby’s face covered in blood, guts, and glass until the paramedics arrived in a frenzy of flashing lights. She remembered, and as much as she tried not to remember, she remembered more. She remembered in detail, and she remembered in fact, and she remembered in fiction and everything in between. For years to come, the harder she tried to forget, she remembered it all, every night, from the bottom of the bottle.

Tommy’s dreams and visions of the invisible man ignited his own memories of blood and stardust, despite his mother’s efforts to shield him from the darkness. He too preferred not to remember and soon grew exhausted by these visits, these conjurings of the invisible man. Tommy had no need in remembering what his mother didn’t wish to remember, and if she shouldn’t need to remember, then why should he? It wasn’t long before he too grew attached to the bottle and found resourceful ways of hiding his habit from his mother, consumed by her own distractions.

At age sixteen, Tommy earned himself a driver’s license, and he knew it was time. He thought it best to move on from all that remembering, all that suffering. One night after finishing off a few tall boys, the man paid Tommy a visit, and he’d finally decided he’d had enough. In a wistful escape, Tommy hopped into the red ford pickup truck that had replaced his mother’s station wagon many years ago. He fled down the road, away from his past, from all that remembering until the rear wheel conveniently popped on an old piece of tired shed. Tommy was met with darkness. He was a baby, and he was a man. He was his mother, and he was his father whom he’d never known. He was nothing, and he was everything. He was the darkness, and he was the light all at once. He melted into a puddle of blood, turning to wine before transforming into stardust.

When Sherice got the call, she walked herself out to old highway 47, the same stretch of road that Tommy had entered and exited the world. She fell to her knees and mourned the man that Tommy was to become, alongside the man that she had once loved in a less than romantic way. She poured out the rest of her bottle onto those bloodstained streets, covering the remnants of all those old tire shreds littering her distant country dreams in cherry red wine.