Theo Greenblatt
THE PERSON FALLING HERE

The drink is called a Cape Codder, he tells me. Vodka and cranberry juice, two ingredients; too simple to warrant a cocktail name, I think.

Cranberries are grown in bogs, he explains, and Cape Cod is famous for cranberry bogs. I already know this. When the fruit is ripe, it rises to the surface and the bogs look like giant pools of bubbling blood.

The Cranberries were an Irish band whose singer, Dolores O’Riordan, had a haunting, hiccupping voice that gave me chills. She drowned in a hotel bathtub “from alcohol intoxication,” the paper said. Meaning, she drank herself under.

Sitting at the hotel bar, staring at the drink in front of me, I picture Dolores O’Riordan submerged in a cranberry bog, her dark, spiky hair, not unlike my own, the only part of her visible above the surface.

He places a fat, warm hand over mine. Wiry black hairs sprout between his knuckles; his diamond pinky ring reflects red from the drink. Taste it, he says.

I lean forward and sip from the tiny red straw. He leans forward, too, and looks down the front of my dress. The drink is tart and bitter and a little sweet, all at the same time.  It’s only two ingredients and still it is too many things at once.

You’re a nice girl, he says. He slides a keycard under the damp cocktail napkin.

I pull out the straw and take a big gulp directly from the glass, feeling the vodka burn down my throat; like Dolores swallowing bathwater, out of control.

I am not a nice girl.

Theo Greenblatt’s prose, both fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in The Columbia Journal, The Normal School Online, Tikkun, Harvard Review, and numerous other venues. She is a previous winner of The London Magazine Short Story Competition. Theo holds a PhD in English from the University of Rhode Island and teaches writing to aspiring officer candidates at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport, RI. Theo’s flash fiction piece “The Person Falling Here” was a finalist in Cleaver’s 2022 flash contest.

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