"Got tight last night on absinthe. Did knife tricks."
— Ernest Hemingway

 
 

LA CUILLÉRE...
She balances the sterling silver spoon atop the glass. It's not at all like what we'd use to eat our soup, the end is flat, clover-shaped, perforated in Les Étoiles style, perforated with stars. The handle is long and thin, with an indentation designed to grip the edge.

LE VERRE...
The glass was of the Pontarlier fashion, a reservoir glass, so-called, flaring up from a heavy flat pedestal, the body in two distinct sections, a smaller bulbous shape at the bottom designed to hold an ounce of absinthe, a goblet shape curling up above it with an incision at the point where it was holding the proper five ounces of water.

LE SUCRE...
She uses silver tongs to withdraw a sugar cube from a glass jar, La Perruche by brand, pure cane sugar from Swaziland via France, rough cut, irregular in shape, not so much a cube as a fingertip sized wafer, she places the sugar on the blade of the spoon and its embedded crystals catch the light like unfaceted diamonds.

LA LOUCHE...
She fills the bulb of the glass with Absinthe Duplais Verte, its color the palest translucent yellow-green.

A fountain sits atop the bar, twenty inches high, an exquisitely turned nickel alloy pedestal supporting an acorn-shaped glass vessel filled with water and shaved ice. Four spouts, the thinnest silver tubes, protrude from the base.

She sets the glass beneath a spout and gently, almost imperceptibly, turns the handle at its end until ice-cold water starts slowly dripping into the reservoir glass.

You're in no hurry and you closely watch the transformation.

As the ice-cold water drips down into the absinthe it starts taking on a texture, like a floating liquid crackling. Each drop of water leaves a shimmering trail through the liqueur on its way to the bottom of the glass, like a falling puff of smoke.

You watch as the crackling starts to settle down into a thin opalescent cloud bank on the bottom of the glass.

The oils of fennel and anise, soluble in alcohol but not in water, are precipitating out. The perfume of the absinthe is liberated, it smells of black licorice, of a candy dish on a doily, of grandma's house, of a velvet sofa and untamed heirloom roses, of teas and salves and a hand-cranked phonograph playing Gershwin and Porter.

The cloud bank rises as the volume of cold water overwhelms the raw liqueur, the clear green layer above the louche getting thinner and thinner until the glass is filled with a creamy liquid cotton.

You taste your absinthe, just a sip, you let the elixir roll around on your tongue, you let each taste bud pick a flavor that gives it delight, the bitter wormwood, the sour lemon balm, the sweet cane sugar, the spring green tang of fennel, the dark smoky anise wafting up your throat and tickling your nose, the subtle perfumed honey of the hyssop flowers.

As you finish your glass, as she works the fountain again, and yet again, your own transformation begins, your senses and your thoughts start to tingle and blend.

The DJ's spinning downtempo tonight, and you go with it, you let the propulsive stillness of the music envelope you, you bring it into the blend with the smell and the taste and the peace and the clarity, you look at the bottles behind the bar, bottles of every shape and size and color, glistening in the light of the tiny halides overhead, and you bring them into the mix, bottles of specific color coming into more exquisite focus in response to beats of specific frequency.

LA FEE VERTE...
The Green Fairy came to me quite unbidden, at home, after I'd finally lain down. I'd known her before, many years before, before she'd made her own transition, I was just a young child and she was ninety even then.

She wasn't yet a fairy, she was grandma's sister, Tanta Hula we called her, but she did have something of a fairy look, now that I recall, a tiny woman peering out of her shawls with a fairy twinkle in her eye.

She lived in a cottage on a rise near to the river, a place of mystery and wonderful smells, walls covered in old photos and framed papers and recipes, old deep dark wood cabinets with a hundred little drawers and doors and tiny little stained glass panels and mirrors, their ledges covered with empty bottles holding bundles of dried herbs and flowers, bottles of every shape and size and color bearing labels with drawings of saints and inscriptions in old Fraktur script.

We were there now, I was older, she was the same, she spoke in Low German and I understood her perfectly.

We stepped out into her garden, it had been just a small plot, back in the day, now it went on forever. We walked along a stone path lined with wormwood bushes and peered at bees feeding on fronds of fragrant hyssop. We sat down on a bench by the river surrounded by flowering fennel and drank tea.

 

Steve Mansee lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. He tends to be a quiet sort.