The martini garnished with a 9mm bullet

The diacetic acid from your first martini slid down your esophagus and fermented in your stomach. It made you smell like pickle juice - acridly pungent. I remember that day, it was the 29th of November 1947. They had just guillotined your right leg off up until the beginning of your thigh. And by the time we reached the bar’s door, your tears dug into your flesh creating crevices along your cheeks and your tears ran through them, like water through rivers.

We hoisted you onto one of the sticky wooden stools and that’s where you ordered your first martini. It came in a V-shaped glass, garnished with an olive-shaped 9mm bullet. You chugged it down and bit the icy cold metallic sphere.

Ever since, you’ve never stopped drinking, but not once did you wave your droopy hand for anything other than that martini.

That martini garnished with a 9mm bullet. And that sticky stool we hoisted you on, you never left. Even when you had to vomit or micturate you would do it sitting on its wooden platform. Your clothes would soak up the yellow fluid, and the chunky spew would knot your hair. Soon, your clothes and hair were saturated, filled to the brim with urea, half-digested food, and stomach sap. No one seemed to mind until six months later, when the whiffs of ammonia and bile refused to settle well on the bartender’s nasal hairs, and with that, you were sent to a psychiatric hospital.

May 14th, 1948 was the day they checked you in. You stayed in that hospital, helplessly strapped with leather belts to a bleached white cot under piecing washed lights. A doctor would come in every day of the week, but not on Saturdays, that was his day off. He would give you a check up and always take away a part of you with him. He’d cut off a toe, or a finger, or pluck out a tooth. Always taking small pieces of your body, small pieces only so we wouldn’t notice. And we didn't notice until 2019 when we realized you were gone.

Now it‘s 2019 and it has been 71 years since they checked you in and now...

You have become no more than a sterling silver charm hugging their throats

No more than a drawing on their graphic tees

And no more than a distant memory lingering in their intoxicated minds as they sit upon sticky bar stools chugging a martini, and biting its 9mm bullet.