Decanting by B. Garden

Marcus stared at the yeasty dregs at the bottom of the otherwise empty plastic bucket, tearing at a flake of dry skin on his lower lip with his teeth.

A bit of blood trickled out of the scraggly flesh, mixing with his saliva.

He swallowed.

Perhaps the alcohol in his blood would recycle itself.

He closed his eyes, imagining his body was the colony ship that had been his home for the last decade and change, and his veins were the great branching pipes of the nutrient reclamation system.

He hoped this one leak would allow enough ethanol to cycle its way through his brain to let him fall back the fuck to sleep.

There had been some sort of holy metaphor there, him willing his blood to be wine.

He had hoped for something powerful and nuanced, like an Amarone della Valle Policella, but he would have settled for some artless Napa Cabernet.

Hell, he would have settled for more bucket beer.

But there was no burn in his throat, no giddy warmth spreading from his stomach.

None of that velvet viscosity, that heady minerality, the spice of oak.

Just the metallic, salty tang of his own diminished vitality.

The bucket stared back at him without sympathy.

"Fuck you," he said, kicking the bucket across his room.

It bounced off the near bulkhead, rattling indignantly.

In the dim indigo light of the ship's simulated night, he pulled an identical bucket from one of the cabinets under his bunk, this one still capped with its makeshift water lock.

He was tempted to peek at the contents, take a whiff, gauge its development.

Maybe the batch was ready, or close enough that a mouthful or two would collectively have the potency of a sip of the good stuff, the ready stuff, the stuff he nurtured from his own body, or more accurately, starved himself to feed, crumbling his own glucose-rich rations into, nursing to life as his own flesh melted off his body.

Even after that, it was a pathetic imitation of the liquid bounty the owners had entrusted to him.

There was also a chance that if he cracked this bucket early, he would introduce some spore, the seed of some mold that for reasons beyond his understanding, wasn't entirely possible to scrub out of the ship's air.

Just one spore could ruin the batch before the pH got to the right place.

Not that he wouldn't drink it at that point.

Maybe even moldy hooch would have a high enough ABV for the alcohol to seep into his bloodstream before he puked it all out.

There was a time when he could have brought such spoiled hooch to the team in water reclamation, could have bartered a share of the product for a spin on their makeshift still.

still.They'd have shot the shit, played a hand of cards, compared tasting notes.