"Sour Times"

 

"I often wonder," he said to the bartender, who looked young, even in the bar light, "who it was that first came up with the idea to put lemons in water."

"Really? Do you really often wonder that?" she asked. Her eyebrows were doing as much of the asking as her voice and her words were.

"I'm very drunk," he said, sipping the water. 

"I know," she said. She smiled at him. "What I like to think," she said, tapping the bar counter, "and this is by no means historically true, but what I like to think is that someone decided to take all the goodness of water and add something sour to it, so that whenever someone drank it, the water tasted so much better whenever you got a taste of it through all that sourness." She dropped her bar rag onto the counter with a sodden slap and wiped away a pool of nearly melted ice. "Sounds like I'm a romantic or something, huh," she said. "But I think that sounds better than saying people did it so they wouldn't get scurvy, don't you think?"

He looked down at his glass. He wanted to ask what she could possibly know. But by the time he looked up again, she was at the other end of the bar, pouring whiskey for someone with a face even older than his.