Marzine lacks a muse, and finds it at the bottom of a green bottle.

Marzine's career had fizzled slightly. The band broke up four years prior, leaving Marzine with the task of filling an entire set's worth of songs, stories, and tributes. She hashed her way across a series of gigs in flea-ridden flop-houses, through the dusty plains to the new west, and entertained the likes of shanghiers, bootleggers and other scabbards fresh off of boats and crime sprees.

Gaining clarity and discomfort, she made her way through two bit towns like Rambler's Peak, MI, Barstow, CA, and Carlton, WY. At a gig in Astoria, OR she actually broke down on stage, stumbled out into the audience, and launched into a shambolic homage to her befallen father.

After the gig, Marzine sat with feet dangling off the dock, the Pacific nipping at her toes, taking buoyant tugs out of a flask, and humming an old seafarers tune.
She heard the foreboding boot taps on the dock, and felt weary in the creaks that followed. She felt like she could fall into the creaks, like one would fall into a fevered dream.

"This ought to help, sounds like you lost your muse."

Marzine's eyes moved around to the man, whose shadow met her own, bathed in gentle moonlight. She looked up, and managed a response.

"Well I'd be oblidged to thank you, but frankly, sir, you don't know what's happened, and how could you?"

The glint in the man's eyes worried Marzine, but the phantasmic green glow of the bottle he offered danced in the moonlight and she felt drawn to it.

"I picked it up in France, just a few months ago, it's real inspiring, they call it Absinthe."

It carried with it the same ecclesiastical spirit as the first time she stood on stage and hours later she was in his rickety cot, fumbling around for her bra strap as the room took in swathes of emerald light. They cast their temporary love into small little places at the back of their minds, and as the undulations retracted and shouts could be heard throughout the moorage, their places exploded, engulfing them in backwards gasps, thrusted palms and thwarted cries.

Afterwards, as they rocked gently in each other's arms, Hershel looked on from a junk boat in the harbor, a murky green vessel which shimmered before it faded into the black night.

She never saw her sailor again after that night, and at the end of her life, as she gradually fell away from her memories in a humble facility in upstate New York, she'd drift back and wonder if she hadn't invented the whole scene.