2026
Posing these bottles against the backdrop of my current knit-in-progress, because this lurid neon pink yarn just screams Lestat, as far as I am concerned!
Armand (white musk, iris, frankincense, resinous woods, blackened clove, blood-tinged incense) Low-pooling smoke and a warmth that feels recently abandoned: a fleecy blanket fort someone else built, the air inside already breathed. A dim flashlight glow of clean, freshly laundered light carves out a lit radius in the resinous dark; the shadows retreat to the corners, tuck themselves in for the evening. The saggy-ceilinged gloom sticky and sweet, cooked-down fruit leather [raisin / plum jam / fig] secret snacks for dear amber-eyed velveteened friends, sleepy-whisper warm and pulled close, feet all the way to your chest, after all the monsters cannot touch you if the blanket covers you completely (also this blanket fort is through the back door of the vampire club in Blade; so close you can feel the bass through the floor, but the blanket rule applies here too). Sanctuary nested inside menace? Or was the coziness compromised all along? Undetermined. But the doorway is hands-and-knees only, and nothing out there kneels.
Butterscotch Bitch (saffron, pink pepper, scorched butterscotch, cognac, red labdanum, woodsmoke) A sticky sunbaked resin, rust-red, hay-dry, sugar-cured shed snake skins and scorpion husks. Horizon line of pudding skin sagging in the heat. A paper wasp nest rattling in a sweet, smoky, candied mesquite branch breeze Salt flats, amber glare, a confectionary lizard skirting the ruinous edge of the pan.
Gabriella (pale lily, silvered sage, mountain air, leather, ancient moss, 18th-century Italian perfume) A whipped, creamy, floral, elegant, and restrained; a candied hush, the inside of a vanity drawer emptied two hundred years ago and still faintly, sweetly powdered even now. Moss at golden hour, sugar-glazed, dreaming under a crystalline cloche. Diffuse, wistful, and yet somehow vast. Soft paired equivalences, huge gentle things addressed by small transparent ones, makes me think of when Wes Swing sings in his song Sleeping Moon, “you are a drifting sound/And I am a veil of glass—”
Long Face (ambergris, frankincense, gold velvet, greasepaint, sweat, orris root, leather) Someone has thrown you down the long, lightless void of a leather well. Monolithic, hide-soft, oiled and airless, the walls too tanned and yielding to grip and too daryk to gauge for fall or distance, leather all the way down, and then more of it, the same cave-damp animal hush at fifty feet as at five, at five hundred as at fifty. Far above, a small cool rectangle of green floral light, the last clean air in the world, forever receding.
Louis (dark vetiver, bitter coffee, bay rum, osmanthus, magnolia, scorched sandalwood, dry patchouli, blood) A gloved hand clapped over your mouth, but the thing inside the glove is not a living thing, not really now not anymore. Scorched black grounds at the bottom of a pot, bitter past all drinking. Three creamy blooms, wafts of wax and rind and cold cream, tea brown at the edges. Dusty tonic on a shelf. Apricot-skinned upholstery. Suffocating sadness in the form of chandeliers, powdery, dim, low-hanging. The melancholy of a front room nobody sits in and the windows painted shut. Kid leather mourning gloves, three pearl buttons at the wrist, a seam pressed against your cheek.
Vampire DJ Of Some Renown (dry ice, fog machine juice, ozonic, dark rum, patchouli root, black amber, clove, incense) Concord grape shrub and blackstrap, a float of something dark and molasses-heavy, a bitter aromatic rinse swirled around the glass and discarded. Served in an upturned chrome helmet over one enormous clear cube, condensation beading down the visor, the drink and the vessel chilled with ghostly thermokinetic energy. A cold hoppy bitterness, the tang of cutlery curls in underneath and arrives a beat after everything else, the taste of the cup itself in the last mouthful. Garnished with a violet pastille on a silver pick, velvety, glossy, the better end of the lollipop.
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