In Short – Issue 5 (Spring 2026)

May 31, 2026

Image credit: Janvs bifrons by Vincenzo Cohen

Champagne and I

By Brooke Champagne

After Borges

It’s the other one, Champagne, who drives the engine of our body, the one who desires: attention, praise, to loom large in the minds of her imaginary audience. I merely serve as amanuensis. Legend in her own mind, Champagne is the half—not me—who creates spectacle. Like when she tells an actual audience of colleagues about a new essay she’s working on: Decades ago, a classmate returning from Mardi Gras showed her several dozen close-ups of variously sized/colored/textured vulva, thus the title she’s overeager to share, “Fifty-Five Vaginas.” I can see them like it was yesterday, Champagne says with a wink. The apparition of these faces in the academic hallway, vaginas on a dry, black bough. Champagne will deploy “cunt” in conversation like rhetorical candy or cudgel, used with venom or just for fun; she’ll find a stupid sex joke inside Pound, in a stick (or wad) of gum. Champagne is so proud of her name and its synecdoche, she has it emblazoned on a long-sleeved tee: Champagne Problems. Champagne-as-walking-self-advertisement amuses friends like they’re in on the joke, that I, the titular Champagne, am the one with a smattering of high-end problems. But the gag goes deeper: Champagne is not just recipient but instigator. Champagne’s the she who rhetorically tap dances across our days to the tune of her supposed wit, and it’s I who’s left holding the cringe bag of every indecorous tale. It’s she who offers unsuspecting passersby her rib-crushing hugs. It’s she—with all her Champagne-y effervescence—who fills me with gratitude for the stoic simplicity of the I that’s mine alone. I dryly stamp that column onto the page, which she then backspaces, with the galling reminder not everything’s about me. Champagne is sultry Kathleen Turner in The Man with Two Brains, scheming to murder Steve Martin, while I’m the bodiless brain in the jar, pickled and falling in love with him. (Champagne treasures how this strange movie suggests a childhood with zero viewing restrictions—on her bedroom cable TV she watched Skinimax soft cores like Lady Chatterley’s Lover before the third grade—but more than that, it’s important for you to know all this. She seeks any opportunity to shoehorn examples of her cool-dude Gen X-ness. She was born during the Carter administration, after all. You see? She just did it again, right there.). If left entirely up to Champagne, she’d bobble-head her agreement to any proposition—omg yes! so true! me too!—throwing in linguistic confetti and party balloons, her pyrotechnics designed to secure your adoration. Only, she’ll discard it once she’s bored, like she did as a kid with those nickel machine plastic capsule toys, those gashapons she needed more than anything, until she didn’t. Champagne is the capsule; she is the sound the gashapon makes when you shake it. I am the capsule’s stale air. Champagne couldn’t possibly consider me, until she needs me, like she does now, to edit this essay about us. I’m editing it for her. But she wrote it for you. If I’m ever dubious about Champagne’s attempts—Who could possibly want these ideas? Are you famous, are you Borges?—she calls me sadder than those fifty-five sad vaginas. Hold on, I say: Shouldn’t any vagina inherently transcend a limiting “happy” or “sad” classification? Because isn’t the point of that vaginal—or any—essay, to determine what’s underneath our subjects (so to speak) and how they work multi-dimensionally? Champagne has no time for (this type of) probing. She’s already prepping for her gig in the next lines—you can find her there—verbally whoring herself away, piece by feverish piece, eating a banana only to deliberately slip on its peel. Well, I’m not laughing. I must narrate; meanwhile, Champagne gets to live. She’s clearly abandoned me here on this page, trapped like a brain, like a gashapon I outgrew. Yet it’s I who recognizes the work we do to build ourselves in words is not simply a diarchy led by us two—Champagne and I—but a triumvirate that includes you. Neither of us exist without imagining the you who reads us. Though I am the one who understands this urgent need for your love is the wrong impulse—the single imperative is whether our words prove false or true, which as her editor, I decide. She may drive the engine of our body, but I am its microcontroller. Oh god, as soon as my part is laid bare, I can’t tell if you’re even there anymore. Is this thing still on? Now every I on this page is ready to topple over with the weight of this cringe bag of shame. And there goes Champagne, bounding ahead with her bubbles and sparkles that I’m too pooped to stop.

Brooke Champagne (she/her) is a native New Orleanian and the award-winning author of Nola Face: A Latina’s Life in the Big Easy, named a Best Book of 2024 from Kirkus Reviews. Her book of cultural criticism and reportage, Drive-Thru Daiquiri, is forthcoming with LSU Press. Champagne serves as Book Reviews Editor for River Teeth and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA Program at the University of Alabama.