The Sweet Dry and Dry

Against the charcoal austerity of Prohibition-era America, two moonlit alchemists—Lee, a lanky dreamer with soot-smudged spectacles, and Eddie, a pint-sized schemer whose eyebrows dance like drunk metronomes—erect a wobbling copper cathedral of vapor and sin in a tenement kitchen. Their still, a Rube Goldberg confession of pipes, kettles, and a baptistry of corn mash, glugs out forbidden amber while ceiling-plaster snows down like guilty confetti. The hooch they coax is less libation than liquid rebellion, each drop a whispered oath against the sanctimony of the Dry Committee upstairs, whose ledger-lined meeting room glowers like a judgmental pulpit. Enter a policeman as stiff as his starched collar, badge flashing like a tiny secular Eucharist; he discovers the burbling heresy, slips on a slick of spilled mash, and tumbles into a slapstick Stations of the Cross—broom handle, cat, coal scuttle, exit door—while Lee and Eddie vanish into the city’s arterial night, leaving only the perfume of ferment and the echo of outlaw laughter. The officer, humiliated, ascends the staircase to brandish his report before the abstinent cabal, indicting not merely two bootleggers but the entire cosmic farce of legislated virtue.