kieranblakewriter

“It’s fine, just drink it,” they assured me. “No pasa nada”

“Drink it”

I’m a city boy and drinking milk straight from a cow was a little daunting. Isn’t it supposed to be pasteurised and homogenised and presented in attractively and persuasively labelled bottles in hygienic fridges in the supermarket?

This was warm.

Even when the milkman delivered milk directly to our house when I was a child, it was cold. But no, this milk had just moments ago been extracted from the cow’s udder, and I was being urged to drink it as is.

The milky breakfast was the sole reason my Mexican friends had dragged me out of bed at the crack of dawn and led me through the cold, deserted streets of Tecalitlan to a farm on the town’s outskirts.

The milk wasn’t just warm, it was bubbly and frothing like a barista’s latte, but nowhere near as appealing.

I lifted the cup to my lips.

“Stop!”

“What?”

“Don’t drink it,” they now insisted.

Thank goodness, I’d been saved.

But before I could celebrate, my friend produced a small flask and poured a mysterious liquid into the warm frothing milk.

“It kills the bacteria,” she explained, while her compatriots laughed in the background.

“It’s Tequila.”