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Authors: Michael Christie
Tags: Contemporary, Adult
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the party, not wanting to disturb it, shivering and euphoric. A seemingly infinite and profound series of connections and theories swamp my mind. It is a better-than-expected stone and it makes me long for my room and my book.
A man and woman are suddenly five feet away, arguing. I am unsure how long theyâve been there. I have an urge to explain something complex and scientific to them, to light their eyes with wonder. The man is talking.
âHey bro.â
âHi, are you guys doing okay?â I sputter, feeling sweat rim my eyelids.
âOh yeah, sheâs just being a harsh bitch.â The last word he turns and yells in her face, actually puffing her bangs back with it. After an emphatic pause, he turns back. âHey bro, how about you give us a toke and make us feel better?â he says to my clutching hands with a smile and an assumed entitlement. Iâm briefly embarrassed for being so absurdly high and unable to share it with them or anyone else.
I tell him, âItâs all gone. Sorry,â with what I feel is a genuine sincerity, my high already beginning its diminuendo.
âHow about giving me my pipe back then?â he says, steps closer.
Iâve been on the receiving end of this type of tactic before. I tell him sorry, there is only one, careful not to combine the words
my
and
pipe,
a pairing that would no doubt signal the commencement of my probably already inevitable beating.
The woman tells him to leave me alone. Her cropped shirt reveals an abdomen stretch-marked and harbouring unearthly wrinkles in the texture of a scrotum or an elderly elephant. The man is yelling now. Blurry and ill-advised jail tattoos populate his arms, and I watch them wave above my head. I wonder if any woman who has told her boyfriend to leave somebody alone has ever meant it. If ever, I conclude, it is a statistically insignificant proportion. Amidst his racket, the urge to smoke another rock comes over me in a bland revelation, like I need to do the dishes. I hear rats scrabbling inside the wall and I try to think if I haveever seen a rat look up, into the sky I mean, and wonder if it is possible for them to see that far. As Iâm trying to stand, the man kicks me in the chest with his fungal shoe and I feel a crunch inside my shoulder and it begins to buzz, and I bring my other arm up to shield my face.
I hear my pipe hit the ground, but it doesnât break because crack pipes are made of Pyrex, the same glass as test tubes. People dumpster them from medical supply laboratories. They are test tubes with no bottom, no end, all that smoke and mania just funnels through them unhindered. My lungs have tested the tubes and their acrid samples, but unfortunately there has been no control group, so the results of these experiments are often difficult to observe.
I am crumpling to the ground, hearing him pick up my pipe and smelling the tang of fermented piss. When urine evaporates it leaves a sticky yellow film, and I am thinking about how urine is a solution, not a mixture, of this I am absolutely sure and the beating continues from there.
Materials
In the room beside me lives an old junkie named Steve, who at some indeterminate point took to fixing between his toes, the rest of his veins being too thickened and prone to abscesses. He blows his welfare cheques in about three days, pupils whittled down, head pitched on the stormy sea of his neck like an Alzheimerâs patient. He warns me by banging on the wall when he suspects hemay be about to shoot too much dope. Iâve rescued him twice by calling in the Narcan injection, plucking the needle from his foot before they arrive with their strange antidote. I guess you could say he is my only friend.
Steve knows nothing of science. Doomed to forever repeat the same experiment, he arrives on his sticky floor at the same vomit-soaked conclusion over and over. Iâm well aware that experimental replication is a cornerstone of the scientific
A man and woman are suddenly five feet away, arguing. I am unsure how long theyâve been there. I have an urge to explain something complex and scientific to them, to light their eyes with wonder. The man is talking.
âHey bro.â
âHi, are you guys doing okay?â I sputter, feeling sweat rim my eyelids.
âOh yeah, sheâs just being a harsh bitch.â The last word he turns and yells in her face, actually puffing her bangs back with it. After an emphatic pause, he turns back. âHey bro, how about you give us a toke and make us feel better?â he says to my clutching hands with a smile and an assumed entitlement. Iâm briefly embarrassed for being so absurdly high and unable to share it with them or anyone else.
I tell him, âItâs all gone. Sorry,â with what I feel is a genuine sincerity, my high already beginning its diminuendo.
âHow about giving me my pipe back then?â he says, steps closer.
Iâve been on the receiving end of this type of tactic before. I tell him sorry, there is only one, careful not to combine the words
my
and
pipe,
a pairing that would no doubt signal the commencement of my probably already inevitable beating.
The woman tells him to leave me alone. Her cropped shirt reveals an abdomen stretch-marked and harbouring unearthly wrinkles in the texture of a scrotum or an elderly elephant. The man is yelling now. Blurry and ill-advised jail tattoos populate his arms, and I watch them wave above my head. I wonder if any woman who has told her boyfriend to leave somebody alone has ever meant it. If ever, I conclude, it is a statistically insignificant proportion. Amidst his racket, the urge to smoke another rock comes over me in a bland revelation, like I need to do the dishes. I hear rats scrabbling inside the wall and I try to think if I haveever seen a rat look up, into the sky I mean, and wonder if it is possible for them to see that far. As Iâm trying to stand, the man kicks me in the chest with his fungal shoe and I feel a crunch inside my shoulder and it begins to buzz, and I bring my other arm up to shield my face.
I hear my pipe hit the ground, but it doesnât break because crack pipes are made of Pyrex, the same glass as test tubes. People dumpster them from medical supply laboratories. They are test tubes with no bottom, no end, all that smoke and mania just funnels through them unhindered. My lungs have tested the tubes and their acrid samples, but unfortunately there has been no control group, so the results of these experiments are often difficult to observe.
I am crumpling to the ground, hearing him pick up my pipe and smelling the tang of fermented piss. When urine evaporates it leaves a sticky yellow film, and I am thinking about how urine is a solution, not a mixture, of this I am absolutely sure and the beating continues from there.
Materials
In the room beside me lives an old junkie named Steve, who at some indeterminate point took to fixing between his toes, the rest of his veins being too thickened and prone to abscesses. He blows his welfare cheques in about three days, pupils whittled down, head pitched on the stormy sea of his neck like an Alzheimerâs patient. He warns me by banging on the wall when he suspects hemay be about to shoot too much dope. Iâve rescued him twice by calling in the Narcan injection, plucking the needle from his foot before they arrive with their strange antidote. I guess you could say he is my only friend.
Steve knows nothing of science. Doomed to forever repeat the same experiment, he arrives on his sticky floor at the same vomit-soaked conclusion over and over. Iâm well aware that experimental replication is a cornerstone of the scientific
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