Need

[Note: The following is fiction.]

Morphine makes me weightless, airborne. Vicodin makes me mellow and fluffy. Meth makes me intense and focused. Even the nitrous oxide at the dentist’s office makes me feel all floaty. I dig that ringing in my ears.

Everything is hollow, hollow. My idiot boss found me with my momma’s pills in the back cooler. I got canned. I have no money. My blood feels like it’s on fire now.  I need. Need, need, need.

I need it, dammit. I don’t know what I need, but I need it.

My legs aren’t attached right now. I need something in me to make my legs attached. People say “upper”, “downer”… it’s all the same. It’s all an upper when you have it. 

That kid keeps screaming over there. Even these pills don’t drown anything out. No matter how many I take, they don’t work. Momma’s gonna flip the hell out when she finds out I got fired. Again. Even these crappy jobs – I can’t keep ‘em. I only work for money to buy my next hit. Maybe I can call Grandma and ask her for my birthday money early. She’s gettin’ old. Maybe she won’t remember she just mailed me some cash.

My head itches. My knees itch. My skin is crawling. Squirming.  I want to run my body over those things in the driveways that’ll pop your tires if you run over ‘em wrong. 

I wish this would stop. I don’t even remember what the hell I did to get all needy and stuff. Oh, yeah, I went to that stupid party last year. That chick with the orange hair put something on my tongue. It was nasty, bitter and sweet all at once. It felt like I’d shoved a spoon of powdered sugar in my mouth. I don’t remember much more than that – just all the lights were brighter than normal and…

I don’t even know how long it’s been since I had more than these pills. Even the pills are gone, now.

My friend isn’t home. I know he always forgets to lock the back door, so I sneak in and go upstairs. I know his momma uses some stuff – she’s always got red eyes when I go over. I knock over a bunch of stuff on accident lookin’ through the bathroom cabinet. The smell of cheap perfume hits me in the face and I want to puke.

I don’t know what this stuff is – the pills aren’t like anything I’ve seen and I don’t know the name. They’re pills, though, and in the orange bottle, anything is possible. I take about six of them because they’re tiny.

Tiny ain’t gonna hurt me none. I pop in a couple more and chew ‘em up. The bitter goodness makes my cheeks numb. Before I even get down the stairs, I’m feelin’ good. These are gooooodddd… I say the word out loud because I feel my lips gettin’ all fat.

I almost prance outside, but my legs feel like stumps, like those big ol’ tree stumps we dug out of our yard last summer when it was eight-hundred degrees outside. Life is sweet, oh yes it is.

That car is comin’ awful fast…

Master Class

 Roxanne’s choice of opening sentence for this week’s class promises to generate some more creative and off-the-wall writing. She chose Kelle Groom’s book I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl whose opening line is: "Morphine makes me weightless, airborne."

[Disclaimer: I have no personal knowledge of heavy drug use, other than what I have seen in the medical field as well as the behaviors of friends in years past.]