“Falling Asleep” by Joseph C. Grantham
Philip buys an ounce of smack. Craig and I don’t even know what smack is until he brings it over—we thought it might have been food . . .
Philip buys an ounce of smack. Craig and I don’t even know what smack is until he brings it over—we thought it might have been food . . .
After writing a suicide letter addressed to her fiancé, Sophie tooted three fat lines of heroin, then downed some pills just to make sure . . .
The gateway drug is not the weed you smoke in a too-thin joint as a teenager. It’s not the beer you surreptitiously sip from your father’s fishing cooler while hunkered down in the garage. The gateway drug is escape . . .
This Sunday morning seems different for some reason . . .
Les’s twenty-foot RV was parked in the gravel drive of a little house with a sagging roof. Plastic deer nestled into the flower beds around it, among clumps of zinnias and cracked planters full of wilting petunias. Some friends of Les’s lived there with their ailing grandmother, no doubt appropriating her Social Security checks and pain meds. I’d only met them in passing, a lank-haired woman and her scraggly-mustached boyfriend.
I hated myself for being there, but I parked next to a dirty old Toyota sedan and hauled myself out of the car anyway. Fuck it, I told myself. Are you really trying to be one of those dorks with a clean life and an office job? Who are you kidding? I sank down beneath my guilt and worry, settling back into the comfortable hog wallow of my ignominy as I mounted the stairs of the RV.
The door rattled when I opened it, and I stepped in, very nearly falling back out again when I found myself at the end of a pistol . . .
Harry glances around the room, the trim freshly painted. Someone with money owns the place. Maybe Christiane’s family.
“Does anyone live here?” Harry asks.
Gem sneers at this pretense of familiarity.
“You ask too many questions, man . . .”
I didn’t know he was hooked on smack when I moved in. That confession came two nights later . . .
I didn’t notice I had nodded out on the train and had missed my stop until the conductor clamped down on my bony shoulders in Wellington, saying, “Come on, honey . . .”