Overdose Part 1

She opens her bloodshot eyes and stares at the cracks in the stucco walls.
The window is open.
A breeze squeezes through the tattered drapes.
Still she can't draw a breath,
cant take in the morning air.
She feels the weight of bruised limbs
under the moth-eaten quilt.
Pressing down on the mattress
she feels broken springs that exaggerate
every scrape on her spine
every scratch on her legs.
Turning slowly towards the door,
she sees it is open and wonders who was the last to leave.
Indifference swims behind her eyes when she considers
which man it may have been.
Her temples throb with dread of feeling the
cold linoleum
on the soles of her feet.

For a second she finds clarity.
you can't shut me out. cant push me back from the past into the future. my mind is too strong. eyes see too much. skin feels too many touches. i know you are looking, feel you casually glance over.

From her reclined position
she can only see partially through the smoky cracked window.
That is enough for her,
the harsh rays
to sting her eyes
and make her wish it was night once more.
She pushes back the covers
with the gnarled fingers of her needle
scarred hands.
Without enough strength to fully straighten
her spine,
or enough awareness to tie on a robe,
she slides off the mattress,
and drags her broken body towards the dresser.
Picking up a handheld mirror,
she looks at her chapped pale skin with
a degree of disgust that has arisen in her
breast each morning since she moved to this supposed
city of what?
angels?
no.
Every time she awakens in this room,
she goes through the same routine.
Shuffling towards the open door,
she slips into a sweater hanging on its
tarnished brass knob.
the hall is icy and smells of dead souls.
She peers down to the left,
then to the right.
She sees him sleeping on a doormat and covered with newspapers.
What a shame she had thought the first time she gazed upon Mickey's fourteen year old face pressed against the concrete.
His was a countenance of purity and empty wishes.
Now at sixteen, Mickey lived in the building, ate the same scraps from the garbage bins dinner was plucked from;
he used the same drugs,
fucked the same squatter whores and the purity was gone.
Purity was dead.
The empty wishes, they live on.
Somewhere deep in his subconscious,
blurred by the open fields of poppies and dark clouds that rained syringes upon his bare skin.
Now, as he peered out from his paper hut,
he gazed with glazed eyes at the girl down the hall,
who wore
a rust
colored sweater and nothing else.
He wanted to give her shoes,
or at least a pair of pants.
then he realized where they were and how much nothing he had to give.
She continued down the hallway past Mickey,
down to the stairs.
Almost tripping over a foot sticking out of the shattered plaster, she caught her balance.
Peering around the corner of the stairwell's landing she sees Amber and Sunny.
They slept wrapped in a torn, stained quilt,
in an embrace reminiscent of childhood.
The two girls couldn't be more than fifteen,
but their eyes were wizened by the harshness of this life.
Their brows were furrowed even in
sleep.
The love they have is the only thing they live for and neither the frigid solidarity stairwell they call home nor the barren table they beg for food from could tear them from each other enough to make them hate this life.
She continues down the stairs and across the space they call The Chapel.
On either side of the room are red and gold mismatched votive candles on mantles and nookes in the walls.
Some people light the candles and wish to be taken from this solitude.
Others cook up their smack on spoons raised over the flame,
looking for the entrance to the desolate place where you don't have to think.
She struts over the mantle of what used to be a five foot mahogany fireplace in some family's lounge or study-a rich man's resting place of relics gone cold.
Now the wood was cracked and broken and housed more rodents than fires.
She glances across the space littered with mattresses and fallen hopes of warmth due to walls and a roof, and
body
heat.
Cold souls and colder skin were housed in corners of this distorted chapel.
No religions or beliefs or even comfort in the churchlike aspect of a candle filled prayerless temple.
More similar to a tomb than any place of service or celebration.
She feels dirt and death and hopeless hands all brushing her ankles as she sways to a strip of light bleeding blurrily in from a boarded up hole,
once a window.
These little strips of sunlight were like lines on a highway...
between the lines,
trying to go straight...
on the path,
but not knowing where it leads or how far she will go.
When light hurts broken eyes and headlights stream directly for her...
Deciding that light was just opposite from what she needed,
she turns shakily away from glaring rays.
Down again to the next floor,
was it the first?
the basement?
It was so long since her pallid countenance had seen sunshine that the stars all bled into one big flight and each day it mattered less and less which one had a door at the end.
Why go outside when all she had was in here.
Was that as empty and soulless as she thought it had been when it so briefly almost became a question asked aloud?
Maybe today she would just try to go outside.
Just to see the sun...wasn't there something she had to do...
Brief baffled thoughts of a distant past were shortly overcome by a need rumbling,
from legs to lips.
Itching skin,
crawling scalp,
Teeth all a-twitch.
Suddenly it was not so vital to know what it was she was supposed to do as it was
to
find him.
And wouldn't you know,
Just as she crouched to the putrescent rotted newspaper pile with a cramp and a need to stop this spinning and churning--there he
appeared.
Silver-topped cane in hand,
pointy shoes protruding rudely like rat's noses and silver plated beaks of birdlike fetuses crammed in triangle ice cube trays.
Friedrich swaggers and glides all at once to the place where she crumbled to the ground.
Tossing a red-striped bag with clean syringe,
asking haughtily if she needs a light,
he pivots and thinks of
five
off the top of his greasy, pocked, head,
five who will be sent up to her room tonight for a long game of beat this whore.
He turns,
on second thought,
with a glimmer of what may have been pity but most likely just amusement...
and drops a second bag- this one with a different color stripe- to the sad broken girl on the filthy
broken floor of this damned house.
She sees this and musters the strength to crawl over and retrieve both bags,
and crams them in her sweater before blackness seeps in.