also appeared in Issue 2 of Prose & Lore, July 2013, edited by Audacia Ray.
After his addiction and heartbreak in the face of my cruelty put the decorator in a bronze urn, I embarked on my thirties with a nice fat inheritance. My alcoholic Sugar Daddy was dead, and I was free to live on my own terms. But it turns out that I’d been getting high for so long, just to put up with the drunken old man, that I’d cultivated addictions of my own. I graduated from cocktail companion to roached-out stoner to dope sniffer within a year. I sensed my timeline winding down, and would occasionally check my palms for stigmata.
When I turned thirty-four, I found that I wasn’t dead, just really impaired and more susceptible than ever to fractured religious destruction myths. I could no longer count on myself or the decorator or his dwindling money for answers – or questions, for that matter. I fashioned my own nails out of pure white powder, the purest you could find in New York, procured by a South American boyfriend. I drove them into my head instead of my hands.
1 comment