You woke up in the early hours in his unfamiliar bed and he was whispering to you. He said, A gun barrel can be like a birth canal if you know what to do with it. Place gun to head, pull the trigger. Place gun to head--he sounded different; mumblier. You turned and saw that he was saying these words in his sleep.
Pull the trigger. It'll shrink you right down. And you crawl right in there, into that gun barrel, and you'll come out the other side and it's like you're not even born yet. Place gun to head. You shook him awake and he gave you a look like you were his mother.
What are you doing here? he said.
Under the sheets you kneed him in the junk and hopped out of bed, blindly searching the floor for clothes. After what seemed like minutes of frenzied patting around the floor with your hands, you left wearing one of his t shirts and a towel around your waist, but it was ok; you'd parked the car out front and no one would see you at this hour.
What are you doing? adjusting his question as you ran out the door, but he was still too asleep to follow after you.
The next day he didn't show up for work and you got a call. No you didn't know the fuck he was, you said, and you didn't appreciate strange bitches riling you with their telephones before the afternoon hours. You knew this was his supervisor, she even sounded as morbidly obese as he had described, as you had both laughed about, and you felt a little empty about right then trying your best to get him fired.
Then a minute later you got another call. That asshole. After you'd left he tried his hand at an overdose except he didn't have anything good lying around and apparently advil, multivitamins and no-doz don't really get the job done. He was at the hospital anyway, and you weren't even sure why they called. You were his only contact ma'am, the nurse said and she did not sound obese, she sounded slender and African American and beautiful. That asshole. He was resting she said and you said ok and she hung up.
* * *
Well he didn't really want you there. Because she was there. She was prettier than you, that was easy to admit, but her ass was kind of flat and those thin soapy legs--you looked up to the ceiling for any added support that might be holding her weight. She wasn't a puppet, just some freak of poise and posture. You hadn't been together that long, but he had told you what he liked, and
you were what he liked, and so what was this then?
They hadn't seen you yet. You turned to walk away and the tears were welling up, stupid tears that you wanted nothing to do with, and then the opportunity just kind of presented itself. Unattended on a wheelie table, in a small plastic cup, were three vicodin. You recognised them from rifling through your stepmom's handbag, and you even took one once and it didn't do much but you pretended like it did and you were at school laying by the football field and you let some boy make out with you for a little bit and then he bought you a sandwich. That was pretty sweet.
But only three. You'd seen how many Dr. House takes, what like six between each ad break? You knew it was t.v. and they had to exaggerate characters to make them look tough, and you loved that, but exactly how many did you need to mix into a cup of nondescript hospital coffee to kill your idiot boyfriend?
It was a stupid mission, but relationships can really make you crazy, right? You decided it would be a plan if you just went from room to room, facilitating your charm where necessary, and admit it, under those thick rimmed non-prescription glasses you had a ton of it. You warmed up to the oldies and took what pills you could get. Which was a lot really, since they were of that hardened generation who believed hospital meds made you gay, and that the nurses were implanted with high tech vacuum tubes courtesy of The Android Goering Mind Control Division.
You figured you had time to kill until she left and you could conveniently waltz in without any idea of how close you had come to ruining this meaningful relationship. Wow I bet they crossed paths in the elevator, he would think. You wondered if that kind of thing turned him on.
After a good twenty minutes had passed, and a particularly striking African American nurse in the hall was giving you looks, you ducked into a small waiting room to mix your concoction. You crushed the pills in the hood of your hoody and got about half of it into the cup of white from the vending machine. On the side of the cup there was some kind of scratch and win deal and you just couldn't help yourself.
The spending money was five grand and the holiday was to whereever you damn pleased. Those coffee companies must have a lot of money, something you might have remembered thinking for about a split second before being flooded by every other thought and the reflex action to throw the coffee over your shoulder, leaving a powdery stain on the crimson walls. It's a colour for calmness, though you didn't ever notice that. You ran down the hall and you stopped at your boyfriend's ward and she was still there and you stood there waving the cup in their face, and they just stared at you like a couple of deer caught on reality television and you gave them the bird and kept running, and you ran home and you got naked in your living room and you drank wine and you smoked a cigarette.
* * *
A day later you woke up vomiting and it wasn't the alcohol. You actually hoped you were pregnant because if it wasn't that then it was something else, and it was something bad and you were screwed. You didn't go into work, and they called and you didn't answer. They called your boyfriend and he was like Who? Listen, I don't like bitches calling me when I'm getting my joint worked on, and he hung up and he hoped that that got you fired. By then you were pale as your bathroom tiles and the colour under your fingernails made you think of some dead grandma.
Those fucking old people. What had they given you? Maybe they had passed on the dregs of some experimental gestapo bio-chem shit...oh man your head was a tilt-o-whirl and you were crawling for the living room to find that hoody and the idea of licking it out never sounded so good. Your tongue was dry as you wiped it against the cloth and you wondered why the fuck you were wasting the last seconds of your life tasting something so goddamn awful. You remembered about some starburst somewhere on the floor near the t.v. but you don't remember if you made it or not.
* * *
A gun barrel can be like a birth canal if you know what to do with it. Your former boyfriend tried catching up with you a month later, when he pointed a gun up his nose and pulled the trigger. Because he'd never seen someone do it that way. Maybe there was a reason for that; he only ended up making a horrible mess of himself. Part of him did shrink down, and he kind of made it through, for a moment there, his spirit face all stretched and bloated, searching desperately for you. And you were there. In the arms of some hunky fireman slash endocrinologist; they have quite a selection up there. And you were all like Enjoy your life of being the elephant man, and you kicked his face back down the tube and
