The Discordant Opposition Journal Issue 10 - File 10
What follows is an excerpt from my unfinished, unpublished labor of hate that I have been working on for the better part of five years now. Readers should be aware of this fact and you might want to include this paragraph. I am not telling you if this is fiction or not, because part of what the book is about is perceptions. I let the reader form their own.
The book is currently called Perceptions in Failure.
Chapter Five: Laura
I was the scum of the earth. I was a drug dealer. I don't mean a guy with a few grams of pot, and maybe some acid. I dealt narcotic bliss. Hard stuff like coke and heroin. It was not, in retrospect, the most fulfilling time of my life. I was also a criminal, a small time car thief. I was fifteen and hanging around with some guys in their late twenties, early thirties. Most of them had spent more time In prison then I had in school. I don't even really remember how the hell I hooked up with these guys. All I know it was the drugs. Imagine, a pot head at age 12. Sure I thought it was great, drugs, money, sex, cars. Buy the time I was 15 I had been in more fights and run from more cops than I can count. By all rights I should be dead, or in jail. None of that, however; is the point.
I was scum, but I was also in love. I was with this girl, Laura. I would do anything for her. It was typical teenager shit. On again, off again for the fist bit, but then as the drugs we were doing got harder, and the crowd of our friends got meaner and older we grew together. I was totally in love. On January 28 of that year I killed her.
It was not premeditated murder, it was manslaughter. Some even say it wasn't my fault. But it was. I killed her. She had what H addicts call a hotspot. It is a hit of heroin that is way to much for their system. Some times it sends you into shock. Sometimes you die. Laura died.
We were at a party. Lots of drugs, lots of underage kids. I was not the only dealer there. I was staying straight that night, meaning that I was only doing soft drugs like pot. I had just come down off a bad acid trip the week before and was trying to let my body recover. Laura was a junkie. She needed H.
I cooked up the needle for her and handed it to her. We were all kneeling down in a circle, and when she was ready she put the needle in her arm. Her eyes closed, and she smiled just for a second. Then she got a look of horror on her face like I have never seen in a human being before, and fell over onto her face, dead.
Needless to say I freaked. From what I could tell her heart stopped. She had no pulse. I don't know how long we waited before someone called an ambulance, and we took her down stairs. The paramedics tries to revive her, first by giving her a shot of something, adrenaline I guess. At the hospital they tried the shock paddle thing, I think, I wasn't able to go in. I told the nurse everything I knew about her, where she lived, who her social worker at the group home was and the phone number. I waited buy her side, and I had to answer to cops. The track marks on her arms were obvious, so I didn't lie about the drugs. I did not however volunteer the information about the party or the source of the drugs. My usual luck with the authorities held out, and I wasn't questioned that badly. When Jenny, the social worker, arrived the Doctor came out and told us that she was dead.
I killed Laura, over ten years ago, and that's where my series of disappearances began.
Old Scratch
