Happiness Was a Warm Gun

(Author's note: This was originally written for a horror-story contest on Fanstory. Didn't win, but got some very good reader responses.)

I woke up cold and shaking, fumbling for my syringe and the pack of disposable needles. It took thirteen flicks of my lighter to get a flame bright enough to see where the kit was. No matter how many times I'd done it, the injection still hurt, still made me hiss long and low as it sank into the flesh. But the drug - I needed the drug. Nothing was more important than the drug.

Eight pills I took, little bitty ones, my whole body shuddering with the jitters and fears of my want. Algae growing in my water bottle, hard to wash down, wanted to spit but swallowed. I needed to get clean water and food. I'd have to face the world. God.

I hoped to slip out without getting the attention of my landlord and all the other tenants, but no such luck. He came to the door before I'd even got my bra on. Bang, bang, rent due, I'm-going-to-kick-you-out-sister-unless, and the 'unless' was something I knew I'd never be able to rely on again.

"Just a second! Let me get dressed properly!" I called, nearly ripping seams in my rush to open the door before he kicked it.

He wasn't angry this time, though. Pale. He badly needed what I couldn't give him.

"Miaka..." With a desperate futility I retrieved a check mailed from my brother, who kept begging me to move to New Zealand and take refuge with him, no matter the difficulties involved. "Look! I can pay you for this past month! And I'm going to move out. There's got to be a flight I can take if I bribe someone."

"Miaka, money isn't going to help me anymore." The landlord opened the door wider and reached through, grasping my hand. I didn't like it when people touched me without permission.

Twisting my wrist but still trapped - damn how shriveled-up and weak the stuff made me - I looked at him with a mixture of sorrow, pity, and fear. "No. I'm sorry. I can't spare any. You know how hard it's become to find?"

"Of course I know, hon. And that's why I have to take it from you. I'd rather not hurt you." He couldn't. I would rather die than lose my stash. I wouldn't let him.

I wasn't a naturally violent person, but the need for the drug did things to people. The needle was still in my other hand, tip not yet discarded, so in the ensuing panicked scuffle I jabbed it into his eye. He screamed and collapsed to the floor, releasing me in order to try to get it out. Gushing blood, vitreous humor and aqueous humor - worst names for pain-juice ever, I might add, words change over the millennia and this wasn't funny at all - and me crying and saying I was sorry, gathering up what I had left of value into a bag and clutching it to me.

I should not have looked back at him, and I really would have preferred becoming a pillar of salt to what my punishment was. When he yanked the needle back out...his eye came with it. He let go and the skewered eyeball, like the world's most grotesque hors d'oeuvre, fell a few inches to the floor and bounced.

He stopped yelling then. That's what it does when it starts, makes them quiet and dreamy. So, of the two of us who were there, I was the only one who vomited when his new eye coalesced into being. His other original eye and the new eye gently plopped out, also bouncing gently before coming to rest beside his head. Another pair of eyes followed quickly.

If he was very lucky, the virus would stop with his eyes, and he would just lie there making new ones until he died of dehydration. If he was unlucky, he'd have other organs coming out the orifices (or at least trying to), gruesomely and relentlessly, before sweet, forgiving death came to claim him.

I did my best to recover composure and dry my tears. The kindest thing to do would be kill him now, but I had no weapons and would be beyond overcome if I had to touch the thing he was. I pleaded his unhearing forgiveness once more, and then rushed into the street, doing my best to admit nothing.

There was no huddled tent of skin, growing, flowing, knotting around skin skin skin she can't move for all that skin. I didn't, didn't, didn't hear the dispassionate retching of a wretched man on his hands and knees, puking up sections of hearts, lungs, stomachs, and I don't know what else.

I knew how to fly a helicopter. If I could make it to the air base without being robbed by someone still untouched, like me, then I might be able to get to an airport in a city where the epidemic was under better control, where I could prove I was healthy and they could let me take a plane to hide in my big brother's house and have nightmares forever.

My medical research company had only wanted a way to cheaply and ethically produce replacement organs for transplant patients, and if one of the top leaders of the project hadn't been kidnapped by terrorists and forced to hand over what they needed to weaponize it, that's all that would have happened. We would have made the world so much better. Instead we - no time, surprise, you see, everything so fast - we - we - We barely had time to come up with any antidote at all. It was inconvenient, with ironically heroin-like side-effects. The city crumbled in horror before we had time to distribute it widely.

Thanks to me, five of the families from my building were already safe. But now I had so little, and the antidote had to be taken multiple times a day to remain effective, and if I stayed even a few hours more I would be gone. I couldn't vomit again. I would pass out.

I found an unchained bicycle and increased my speed with relief. There was still a chance. I thought about New Zealand, green and stable and peaceful and clean.

The streets were full of carrion birds, rats, and cockroaches. I nearly crashed when a murder of crows fluttered almost in my face. New Zealand. New Zealand.

A few hundred thousand medical monsters were all that stood in my way.

I've changed my mind...

As Margaret Hsu has begun to form more fully in my head, I realize that poetry is the writing that will be integral to her healing, not working on a script. The script is too much me. I write decent enough poetry but it isn't my favorite form. I haven't written much, on my own, for a while. I wrote it in the hospital, though. I can write it for her.

Here, actually, is the one poem I wrote in the hospital I still like:

~*~

The Gargoyle Principle

Written Halloween 2010, in ---- Psych Ward (Nonviolent, Temporary, Women’s)

It was All Hallows’ Eve, Samhain, Hallowee’en when the pills

helped me fall asleep despite the shhhnoisyshhh

which, it being 3 AM, means it is All Hallows

the day, itself, with spirits awake and walking

the way I am awake and wanting 48 hours enchanted away.

We don’t sleep well here on the best of nights

and one might think our own demons animate

us to mutter and toss, thrash and request

for sedatives from the front desk, the night shift –

nurses nursing coffees as they nurse us.

Cathedrals have gargoyles as sort of psychic

bodyguards, a demon on your side to frighten

the ones that would do you ill. In my current

illness I have an ugly bat-doll clutched by my side

hug-sized, looking alarmed enough for the both

of us so I can be calm, calm, thanks to the gargoyle principle,

thanks to the slow but reliable tick of time

towards the day, hour, minute my body is free as my spirit

sheltered by my plush gargoyle and a blanket of inky scribbles.

An Old Ghost

At this site: http://www.voicesnet.org/displayonepoem.aspx?poemid=75306

I wrote this poem when I was thirteen years old! For extra credit, to be precise. My homeroom teacher at the International School of Beijing, Mr. Pearson - a native of Wyoming who collected unused airsickness bags from various airlines - offered various slightly off-kilter assignments for those seeking additional points. The prompt was a quote by some astronomer, whose name I have long forgotten, but one I remember was female. She said, "When I look up at the night sky, all I see are whales and fishes." We were invited to make anything of that we wished.

For those uninterested in following the link, here is the text:

SWIM WITH THE STARS

Stars as whales
Stars as fishes
How is this possible?
How can you see it that way?
Look up at the night sky
Sparks swim
In the dark sea primeval
The edge of the Milky Way floats by
Like foam across the waves
A deep sense of longing
With an unknown cause
To fly with the stars
Swim through the abyss
Quiet hushed world
Like being underwater
Peering below
Instead of looking up
Our imagination connects the dots
Giving the patterns stories and lives
Awe like the awe of the sea
The sea and the sky
Both mysterious
Threatening in a way
Yet strangely comforting
We cannot go far to explore their secrets
Only dream and admire
Graze the surface of their world
Twinkling points of light
Clustering and spreading
Shoals and schools of stars
While the galaxies dip and spin
Graceful behemoths of the beyond
Like fish
Like whales

In an ocean as deep as Time

It's not exactly great literature, but it's not bad at all for age 13. In any case, I got a bucketful of points for it, my math teacher printed out a larger copy and stuck it on his wall for the rest of the year, and the school put it in the newsletter. It's weird to see it again, with 889 views, no less. A good weird.