Tag Archives: addiction
K sold the ring his fiancee had given him. Some guy in the parking lot of a sandwich shop gave him $400, claiming that it was identical to the one he lost, a gift from his own fiancee.
K spent the first $100 at a strip club, folding his stack of dollars into paper airplanes and cascading them into the air, like a little squadron of warplanes, toward the pretty but malnourished stripper.
K spent the remaining $300 on a fat prostitute. He had no desire to sleep with the fat prostitute. Instead, he wanted to ride her, like she was a horse.
K used to be a skilled equestrian and won many awards. K fell in love with a pretty lady, also an equestrian, skilled. They were to marry, but things fell apart; K never rode again. K moved away and decorated his meager apartment with his awards. The urge to ride was strong, but he refused to return to horses.
K demanded the fat prostitute remove her clothes. Then he climbed atop her. He rode her vociferously, until they both collapsed into a heap of flesh.
K slept heavily. When he woke, the prostitute was gone, and so were his awards.
Leave a comment | tags: addiction, affect, awards, body, capitalism, fat, fiction, flash fiction, horses, love, marriage, money, relationships, romance, sex, Short Fiction, short story, women | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction, Woman
“May I please have my eyes back,” asked the angel. I wasn’t sure how she knew I had them (I found them in the gutter; the dazzling green of the iris caught the sun and blinded me), but her voice was stern. I reached into the breast pocket of my jacket and handed over her eyes. The angel and I had sex and I fell in love.
Sometime later the devil came to my door, offering a cure for my heartache. “Take this,” the devil offered, extending a hand that gripped a small pill. “She will leave your mind as will the sorrow she has caused.”
I retrieved the pill from the devil’s outstretched palm. “It’s a special compound just for you,” the devil said. Small and rectangular in shape, the pill had a “K” in its center.
The devil saw me hesitate. “Or take this” – the devil produced another pill – “and be haunted by her memory until you die.”
I retrieved the additional pill and placed it on my palm next to the first pill. They were identical.
“But you may not have them both,” said the devil impatiently, glaring at me with eyes a penetrating shade of green.
2 Comments | tags: addiction, death, devil, drugs, eyes, green, love, relationships, romance, satan, sex | posted in Her, Him, Me, Short Fiction
She had a constellation of shitty stars tattooed on her body. They were cartoonish and lumpy, the shape of holiday cookies. I followed them down her spine and around the bottom of her left torso, where they then descended and coiled loosely the length of her left leg.
“These are awful,” I said. She shrugged and rolled out of my bed, complaining about needing to “wash [my] scent” off. That was our first and last conversation. I closed my eyes and when I opened them—evidently much later—she had left. My wallet was gone and I found a syringe in my bathroom.
I drove to the crumbling neighborhood where I first saw her only a few hours prior. But now I saw only drug addicts milling around and a woman bobbing her head to an inaudible rhythm. I called from my vehicle, interrupting the woman. She swore at me and displayed something sharp. I drove off, fretting.
At a loss, I slithered into a tattoo shop and demanded my own constellation from the worst artist on staff. He readied his inkwells. “I’ll give you an extra thousand if you tattoo me with this,” I said, offering him the syringe.
Leave a comment | tags: addiction, affect, art, drug addict, drugs, flash fiction, ink, money, needle, prostitution, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, syringe, tattoo shop, tattoos | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
K, though dying, was in the best shape of his life. “The TSA agent asked if I was a gymnast,” he boasted the other day. “I told him I was just a narcissist.”
K wasn’t just a narcissist. I don’t remember the name of his illness, but it was fatal. Still full of vigor, he paraded around in his Under Armour, revealing every crevice and striation in his torso, like an aspiring Mister Universe. In another several months, he would become hollow, like a drug addict. What would the TSA agent say then?
When he took too much medication, K would rant about “beauty in decay.” Then he would hit the gym extra hard. K read too much philosophy—chubby men expounding on a reality they know nothing about. Have you ever watched somebody die, I hissed once, angrily. We disagreed a lot these days.
But K was right. He had more girlfriends than I could count. “Do they know you’ll be dead soon,” I asked after he regaled me with a story of a hefty blonde.
“Of course. They wouldn’t be interested in me otherwise.”
For the first time in a long while, I found myself agreeing with him.
Leave a comment | tags: addict, addiction, affect, death, drugs, flash fiction, gymnast, illness, Mister Universe, narcissism, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, TSA, women | posted in Him, Me, Short Fiction
“Did you know people sell these?” K took a tablet from the orangish vial on the counter and held it between two fingers the way you inspect a small bug. “They call it ‘hillbilly heroin.'”
“Yeah, but I need those,” I said. “You know–for pain.”
K wasn’t listening. “One of these can go for, like, $20.”
I rolled my eyes: “Can’t you find something else to sell illegally?”
“No,” he retorted. He snatched my perscription and left.
I sank into despair, knowing that my doctor would never buy the story I needed to sell him.
……….
K came to my door a few days later, smiling widely.
“Can I have my medicine back now?” I asked.
“I sold them. We need more.”
“That’s not going to happen. There are rules to guard against this exact thing.”
“Yes it is.” Then I noticed the hammer in his hand.
“Wait,” I screamed. I pleaded. But K insisted it was the only way. I backed away. Then he pulled a handful of money from his pocket, thrusting it into my hands. “This is your half.”
He raised the hammer.
I closed my eyes and envisioned prostitutes and Rolexes. I don’t remember what happened after that.
Leave a comment | tags: addiction, affect, drugs, flash fiction, hammer, heroin, hillbilly, money, pain, relationships, Rolex, sex, Short Fiction, short story, women | posted in Him, Me, Short Fiction
She opens her briefcase. “Why you keep doing this,” she asks in accented English. I can’t tell if she really wants to know.
“All I have left are fat ones. If you wanting pretty ones, you must ask early. They go first. Bitchy ones gone next for whatever reason–I don’t understand why. Then nice ones, girl next door. And so on. You wait till end of day, you stuck with fat women. Sorry. I told you before, you know?”
She readies her syringe.
I feel them flood my bloodstream. At this point it doesn’t matter what they look like, or if they’re nice or whatever. I collapse in a heap of myself, knowing that I’ll have to get off the floor momentarily. Knowing that, because the real pleasure is not in the high but in the anticipation of it, the fun is over.
“You need real woman,” she says as she collects my money.
I shrug, wondering if she’s flirting. “But what will you do without me,” I ask by way of humor.
“Don’t need you,” she replies. “All men are pathetic. Many customers.” She leaves.
I touch the hole in my arm and nod emphatically at nobody in particular.
Leave a comment | tags: accent, addiction, bitchy, disease, drugs, fat, girl next door, language, men, relationships, sex, Short Fiction, short story, syringe, voyeurism, women | posted in Her, Me, Short Fiction
“My name is K. And I’m an addict.”
He didn’t elaborate on the nature of his addiction and nobody bothered to ask. The people in the room probably presumed that his addiction was some permutation of theirs: drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex, whatever. K had been attending these meetings for several weeks now, hoping that being part of a community of junkies would somehow cure his junkiness. Today was the first day he bothered to speak.
“Hello, K,” said a mass of voices. K sunk into his chair, knowing that his addiction was his alone, and that all the other addicts could never understand. Vulnerability suddenly exposed, K needed a fix. Fuck this place, he muttered to himself, as he snuck out during a coffee break.
……….
“It’s been a while,” said the voice on the other end of the phone, as though it knew K was on the brink of relapse.
K apologized and then pleaded for a fix up. “Pretty ones this time, please,” he added. As K reveled in the remorse and worthlessness of relapse, he envisioned the drug taking its effect: countless microscopic women riding his veins, soothing his pain with their kisses.
A knock at the door.
Leave a comment | tags: addiction, affect, drugs, flash fiction, pain, rehab, relapse, relationships, short story, syringe, women | posted in Him, Man, Short Fiction
The woman got stranded in Iceland once, after following a guy she “loved” onto a raft.
She went to a casino in the capital and shoved what little money she had down the throat of a slot machine. Finding that she had a knack for that kind of thing, she won big: she bought a ticket back to the US and even had enough money left over to try and get her life back together after love fucked everything up for her. She moved to Las Vegas.
She had this favorite slot machine in the corner of her favorite casino. It was always good to her. They first met on a whim; she had a feeling about it, that’s all. They liked each other immediately and spent evenings and weekends together. She told the slot machine about being stranded in Iceland. She told the slot machine about other bad stuff, too. The slot machine was extra generous at times like those.
One day she told the slot machine about this friend that was worried about “[her] gambling addiction or whatever.” The slot machine was silent for a moment. Then it smiled a big smile and offered her more money than usual.
2 Comments | tags: addiction, affect, casino, desire, gambling, Iceland, Las Vegas, money, relationships, slot machine | posted in Short Fiction, Woman
