Tag: Addiction

Short Story: For Family

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

It was insanity. It was complete and utter insanity. This had to be the most stupid thing she’d ever done. And for the most stupid of reasons. She steadied herself on the front bumper of the car, held on to a windshield wiper. People’d been killed less stupidly.

At least if she fell at this speed, she told herself, death would be quick.

Somehow, it didn’t make her feel better. She wasn’t sure anything could, not at the moment. Maybe a bubble of down-soft mattresses around her. Probably not. Otherwise, the universe could call all their debts even so long as she didn’t die horribly– even dying non-horribly wasn’t off the table.

She swallowed hard, feeling the car’s engine explode with power. It raged forward, spurned by the foot of the fuming creature behind the wheel. Kris had never exactly been collected, but this was insanity. Stupid insanity. All of it.

If Kate hadn’t been insane enough to get involved with the gangers, this would’ve never happened. If Syd hadn’t been insane enough to still love her baby sister, she wouldn’t be hanging on by a wiper blade. If big brother Kris wasn’t insane, period, he wouldn’t be forcing her to. Most of all, if their parents weren’t insane, Kate might not have developed her insanity, and wouldn’t be just out of reach in the econo-van rapidly approaching their front-bumper.

The more she thought about it, the less she knew what the hell came next. Kris’ foot was to the floor. The car was gaining. Soon enough, she’d have to decide if she wanted to attempt something. As to what, she didn’t have a clue. All of this was played by ear. Obviously. Who the hell planned hanging off the front end of a rapidly moving vehicle. If she had planned anything, it would’ve been driving. Not hanging. Kris could’ve done the hanging.

Instead, here she was– in arm’s reach of their sister and the stupid fuck trying to kidnap her. Or who had rather– wasn’t much further to go on that, really.

Kate had always had drug problems. They all had their vises. Family problems were as genetic as the genes themselves. Kris liked to gamble. Syd drank like a fish. Kate smoked, snorted, or shot just about anything and everything she touched.

She’d always been safe about it– mostly. She’d contracted Hepatitis from bad needles. Not her fault, really. The needle exchange’s supplier made a mistake. It was a big one, ended in lawsuits that Kate had benefited from. She immediately took her cash payout to get high off of and had been coasting off it ever since. It was a lot of money, after all.

Likewise, Kris’d had both his legs broken by bookies. Not at the same time mind you, but it got the point across… for a while. Syd woke up in unfamiliar places more often than not, expected to start puking blood any day. She hadn’t decided if she’d stop drinking then or start drinking harder.

They’d have blamed their parents for their shitty lives if they weren’t so certain that, by now at least, it was unfairly beating a dead and less blameless horse than they’d like.

None of that prepared them for what was happening now. If Syd bothered to stop and think, or had time to, between the car’s first nudge of the van’s bumper and her reactive leap between them, she’d have realized how absurd the whole situation was. Kate was an adult. She could do what she liked. Including junked-out, maniac gang-bangers. It wasn’t their business. Both Syd and Kris knew that. But since when was sibling-anything ever rational?

Sure as hell not now, Syd knew. Or would’ve thought, if she weren’t clinging to the very razor’s edge of the van’s rear, double-doors. Her nails were splitting the weather stripping. Her finger tips stung from inflamed needles shooting agony through her hands. Her grip tightened. Knuckles whitened. Fingers went purple at their edges. Her feet caught the bumper and in a flash, Kris revved up and past to the van’s driver side.

Syd had only just gotten her footing when the van lurched right.

“Kris! You stupid fuck!” She shouted into the wind.

She regained her footing, only to lose it again from another lurch. She clung on by a lone set of fingers. Kris was ramming the van.

“You idiot!” She screamed, feeling her fingers bleed.

The van lurched again, forward this time. It gain an inexplicable burst of speed. Between it and the oncoming traffic, Kris was forced back behind the van again. Syd screamed and shouted at him, regaining her footing a last time. He seemed to understand the stupidity of his own actions, didn’t care. As soon as he could, he surged around and past again. Syd cursed his name, his life, and her own stupidity for being here. Then, she did the only thing she could think to.

Her free arm reeled back. All the force of the bar-brawling drunkard she was shattered the door’s window. Blood instantly streamed down her arm, her coat, the door, rained into the wind. Kris rammed the van again, but she had a better hold, however painful. Most of all, she had a burst of fury. She threw open the second door, and hurled herself into the screeching van.

The next few moments were hard to follow, even for someone sober. Syd barreled through the van toward her sister, drug-addled but in a terrified daze on the floor. Syd’s drunkard’s-legs engaged from her idiot brother’s head-butting. Then, in a moment she was sure would’ve killed them all, her bloody hands slammed the junkie’s head against the dashboard.

Syd had just enough time to grab the wheel before the van lurched, angled right, and tipped. She saw the last few hundred feet of the van’s momentum from a tumbling view progressing backward and around through it. There was also, in a glaring sort of way, the obvious, ongoing road rash of the junkie boyfriend’s head and face; gravity had wedged it through the shattered window and dented driver’s door.

Even before the tumbling world came to a halt, Syd knew the guy was dead– though her own status was undetermined. Dragging herself, and Kate, from the back of the van, she found Kris waiting. Only then was Syd sure she yet lived; there was no way they’d all three gone to hell at exactly the same time.

Kate swayed, another junkie on drugs and completely oblivious to the severity of her circumstances. Syd swayed too, but from a daze more excusable than Kate’s. By now, the junkie boyfriend’s face was mush between window and ground.

But that didn’t stop Kate from shouting through the back of the van, “It’s over, Shane! Don’t ever call me again!”

She swaggered over to Kris’ car and fell in to the backseat. Syd and Kris exchanged an incredulous look. Kris sighed and headed for the car.

“You’re welcome,” Syd muttered, though Kate wouldn’t have cared anyhow.

As if on cue, Kate yelled something fittingly foolish.

Syd threw her head back to confront the starry sky, “The shit we do for family.”

Poetry-Thing Thursday: Losing The Moon

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

I read in a letter,
that you’d taken to madness,
isolated yourself,
and carved a hole into your life.

I’d figured it out,
but you wouldn’t take my call,
figured you’d had doubts,
about me and the others.

Maybe I’m wrong,
but this silence is cold,
and darkness endless, abundant–
especially for those carved out.

So I wrote you a letter,
and I paid you respect,
in both greeting and closing,
knowing you’d never read it

but just in case,
here’s the gist:
You’re not alone
and we can throw you a bone,
or if you find need,
a lead.

Whatever it be,
tell us please, soon.
We’re nearly out of time,
and you’re losing the moon.

Short Story: Rhythms

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

To the opiated masses, power was still another fanciful thing only rich folks and electronics had. Humanity had passed the point where it was new or noteworthy, but had not reached the point where it was usual, mundane. Not on a grand scale. They were in the in-between times of yet another thing. No longer miraculous, but not commonplace enough, power was both a thing but not a thing. It was leashed by egghead scientists or courted by overzealous millionaires and billionaires. Or, if one worked their entire life, perhaps a layperson here or there.

It was via that mentality that power was disregarded by Earth’s general population, in both metaphorical and literal senses. Some ruralites even claimed its existence a conspiracy. Those creatures said humans never had, and never would have, power. Not in the grandest senses. Ironically, they were most often responsible for shortages of power.

For the rest and vast majority, power was just a thing beyond grasping. Most especially, great power. It was out of reach, financially or socially, or both. There was no point in dreaming about it because so many other, competing dreams were higher priorities.

Of course, what prospective home-owner didn’t want free, limitless power? What conscious mind didn’t wish it to help them “slip the surly bonds of Earth,” bypass the smog and madness between it and space? They all did, but it wasn’t meant to be. Not yet.

Not until a man lacking both gained them for all.

Thirty years later, Brandon Keller still wasn’t sure how he’d done it. He remembered the night it began though; remembered his dead-eyed stare at the half-dead television flickering from age and water damage. He remembered the mildew mingling with lighter-fluid and spray-varnish. A dangerous and favorite combination. He remembered the sound of the paper-bag over the percussive metal ever-thumping in the background. Most of all, he remembered the utter desolation.

Inside. Outside. Perpetual.

His innards were dank, dark. Even danker and darker than the walls of the abandoned junk-shack tenement he and others like him were forced to inhabit. The walls wept every time it rained. The sound of fucking, fighting, and metal or rap ragers echoed ceaselessly along the floors. Dilapidated, paper-thin walls crumbed between rooms, apartments forming windows into private lives no-one cared to view, their inhabitants least of all– seen one junkie….

They were all junkies. That was why the called it the junk shack. Brandon too, then at least. The place he’d been in wasn’t the best, wasn’t the worst. It did smell. Mold and Mildew. His huffing bag took care of that, but anytime the wind kicked up through broken windows or drafty walls, cat-piss stink from the rotting crack-lab in the next room smothered the varnish-lighter-fluid cocktail.

Something long ago had told him he’d been destined to wallow and rot like so much of the junk-shack before a moment of clarity intervened and the miraculous was found anew in him, through him. Thirty-years later, on the penthouse level of the Keller Power Consortium building, he would flex his bionic hand and feel it a small price to pay for all that was changed.

He’d been bored. High as a kite. Lost at what to do with himself– or why he’d suddenly developed an itch for doing something. He wasn’t aware of a lot in those days. He was, however, beginning to see patterns. Kaleidoscopic. Fractal. Like Fibonacci sequences, but in the repetition of the news and the other bullshit the television spewed at him.

There was a mathematical pattern to reality; an eternal cascading and bumping that seemed on micro-scales to be ever-random, but on macro-scales, its patterns were fairly obvious. He’d watched them for months, completely unaware of them. Then all at once, they were there. Sensory overload. Months of patterned reality crashed down. He couldn’t take it.

He didn’t know any of that yet. It took him months to figure out the particulars. By then, he was recuperating in a hospital, arm missing. He’d somehow managed to avoid the need for skin-grafts. Something about the trajectory of the explosion, angle of the fire. He didn’t much care to know those details. The others though…

When it happened, he was too busy detoxing, relearning there was a world existing outside the junk shack. Likewise, when his head was finally straight, he was too preoccupied with an image that had taken it over. It was more an idea really, but it had a mentally visual component. Two. One of macro-scale. One of micro.

Micro-scale was something like two nuclei, just before collision. All around them were out of focus collisions already occurring, exploding. Then, the Macro-Scale, there he was bionically armed and standing before a chemistry set that made the cat-piss crack-lab’s look like a catheter.

No-one understood it. Not even Brandon. It didn’t matter. Most of human progress was made only to be understood later on. It was yet another of the micro-macro rhythms; a duality of science and reality. There were things seen and things unseen. Both were useful. Both were necessary. Both could be harnessed.

So Brandon harnessed them. Through a frothing concoction of natural elements, the amateur-chemist turned energy-mogul found a formula for cold-fusion. Chemical cold fusion. Free, unlimited power. He stood in the shadow of creatures like Faraday and Tesla, Nobel and the Curies, then stepped beside into their light. There, he found the solution to a problem ages old and eternally important.

And thirty years later, he watched the last residential light flit on in what used to be the junk-shack. Free housing provided by the mogul. Like himself, the majority of people aided by his programs were former users, abusers, would-be burnouts. They weren’t just given the chance to get clean, they were given new leases on life. They were given new reasons to hope, to dream. New paths to achieving those hopes and dreams.

In his own way, Keller had universalized power and set off rhythms. One Macro, one micro. They mirrored themselves via an iteration even far older– as old as time, in fact; change.

Short Story: Cold Moon

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The moon had risen cold that night, duller than it had any right to be. Just another sign something was wrong, or heading that way. The highways were deserted. Only once did headlights meet to warn then bypass Austin from the oncoming lane. He barely noticed them. To him the road was merely an endless series of ups and downs, micro-turbulence, and wide curves. For all he knew, he was flying.

The dull-Mooned sky was cloudless. An occasional wisp of fluff drifted by in the distance, but never bothered the dampened sheen of incandescent white. The two were like opposite sides of a coin, ne’er to meet. Somehow that didn’t affect Austin. He merely drove, staring, almost lifeless. His motions automatic.

Even after, he wasn’t sure where things had gone wrong. There was a deer in the headlights moment, with Austin the deer. Moments where, even long after the accident, Austin swore there’d been no-one there. It was as if one moment the road were empty. The next, a boy had materialized. The blood stains said otherwise. His damaged car said otherwise. The boy’s grieving father said otherwise.

Austin knew the kid was dead. He was just sitting, waiting to hear it confirmed. A police officer sat beside him. He’d come to take a statement. It was simple: “I was tired, but alert. Like always. I drive that road twice a day. No-one’s around on late-nights like mine though. Still, I check the mirrors. Always. Mom was killed by a drunk driver ‘cause she merged without checking her mirrors. I always check them.”

The cop was forced to re-focus him.

Austin stared at the floor, completely shell-shocked. “I checked my mirror to change lanes. My exit was next. You know how it is. I look up, and this kid’s in the middle of the road. I didn’t see him before. It was like he’d come outta’ thin air. I didn’t… didn’t see him. I was checking my mirrors.”

Austin wasn’t much use after that. He descended into a fugue state. Traumatized. The officer stayed near him. Eventually Austin suspected it was as much for safety as support– the last thing a prosecuting entity wanted was a vigilante murder out of grief. Austin didn’t think it would’ve been all that bad. Then again, he didn’t feeling much save complete and total dread.

Before long, a doctor appeared. He stepped from earshot with the officer, muttered in low tones. This was the moment. Austin knew it. In seconds, the officer would lock-step over, relay the news. He couldn’t help but feel the soul-shattering crack in his chest. It still echoed through him as the officer escorted him to his bloody car and promised to be in touch. Austin drove toward home, front-end one headlight less than usual.

He wasn’t one for bars, but he knew all of them in his dingy town. He knew the upscale ones. The ones that attracted the best women. The ones that brought allowed underage kids. He even knew the ones that stank least or offered the best drugs. He wasn’t interested in any of them. He went to the only one he was certain he’d never wanted to approach. It was a dive-bar for dive-bars. A place where nobody knew your name because no-one had names there, because no-one spoke. They just drank, hunched over, acting as small as they felt.

He hid in there, and within there, like all the other so-called barflies drinking away sorrows. No-one bothered him. No-one would. The bartender didn’t even ask what he wanted. He just set two-fingers of whiskey on the counter. It was warm, vile, felt like Austin’s insides felt. Whether clairvoyant, or prescient, the bartender never needed to speak. If someone needed another drink, or a change of taste, they got it.

Perhaps that was the reason Austin found himself returning nightly. Perhaps not. Perhaps it was something entirely unrelated, inexplicable. Or, perhaps, it was just another of life’s mysteries– like how a child living twelve miles from a highway mysteriously appeared there without his family knowing he was missing.

Like everyone else, Austin drank with his head down. This was the way such people were made– how places like the dive-bar survived. They fed off the souls of those slowly killing themselves there. Not directly. Indirectly. And not through money. Not a single person, Austin included, ever paid. They were never asked to. Their tabs were kept and tallied, in as much silence as everything else, to be paid by their next of kin. All of it was overseen by one man; a creature of silence like the rest.

Somehow, perhaps from lack of awareness, or the desire to keep quiet, drown sorrows, the man that joined the barflies every night in the corner was entirely missed. He sat with legs crossed, just out of range of Austin’s peripheral vision. Atop his knees was a book. Beside it on the round table, a Mojito. A curious drink for such a place. More curious was the way, every few minutes, he dabbed sweat from his forehead, sipped his mojito, and scratched his book with a pen.

Had anyone bothered to look, they might have noticed the rhythm. Had they bothered to look, they might have noticed him at all. Then, they might have thought to step near him. They might have smelled the hint of sulfur to the air. They might have seen the ink colored of fresh blood or drying to a deep, brown. They might have noticed too, the curiously Latin and rune-like writings in the book. If anyone in the bar had thought to notice him at all, they might have noticed these things too. Indeed, they might have noticed the names of their fellow liquor-jocks, or even themselves.

And if they’d thought to stick around long enough, observing closing time, they might’ve seen the man rise to disappear out the door. Were they able to inhabit multiple places at once, they might even find themselves near a highway and at the bar simultaneously. Then, with a flicker of surreal reality, the man would disappear from the door while a boy materialized on the highway.

Perhaps, if someone thought to look, they would see these things. But no-one ever did. And no-one ever would.