Feeling Anything?

A Story by ZackOfBridge

Emily grazed the box outlined in the pocket of her shorts. There was a mischievous flick in her eye when she smiled at me. Whatever was in the box she wanted to show to me, but she was waiting for me to ask her.

"Just show me," I said. My curiosity was lint deep in her pocket. "What does it do?"

"Don't know," she said and slid the box from her shorts, a mint container was her stash keeper. She popped the lid with a flick of her thumb. Blue nail polish reflected the sunlight that burnt above the suburban park. Inside, two neon pills brightened the tin innards of the box, one golden and the other bright green. "Never seen these ones before."

"That’s reassuring," I said and plucked the yellow one from the cup of her palm. The pill was a work of craftsmanship. In my hand, the pill shined with the light and was branded 'Paradoxyl'. I thumbed the lettering engraved into the pill. "Are these new?"

"He's been working on these for a while," She said while flicking the other stolen pill in her hand. Emily's father, a neuroscientist for the designer drug craze, had no objections to bringing his work home with him.

"That is something," I said, still scrutinizing the pill. "Can I try it?"

Those words had assembled themselves on my tongue so many times before. My focus had stuck to the capsule pinched between thumb and pointer finger. There was intensity in my stomach. Designer drugs are unmatched by schoolyard pot or gold mushroom-caps. With the pot I knew that my mouth would dry up and I would feel a haze instead of clarity. There was no predictability with these designer drugs. For a moment I worried of my safety, but that passed when I stopped thinking. These drugs do no physical harm. The wealthy get their fix without rotting teeth and becoming some eccentric, diamond toting junky. They could get their head-trip in the country clubs or they could follow the white rabbit down the fifth hole of the private golf courses.

"Of course," she said under all her blonde hair. She looked up from the green seed in her hand; a grin stained her face. "That’s why I brought it, you're going to try it before I do."

"Like always." I said. A nervous laugh escaped my lungs. Being a lab rat meant the good s**t was free for me. I eyed the pill again and tossed it in my face. A developed impulse pushed it to the back of my throat. "And that's that."

Emily's eyes washed through me as though they had watched the capsule travel down my throat and into my stomach. Turning my back to her I shuffled my feet towards the tree near the end of the park. She followed silently behind me, I felt her expectant gaze burn in the back of my head.

We settled in the shade of the tree. The sun had no say against the trees cooling shelter. Emily and I sprawled underneath the tree smiling towards the clouds; they performed for our deranged minds. We reminisced of our past drug experiences without end. I felt we would bore even the tree. But the leaves whistled with thanks to the April breeze. Fifteen minutes danced off with the wind blown clouds. There was an occasional jet skipping across the sky and an occasional...

"Feeling anything yet?" She asked and sitting up, lit a cigarette. She let the menthol smoke drift past her nose and into the tree where the leaves now rustled to avoid it.

“You shouldn’t smoke” I said, the smoke rose into the branches of the tree and was gone. More smoke rolled from her lips, the strands of smoke pinched at the fabric of her shirt.

“You know that I don’t smoke.” She said with a drag in her lungs.

“And what is that you’re doing right now?”

“Okay fine, but you know that I’m not a smoker. I only smoke on the weekends.”

“It’s Tuesday. And you’d better cut out your weekends too because track is coming and I’m thinking this will be the season I’m faster than you.”

“Oh s**t no. Besides, it isn’t about speed, Its endurance. You must be high if you think you’ll be faster than me. Do you feel anything or what?”

"Nothing," I said and exhaled disappointment. The grass underneath me was average, could have had a trim, and the playground remained a playground posed in wood chips, a slide branched off and swiveled with late night graffiti. Everything was set in a perfect, mundane position. “Nothing”.

A slight breeze brought my hands behind my head and laid me out on the grass. My eyes shut, Emily must have been bored with her cigarette because she kissed me with parted tobacco-lips and then I disappeared forever. I was caught between an inhale and an exhale. It was a middle ground entrapment, neither alive or dead My mind became one of those insects, those poor saps that were trapped in prehistoric amber. Like one of those bugs, my mind and my thoughts floundered and struggled. Eventually I accepted my mysterious and undeserving fate. And this lasted eternally.

I came back though. Everything must come to an end, eternity included. I exhaled and my head jerked violently from from the nook of my palm. My forehead thrashed into the girl who had kissed me before I was abducted into my mind.The first real thing I had seen in an eternity was Emily clutching at her nose.

I had tried my hardest to recreate her from memory, but I had completely forgotten the light freckle at the very corner of her bottom lip. When she is happy to see me the freckle rises with her smile.

"What the f**k!" She wiped a stream of blood from under her nose before it leaked across her lips. "What are you, gay now?"

"Jesus, I've missed you," That was all I could say. Tears spilled from the corners of my eyes and down my face. I didn’t bother to wipe them off. "How could he do that?"

"He? My dad?" She said. Her being upset had gone and been replaced with a childlike curiosity. I felt on display, a primal, unreasonable exhibit.

My lost mumblings gained pace, "Not your dad. It was GOD, The Big Man. He tossed me in and forgot about me, left me with my own mind. How long have I been gone?"

She didn’t answer, but her silence did. I grabbed the phone that had slid from my pocket onto the grass. I had never been gone, maybe for a second. "So you felt something?"

"Foreverness. Yeah, I felt whatever the hell that was." It was an ability to think soberly for an eternity. Time to reminisce and think with complete attention, a sober time to relfect. Nothing has ever been more frightening.

I have seen the faces of my closest friends mesh into a spiral only to reveal the paranoid horrors I believed to be in their heads. I have felt my tongue dry out and vanish. I have had the earth spin under my heels and had my head stricken like a plane from flight. Pills, powders and plants have shown me horrors, but each had their curfew. None could play in me forever. The sanity testing debauchery of those drugs distracted me from the parts of my life to powerful to confront. Not this paradoxyl, it showed me a different horror; eternal sobriety, “You don’t want that, Emily give it to me.”

“Wow, you’re already a fiend.” She said and the pill was getting closer to her mouth. Intention was on her breath. “No way greedy, this one is for me, you had your turn, and you’re alive now so that means this wont kill me.”

She was making an effort to escape real thoughts. She needed something, anything to take her mind off of her broken family and her socially accepted drug-addicted father. This drug, this trap was not away to go about it. She wouldn’t recover like I did. I’m just a pouting defiant kid who uses drugs to stick it to the invisible, imagined authorities watching my every move like I make a f*****g difference. This girl, Emily, Emily has got real problems. She has got s**t to escape, an emotionally dead father and a six-foot under, dead mother. She would be confined to these thoughts forever. I wouldn’t let her.

I slapped the green pill from her hand. In the grass it hid, “No Emily, you can’t have it.”

“You b*****d,” She said and dropped onto her palms. “Forget about me hooking you up again, damn junkie.” She hurried to find the pill, yanking out patches of grass in an impatient rage

“I’m helping you”

“If you wanted to help, you would find that damn pill, put it in my hand and f**k off.”

Like a beacon of evil, I saw the green pill shining under the blades of grass a finger crawl away from Emily’s hand. I tore the thing from the ground, slits of grass clamped between my fingers. “You’ll thank me never, but that’s alright.” And at that I ran from her.

The cushion of the grass absorbed the jabs my feet made against it. I needed the solid concrete to feel I were getting anywhere. And I had it, sidewalk slabs parallel to street asphalt. The thump of my soles echoed from the suburban homes. And then the echoes doubled.

Emily was chasing me. I refused the instinct to look back. Her hair would be trailing behind her and there would be hate pumping red into her cheeks, I knew that already. My legs moved forward, muscles tightened and tore. Her slaps against the sidewalk became louder and even the heartbeat in my ears couldn’t quiet them.

The pill rattled in my palm, and it reminded me to keep on. My blood was thickening, my breathing shortening.

The thumping behind me stopped. I looked back and Emily was clutching her thighs. She coughed, flem seperated in her throat.

“I’m sorry.” I said.

“F**k,” She struggled to speak. “F**k you.”

She started the other way, back toward the park; the sun was on her back and smoke lifted into the air above her. I needed to start my way home. I opened my palm; the skin around the pill had a reflected green. It looked good with the sunlight on it. The walk home took forever.