It started with heat thick and swampy, the kind that clung to the skin like cheap motel sheets and bad decisions. A hollow thrum pulsed through the drywall like an irregular heartbeat of some forgotten machine buried beneath the floorboards. I was in the fourth hour of a bender I didn’t remember starting, in a house I didn’t own, watching her smoke the kind of joint that should’ve come with a waiver and an exorcist.
She was sprawled upside-down on a couch that had seen more sins than confessions, wearing a lace bra the color of apathy and a look that said she'd chew glass if it meant silence. Her legs were kicked up, knotted at the knees, shimmering with the kind of sheen that screamed she hadn’t moved in hours. Or maybe she had. Time had molested the clocks into submission long ago.
The blunt she held—fat, arrogant, defiantly smoldering—wasn’t for the buzz. It was a highlight of her day. A ritual. A weapon. A hymn. Her fingers moved like they’d danced this ballet of vice before, hips relaxed as if the devil himself had granted her temporary reprieve from damnation.
She exhaled upward. Not into the air, no. Into the void, straight into the gallows of every invisible god judging her from the cracked ceiling paint.
There was honey on the ashtray—literal honey, from a busted jar next to a half-eaten peach and erotic pictures of her with other men. The air was saturated with it: burnt resin, heat-split citrus, old sex, and the faint stench of dollar-store candles pretending to be sandalwood. Something buzzed—maybe a wasp, perhaps paranoia. Hard to tell.
I didn’t ask questions. Not the heavy ones, not the hungry ones. Just the quiet ones, the hallway ones—the kind that live in the back of your throat like regret. “What happened here?” I wanted to say. But why break the spell when the magician hasn’t bled out yet?
She laughed, no, cackled a sound that shattered the air like a cocktail glass against a lover’s skull. Her voice was honey-thick, venom-laced. Not a greeting. A challenge. “You ever watch yourself rot from the inside?” she asked.
No, but I could see it now. The hollow under her collarbone held the answer. Her ribs whispered secrets to the sunlight streaming in through slatted blinds that hadn’t been cleaned since hope died in this town.
Every inhale from her lips sucked the world tighter, more grotesque, more beautiful. She was the last honest hallucination in a city crawling with plastic truths and silicone empathy.
We were hydrating off whiskey. We were hiding from headlines. We were half-human and hemorrhaging. There was no hero in this house, just heat, hallucinations, hunger, hoarseness, and her.
And she was the hurricane in a sundress, the why that tore holes in the how. The fourth horseman’s mistress lit the fuse on the last sane neuron I had left.
Somewhere between the smoke rings and the guttural hum of the window unit choking out its last breath, I decided to stop trying to leave.
Hell, the doors were gone anyway.
