He walks across the cemetery as he has done every Saturday at noon for the last year, a rose in one hand and a bar of chocolate in the other. It is summer, and there is not a cloud in the sky. He feels the sun on his face and grimaces. It is not hot enough. Nothing is ever hot enough. He reaches the two graves and deposits the gifts he has brought – the rose for the woman, the chocolate for the boy – speaking their names as he does so. It is many months now since he last heard them speak back, but he intends to remedy this soon.

He notices the sun is now low in the sky. He is not surprised; time always behaves strangely when he is here. Sometimes it flies by, like today, when he has been visited by a host of good memories. Other times pass so slowly that he feels himself growing roots into the cemetery’s ground. Perhaps the latter is not such a bad thing. Maybe if time passed even slower he would eventually find himself completely immersed in the earth and they would all be together again.

He has some time to kill before he can visit his dealer, so he takes the long way round to the inner city. The good memories persist, so it is a pleasant walk, but he wonders whether this means he will not be in a suitable frame of mind for what he intends to do later. The drug seems to work better when he is dejected or angry – the comedown in particular is far more intense, and this is the important part.

He thinks back to his first experience with it, the evening after the funeral. After he had left the other mourners on the pretense of wanting to go to sleep, he had walked for hours, meandering through the city with no thought to where he was going, no thought to anything other than the flames that had engulfed his house with his family in it, and the young firefighter who had stopped him from running in. He found himself in a part of town he had never been to before, though he recognised it from crime related features in the local news. He suspected that the only reason he hadn’t been mugged already was because he looked like death – like two deaths, in fact.

“Fifty for six burners,” a kid whispered as he passed. It was the name of the drug that did it. He reached into his pocket for a fifty and handed it to the kid in exchange for six pills wrapped in newspaper. A taxi drove past and he flagged it down, suddenly nervous about his surroundings. Once back at the characterless apartment he had rented he called himself an idiot, but didn’t throw away the pills. He sat in the armchair and put the packet in his lap, contemplating all that had happened and wondering, What would be the harm?

There was no harm, as it turned out. Some mild hallucinations that lasted some time, and a feeling of warmth spreading from the inside out. Once the visions started to fade, the warmth was replaced by an almost painful burning sensation. The next night he tried two pills at once; the day after that he tried three. The hallucinations were more vivid and lasted longer each time, as he expected. The clincher, though, was the burning sensation. It seemed to increase exponentially with each pill taken. After a few weeks of working himself up to taking the three pills, he bought two packs. He took all twelve pills together and experienced burning pain on the comedown like nothing he had ever known. But still it was not hot enough. He wondered whether anything would ever be hot enough and it was then that the plan formed in his mind.

Now he arrives at the insalubrious part of town and walks to the kid on the corner, and the familiar exchange takes place. He hasn’t taken a single pill for around six months now, but still he buys them, week in, week out. He takes a taxi back to the apartment and pours himself a large glass of water. He brings out a box from the kitchen cupboard and opens it. He adds today’s purchase to the pile of pills in the box. He doesn’t bother to count them but estimates he has around 150 pills to get through. His internet searches have confirmed that less than one third of that amount would be lethal, so he is in no doubt as to the final outcome of his plan. He just hopes that this time it will be hot enough.

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Tags: drugs, fire, fridayflash, grief, Writing

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