brushstrokes and gibberish
tanzania, africa
abe
The brushstrokes of varnish against the closet door were absurd. I saw a ribcage. Not a normal cage, an intentional, just to fuck with me, mangled to rubbish rib-like-structure. Clearly, there was a spine down the middle. The ribs were a mess, though. Uneven. Unbothered with their malformed presence. This door concealed the closet in my bedroom, and, as I sat at the foot of my bed staring at this abomination, I was prepared for sickness with a plastic puke bag held just below my chin that began as something we get as a grocery sack in Tanzanian markets.
I wanted to complain about this tragic abnormality, but my landlady was an unevenly brained Ugandan. This fucking door probably made sense to her. I couldn’t whine, though—I was an imbalanced American. Who would know who was right?
I snorted the stuck chunk inward deeply and the heroin jumped from the back of my nose to the bottom of my stomach then bounced back to the roof of my mouth only to push out of my oral and nasal holes and into the bag. My first thought was money wasted… my second was money well-spent on the H. My third was the electricity—when was it coming back on? 7 hours now with nothing. Hydroelectricity is only a good idea when there’s no drought. My fourth turned into the nothingness we all want as a womb from the world around us… the shit was beginning to work.
Later:
Those fucking brushstrokes. I could’ve done a better job painting armless with cerebral palsy, sweeping my head back-and-forth with the brush dangling from my mouth. The H began to smack. My mind began to succumb to the situation—these ribs were breathing. Veins, arteries, internal organs that I couldn’t and still can’t identify appeared to make human movements; inhumane how the mind works on opiates.
The paint job above the closet had always appeared normal and continued to be so… the bottom, though, the bottom half of the door was fucking with me. I saw legs. Maybe a puss, but somehow misplaced. Then I saw a dick below the puss, but it was also misplaced. The dick was below the kneecaps and the puss was somewhere in the stomach.
I reached out to touch the puss, but the door was a bed-length away. I reached further, but even my knuckle-dragging arms didn’t make a difference. The puss was far away. Don’t know what I would’ve done with it anyways, heroin is a far cry from a fuck-drug.
The bag of aftermath dropped from my fingertips onto the floor with a booming sploosh; there was either an echo or the sounds of vomit splattering from the floor upwards only to seemingly bounce from wall to wall.
Funny thing about heroin—if the weather’s hot, I want it to be cold; if it’s cold, well, you can guess that I want it hot. Dar es Salaam is fucking hot. White people sweat while sitting under a tree with a nice breeze as black people work in the open sun without pain; dogs swim in the Indian Ocean then immediately retreat to the shade of any nearby tree; goats, however, just deal with it. I wanted to be a goat, not the dog. But I was the ever-retreating dog that entire year in that country.
I wanted the goat’s ribs heaving against the door to cease. I wanted to be black and have the ability to handle heat. I wanted those ribs to eat, although I knew I couldn’t even eat a morsel of the White Witch’s Turkish Delight if placed before me. I wanted God to reach down and scoop me up into something better. I wanted Aslan to die just to help me. I wanted my grandmother’s halo to dissipate into anything that could help me without regard for her consequence. I wanted to admit that some of the Backstreet Boys’ songs were catchy.
That last thought brought on another puke; however, my puke bag was a squashed bug on the floor, so I chucked on top of the bag. Afterward, my head became an anvil as it fell on the pillow and drifted off into a steelish-sleep.
“Fuck no; I don’t want any of that shit. The other night was fucking terrible. I puked twice.”
'That fucking door. Those fucking ribs. But the H is great.’
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