TRIGGER WARNING: YUCK

Grandmom wants some of the narcotic I've got stashed in my toe.

She has not been feeling well. There is some foreboding of decline and death, but for the time being she is relatively hale and is currently tending to the barbed wire, the weeds in the front lawn, and similar industry. She has already had one hit but she's welcome to another. She can finish it, and I tell her so without reservation. I don't need it.

It's not cocaine or speed, but it lends both euphoria and energy. That Grandmom has been sick is all the more reason to give her some: it'll make her strong. It is clearly not a drug of this world. It has neither the moral nor the morbid stigma attached to street drugs. Still, I do have a stash of it in my toe.

I am thinking about Bill G——. "Remember that friend of mine I brought over once? Bill?"

Grandmom is on her hands and knees between the dining room and living room, inscrutably cleaning. She suddenly remembers who I mean: "Yeah! with that damn lawn chair."

"Wait—Bill broke a chair as well?" It doesn't occur to me until that moment that we had earlier discussed another friend who had broken another of her chairs; they're racking up. "What is it with my friends and your chairs?"

"I dunno." She looks old suddenly: saggy, with thinning hair. She is busy on the front lawn, alongside the fence. I try to remember the last I heard of Bill, whom I once loved end-of-the-world achingly and who once betrayed that love because ew, faggotry. I consult my clippings; this one is probably from LiveJournal: "Porn star Talvin Demachio...

... [or possibly it was Lance Navarro] ...

 ...[photo credit me] and I went to see Bill last night at the —— Theatre," it starts. So Bill's a showgirl. Somehow, the old LJ information is enough for me to know how to contact him again. Knowing is enough, I discover.

"Got one more for an old lady?" Grandmom asks. I give her my foot. [My foot does not detach but my joints—joints in general, I suppose—are far more accommodating here than in life. The sore does not hurt, even when plied.] "I told you, have as much as you want. Have it all." The stash is inside an infection on the plantar side of the knuckle between the great right distal and proximal phalanges. Fortunately the unnamed narcotic is still snortable when coated in pus. Grandmom goes for a polite sniff and I tell her again to have more. "Here, squeeze it," I say, and I squeeze it so that more crystalline goodness comes oozing out on a tide of pus. She snorts it.

There is no disgust here, no embarrassment. I love Grandmom [rather more jovially and less complicatedly here than I did in real life] and am happy to give her my drugs. I want her to feel better. I'm not sure why my stashbox is internal, but neither of us give it a second thought. Maybe when you have a festering sore, you just make use of it. In this case, at least, it is no more awkward than handing off a tiny silk purse with nummies inside.

I discern that Joe F—— (one of several people in an enormous bed with me) wants another snort, too, so I give him my foot.  I can't really attest to ever having loved Joe, achingly or otherwise, but holy motherfucking shit was that man beautiful back in Newark, 20-few years ago. Unlike Grandmom he is dissatisfied with the phalangeal proceeds and says, "Damn, here I am, just getting these half-assed—" but at that moment a wave of the drug hits him and he shuts up.

"See," I say, "you got some." I roll over in bed and I am awake and alone.