“You can’t take it away!” Damon clutches at his own, screaming out of his chest rips, his button-up undone in a ripped-open shirt, soaked. He crawls back across a room cluttered with wires and objects with no desk to go, on top of a sleeping bag. His kick backwards has him cornered, slamming into the wall, where the lamp on the ground shudders and wobbles from the impact. He lets out staccato yells, ripping from his pecs, his neck stretching up in thick slugs of vein bulges. His toes are serrated apart in a glistening of energy flooding out the brim through every pore. His lunge kicks throwing as fast as the length of countless shouts.
“You know I would do anything to help?” the voice says whimply in huffs, heard around the corner of the hallway. The other man is still catching his breath somewhere.
Damon’s hair is stuck together in matted paranoid clots of thick blood as glue, and his eyes bolt through one side of the room to the other, shooting veins out of his shining pupils catching sights at the rim of itself, dilated in a deep black reflection. He lets it out in a sharp cutthroat, chasing with reply yelled, “Where are you!?” His hands violently stir the air, stiff and ragged mechanics of a fast flanging motif. His arm swings wide in the imprecision, as he gulps large before gasping, his back still against the fold of two walls meeting. His hand reaches the right pocket of his unzipped jeans, rolling down with an undone belt.
The red of his baggy underwear is showing above his tight bone of waist, with his lower pecs drenching the fabric from above. He jumbles his fumbling shakes of fingers around, finding the pocket, his eyes stretched wide open and his neck pole jutting his head upwards. Damon’s eyes look out over the tip lashes of the bottom eyelid, staring at the doorway with his head cranked against the enclosure. His left hand grips the blue curtain shut, hiding the night.
The jiggle of pills is heard in the bottle he retrieves from his pocket, shaking from the sound of a panicked wet palm not sitting still. He suddenly drops it, and he pilfers the two arms around like long trash pickers extending long and out, almost like he was serving community service for God—without missing the passion of a mad preacher in deathly need of drug trash. His arms continue to juggle about frantically, though now with purpose. He clenches his jaws with teeth grinding left and right. “Fuck!” The quick shock falling out of his mouth.
“What’s going on in there?” The voice is still catching itself from the other man. The steps grow closer, not far now, before almost falling against the hallway, thudding into a slide, down into ground.
Vocals explode with the gust of chest stomping itself loudly, “You can’t take it!” His pulse hammers in unison with the lungs and agitated mind. All his organs, limbs, and thoughts are stammering in a stimulant haze. His right hand slams down, hard and fast; the bottle rattles the more than ten of what was once ninety in the see—through amber cylinder of white cap sealed. He tries jerking in shorter muster jumps against the cap, but it doesn’t open. It almost wrenches into a break from how much he puts his heart into it, still working his torque against the bottle cap of medicine. He mutters in a molar-grasp clamp of a mouse trap for bears, followed by canines ripping open like an alligator before a meal, “Shit! Shit!” The thrashing at the hallway wall outside the room continues in flails.
The zap cuts his commitment like a razor’s edge, and the obvious finds him. He pushes down and squeezes with his damp hand, and the child-proof cap is gone. He pours all of it out immediately into his hand, and the pills scatter like candy out of a pinata. He gasps with a heartbeat stopping. He swallows the however many in his hand without water; he musters a dry swallow down a parched throat, almost choking. He begins to pick up every little tablet he spilled onto the sleeping bag now.
Tiny pinches at each little caplet, collecting each between his smudgy fingerprint secretion; damply. The coating almost wears off from the heat of his clammy tips of hand, swollen red and numb. He is bent down now, counting every little chick of the flock, like a good shepherd. The man quietly whispers in focused speed so fast that it almost mixes the words into one, “That is all of them.” His head lifts; the lights all go out. The room sinks into a black with no edges, the curtain keeping out any trace of the night. His shout shreds the neck long in a boil of growl, following as reply to the dark entering, “No…!”
The other man’s weight falls on top of him, a bullish slam at his soaked squared pecs, and he is almost made into the wall at once; breathlessly filled. He cannot see a face in the black, only the heat and mass of a shape pinning him down. The salty drink of another’s moisture lathers his face and teeth from a swath of palm across his open lips, the other’s fingernail almost rolling under the eye socket. “You won’t take it!” the man with the drug screams at the aggressor, before he sprawls open his jaws like a starving hippo at the meat of hand, biting with a tweaking titanic force.
The incisors and canine teeth rupture through not just the wet skin, but even into the bone, like a dog chewing through both flesh and body of a chicken flat, crushing calcium into shattered glass. The carrot finger smashes and rips apart into his mouth, severed with blood gushes. The aggressor screams out the sincerity of the roar from his bite, the pain unmistakably had firsthand. The finger is spat out into the dark.
“Damon!” the aggressor screams at him. The other man climbs his weight onto Damon’s chest before prying open the jaws like an anaconda’s, his hands feeling blindly for what bit the hand that feeds. Damon starts letting loose a pitch at the torturous dentist, his victimhood showing in frantic noises splattering with sparse spit from an open and dry mouth. Damon sharpens his knee with intentions, and it shoots like a hate piston cranked in primal survival. The aggressor is shot at the testiculars with the bruise shot, its contusion knots backing up into the pelvis as hard as the wall Damon was slammed into earlier. The grip at Damon’s mouth loosens during the aggressor’s everything but gullish cry.
Damon, sensing his moment in the dark, rolls his hands and arms at the other’s lower arm. He throws his left leg up and behind the aggressor’s right leg, and he swindles onto him at the same time his right elbow slides hard through the cheekbones while on its way to the back. Now half mounting, Damon pushes the arm up and out from the chest, closing around the blades, while his body weight falls into the shoulder. The aggressor’s right leg is wrapped in Damon’s during the roll onto his back. Damon cranks back the arm while laying into the shoulder, rolling his ass over the other man’s left leg for balance against struggles. Damon still holds the cluster of pills in the wet palm of his now left hand, where the right hand had plucked them out from the floor.
The aggressor below Damon tries screaming through his puckered lips stuffing the ground, and his sounds are only made out with him from the ground he kisses. Damon lets him explode his strength against him, letting him tire out, letting the squirms grow weaker. When he feels the electric fry itself, he places a torso deadweight addition to his push of elbow crash, the contractive rise downwards and into the back of the immobile skull. The sound muffles hard and long. Then another throw of elbow, and another, each one found by feel and sound in the still black room without light. Eventually, the tired aggressor, turned into a wounded casualty, tries to merely cover his head as he winds up into a fold of himself, his body giving up and just limply taking each and every beat.
The loudness of cries is gagged and quiet in escape, each and every one followed by crying pants starving of breath, “Stop…!—Stop…!” Damon throws punches into the side of the other man’s face, his knuckles clubbing hard still, but slowing a little each time. In the black, he cannot see the face under his knuckles, only feel it give. Nothing… The punches stop for a moment. Damon leans forward a little now, his hands holding up his weight on the other’s head.
Fast inhales slowing down. Slowing. Still for a moment. Not much sound or movement. Quieter now. Eventually, Damon drops his head against the back of the other man crying. His wet forehead and nose rub against the nape of the other’s hair, and the bridge of his nose drags across it. His breath, labored, comes out from his resting crown, before he hovers his lips, giving a soft pucker and kiss over the crying man’s hair, followed by a long glide of a single lick. Damon’s panting is heard monstrously intimate more and more as it nears the other’s ear, dragging up and closer to it, his voice low in a primal hold of the other man’s sanity. He gives one last kiss to the behind of his ear, a slow smooch long. His voice is heavy through exhales until he pushes himself off the other man. The man on the ground weeps to himself.
Damon goes out into the hallway of the trailer from the doorway he leans on, his body weak and tired. He had stumbled into it, really, with carelessness from fatigue. Another rise and fall of lungs; a pattern. In. Out. In. Out. Sickly felt tired, then tired felt sickly. Inattention as rest. Calming down a bit. He walks a little slowly.
In the hallway, Damon starts lazily dragging his soaking arms across the brown wallpaper that imitates wood grain, to help support his mass. He finally reaches the second door frame of a bathroom with a door barely hanging onto its hinges. He looks down, realizing his pants are already unzipped, so he only has to roll down his sweaty red underwear, the bottom of his cock’s heavy trunk revealing itself before heavy hanging balls; all of it soaked and musky. He lets out a long stream of clear piss, and the arch runs up the rug below the bowl, and climbs with correction into toilet water. His dick, balls, and shaking hand are all drenched wet together, and he finds himself a little grossed out by himself; he has a moment to realize he needs a shower. The toilet has stains and scum stuck onto the inside of the bowl, neglected unto its now state.
In the small bathroom, he looks into the mirror and sees himself. His reflection shows the scruffled hair tangled by the paste of thick blood throughout. His swollen and busted lower lip bleeds. Damon’s eyes aim a squinty distance at his view, with depth past himself, and the pupils are dilated with high between his eyelashes; a high of more than one substance. The buttoned shirt is ripped open further, his muscles painted in gleaming lather. He sees his body and feels detached for a moment, finding his own image unreal, like clay.
His stream grows weak and trickles a little onto the floor as his heart loudly pumps through a tight strain in his ears; he is finished pissing. Memory: it is reintroducing the pills, so where are they? He checks if he still has the drugs and opens his left hand. Damon finds the stimulant smudged on the outside, the print rubbed off and his palm coated with their almost clay or putty dissolve, becoming like wet crayon melt at the exterior.
He thinks of an idea, before simply saying, “Fuck it.” He opens the medicine cabinet, picks out one of many amber bottles, and pours out its meds into the toilet bowl he just pissed into. He takes his large roll of thick index to push the small metal lever, and the old toilet lazily whirls away its water with a shulking and sheeking suck. He tries dropping the pills he kept warm into the emptied bottle, but they are stuck to the heat of his skin. He uses the brim to both scrape off and catch them, sliding its dull edge underneath them, like peeling dry mud off of rocks. After gathering his flock of tablets, he twists the cap onto the bottle, placing it into his right pocket.
He spits a little blood out into the sink before going into the hallway. He goes to the safe in his brother’s room, found in the closet, before the bathroom and past his own room, and he cracks in the numbers through spins he knows. The lock’s curved guarding clicks loose, and he lifts its hang left, away from the joint. As he opens the large square chest of metal, he sees it, a nine millimeter pistol, its magazine already loaded, he thinks. He grabs it, walking back out into the hallway, his heart beating hard into his ears still. At the doorway of his own room, he drags up the weight of the barrel from the grip, and hangs it at a point towards the corner, before flipping the light switch on with the other hand.
The former aggressor, his brother, looks up from the floor; his disbelief is written in a childlike shock, through a pouting stare of a man bleeding out the head. The brother is seen holding the finger that was chomped off in one hand. The long line of numbers dialed onto his phone is unable to be seen, and Damon says through his distant face, “Brother, I’m sorry.” The shots ring the ears immediately with every pounding fire of the gun, shells flying, recoil shaking up every which way, as the brother becomes more limp with each shot. Clicks then follow from the finally empty magazine.
Damon walks over the now corpse of his brother, seeing the numbers dialed at last, where the phone lies on speaker mode on the ground. The digits on the screen read as this: 25291791441265.
Damon stares, his heartbeat feeling slightly more loud and heavy now, “Fuck…”
The voice speaks through the phone; it’s the father of both brothers, “Hey, son…? You took a little too much; your tail is a little far down your throat now, son. Did you forget? I know you can hear me.” The voice cackles in low quality, with fuzz roughing at the edges of the sound. Its electrical noise breathes zaps into Damon’s ear, where resonances thin out into the sharpest felt distance; surgically. The scent finds its way through the brain, where the savory slur smell of blood spit rings a deja—vu alarm.
Lowly said to himself, Damon speaks, “No…”
The father speaks, “Listen, if you want to get out, you need to take the rest of the pills. I know it doesn’t make sense right now, but just trust me.” The almost static edges of the vibrations coldly overcome the warmth of a sweaty high. Damon gulps hard, and the room blurs a little now, where the walls are running in place.
Damon asks his dad, “Dad, are you real?” His stomach crawls out of his throat. The intestines follow suit in the other direction, almost falling out of his ass. The wrenching suspense of God weight pressure forms his strain of heart worse than before.
The buzzing texture mixes with his dad’s gravelly age voice into the speaker, “Yeah… I’m real.” A moment of stillness follows, with Damon still fevered, before more thin yet full audio, “You need to take those pills, all of them. There is no other choice, son. This is how it works.”
Damon is riddled in a further high coming on, his heart beating at the ribs’ confinement like a prisoner in a cell, and his clamminess grows stronger than yesterday. The dry breath climbs like barbed wire out of the throat, shallow, breathing in the swirls of a room distant yet close in smells of red metal sludge. He feels like he is caught in the loop of a death factory. He looks down at the barrel of his pistol, wondering… What if? The clicks come quietly from it, his finger squeezing the trigger over and over, every click reminding him of how fucked he is.
The father reminds in a calm voice a little heavy, the signal breaking up slightly, like the world is being as torn apart as the phone connection, “Damon, son, you know I wouldn’t lie to you.”
Damon is hit with the lightning zaps of a hanging man, one machine and another shadowed. He gulps again. His heart ceases to clap for a moment. The cold sweat rolls down the dimples of his back. Shock finds him pale with a gut churn. He lifts his toe into a step in the direction of resistance.
“Souh—n…?” The father speaks through the slits of imperfect UDP packets that find their way out of the speaker.
Damon picks up the phone and walks out into the hallway, finding the hue of the yellow bathroom light terrifyingly familiar. He feels as if he could shit himself. He stumbles with each wave of fatigue, and the muscles are exuding the fires of a brain burning high with a cold dry extinguisher of a father’s plea. The father speaks again; this time the signal finds itself clear at first, with only faint sharps of grey and white noise cutting itself out, “Son, please, you know I wou—ld—n’tn’t—lie…lie—to you. You can still turn back.”
Damon stops his walk before the doorframe of a neglected bathroom, blood in the sink, a knob for hot water missing from yesterday’s high on the toilet, and piss soaking into the rug over the carpetless ground. “What kind of world is this?” Damon asks out loud in quiet, through a damaged voice. His hesitance… What if there is a world where love exists here? Flashes: the flashing vision of earlier, where he and his brother fought in the hallway over the pills, where the brother took bites at his foot kicks; the flashing vision of plummeting through clouds; the flashing vision of being forcefully fed gummy flesh like teeth by the rosy cheek puppet in overalls; the flashing vision of pulling himself out of a maiden as another person… What? The sound of a woman finds him from inside and afar at once, “Christopher!” His insides boil as his extremities sweat further cold.
It doesn’t feel right to listen to his father. He must get rid of the pills, he thinks, and he will pour them into the toilet.
He walks above the toilet, his left clam of hand holding onto the counter of a bathroom sink—which sinks into the water-damaged rot of a carpetless wood floor. He pulls out the pill bottle, warmed by his wet pocket. He almost twists it, before—a tackle finds him thrown sideways, the ground throwing the wind out and into the scatter of air. He lies in his piss rug, where his brother, still riddled in a multitude of fatal gunshots, drops his fist down at his head like a mad—hound dog rotting in rabies. Damon foams at the mouth with eyes empty.
The slams covering Damon all over make his mind rise into the distance above, watching the small little filth of bathroom violence float like a cube in a pond of black, seeing through its wall from the outside. The further out his mind goes, the greater the void covers its outer enclosure, and he watches himself punched open at the face.
Damon tries raising his hand on the urine-stained rim of a toilet bowl to lift himself out of the beating, and the beating follows him on the way up, forcing him to almost hug the bowl. His brother grabs him by the clumps of hair stuck with gummed-up knots of blood dried, tying it up in tangles. The bloodshot eyes of his brother bulge out like a menace of God’s wrath. He drives his shoulder and arm into an extension, and Damon’s skull is pushed into the toilet bowl. In each tenth of the moment, the rim thuds the teeth, crunches the nose cartilage, and pounds at the balls of the eyes, all of Damon’s face jammed hard into the edge. The crash against the seat makes blood run.
The wet of blood reinvigorates the whiff of dry urine scum, bringing the scent into a mixture for Damon’s smell. His nose’s sense is the only thing remaining to reach him in the growing height away from himself. His huffs of inhales sharply sting with the ideas of urine and iron grounding him amid the smacking of his head against the shitter.
From the furthest away, where the size of the universe is contained in a dirty bathroom of every human secretion, the largest room shrinks into a pool of black. The void stretches overhead and around the lit cube, and Damon’s mind keeps rising, the bathroom growing smaller and smaller below him. The bloodshot eyes of his brother burn with a distance unfathomable, adding the burn only more so unto his soul. In the sharp pain replaying, the phone speaker is heard from afar, saying through broken noise, “Yeah… He didn’t listen. Yeah… We’ll have to repeat it again.” Down below, Damon’s own eye is blank in a robotic drool, the trauma too large to fit inside the mind. The fever crawls in a twitch out of his head and through the pores, unable to keep it all inside the brain. Broken.