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the station as Joe flew off in a hail of blood. Tania felt it hit her in the face, like some obscene custard-pie gag. Joe’s insides splashed across the face of a screaming woman next to her with the impact of an open-handed slap. The woman fell to the floor screaming, covered in gore.
    People were running around in confusion. The train came to a stop halfway into the tunnel, with Joe’s mangled corpse caught in the wheels, ripped into meaty fragments across the track, shredded and starting to cook in the hot crevices of the brake levers. In the mayhem, nobody noticed a silent, decaying woman silently make her way off of the platform.
    She considered following Joe into the path of an oncoming train in the weeks that followed. As the sickness worsened, Tania found that the quickest, easiest way to do it was asphyxiation. The biggest problem was that when she held the plastic bag tight over her head, and the heat started to build as she instinctively gasped for breath, the urge to tear the bag off was almost unbearable. It took several attempts before she was able to see it through for the first time. After that, Tania was a pro. Once you rode out those two or three minutes of panic, death came on slow and easy, like sliding into a warm bath. Instead of rotting wounds or a bleeding anus, she was left with a red face—the result of the blood vessels constantly erupting under her skin. But she looked no worse, she supposed, than many of the alcoholics she had met at the meetings.
    But still, she did consider doing what Joe did. Maybe it would be easier to just cease to be , once and for all. The rush was becoming less and less, and the withdrawal symptoms seemed to intensify with each passing week. The past few months she had become a ghost, a shell, something that existed only in the shadows.
    A month or so later, something happened that made her change her mind about following Joe. She was visiting the quiet section of Griffith Park where she’d spread Joe’s ashes. She was just sitting there, watching the sky as the golden hour began to fade. The place was silent, peaceful. The noise and heat of the city may as well have been a million miles away. It was in this fleeting moment that she thought she heard it, an almost subliminal noise carried softly to her in the breeze.
    Tania …
    Taaania …
    Pleasssee …
    Pleasse …
    Just one more fix …
    And then I’ll quit …
    For goood …
    The tears came then, as she finally understood the true extent of Joe’s hell. She imagined him reduced by a crematorium’s violent heat to a billion little ashes, countless tiny fragments of carbon, dumped out of an urn and left to flit around in the careless breeze. She imagined Joe clinging to the underside of plants and trees, lost in discarded beer cans, and stuck in piles of fresh dog shit. And all of those infinitesimal specks of what he once was still burning with that terrible sickness, that unimaginable yearning, a billion fragments of Joe still futilely screaming out for the relief of a fix he could never have again.
    Tania stood stiffly, and addressed the breeze: “Goodbye, Joe. I’m sorry. I can’t help you anymore. I’ve got my own habit to feed.”
    And then she was gone. As the sun sank behind the hills, the park fell into miserable, pensive silence once more.

S OPHIA L ANGDON grew up in Tampa, Florida, and moved to New York City in 2003. She is a writer of short fiction and a poet. She is currently working on a short story collection titled What’s Normal About Love? and two books of poetry, Love Letters to My Master and Is This How the World Turns Out . She can be seen performing selections of her poetry at various venues throughout New York City.

hot for the shot
    by sophia langdon
    E liza stepped with light protracted steps to the bathroom two feet away from their bed, and headed toward the stash she had been hiding: her old cottons. She looked back