Heroin Chronicles Read Online Free PDF

at him as she closed the door. He was asleep. She was thankful for that. She didn’t want him to be awake, his eyes searching for her next move, looking for what he could get.
    She did everything with awareness of every creak, every footfall. She didn’t want to share. There wouldn’t be enough. She reached into the medicine cabinet, took one tampon from the back row of many, pulled it from the cardboard applicator, and emptied the hardened pelts of cotton hidden behind it into her hand. The faucet clacked and chattered. She stood unmoving for a moment, listening. Then let the dribbling of water fill a white top from a water bottle. She added the cotton stones, watching them soften and bloom. It would be a shot of mostly cool water in her veins. She began the extraction, hoping for gold. Hoping whatever made it into the syringe would take the edge off, get her a little well—it wouldn’t. She would once again be the victim of her exaggerated memory.
    Eliza settled onto the rim of the tub, her legs straight, locked against the door. The syringe in her mouth held in place by lip and teeth, she wrapped her hand tight around her upper arm, pumping her fist, searching for a welcome spot in the crook of her arm. She stuck the needle in, a little blood came swirling out, the edge got fuzzy. But it didn’t disappear. She got up from her perch and began to clean up: syringe flushed with water and back in the cup with their toothbrushes, he would know, but she would at least make an effort.
    Eliza caught her reflection in the mirror and held her own gaze. Her eyes maintained a permanent shade of fading pink, sharp high cheekbones held up her taut, hollow, brown skin. Her face littered with black spots. Souvenirs from scratching and picking, God knows what else.
    â€œI don’t look so bad. Nothing makeup can’t hide.” The mistake of her words hit her before she had time to find solace in her own sophism. She pulled back her long, black, thick hair—still strong. She let it fall down her back. Something to flick and play with, she thought, something for the johns to hold onto. She smiled, and too many black spaces where once there were teeth smiled back. “Fuck, I’m too young.” She gripped the side of the sink, then let go, walking carelessly out of the bathroom.
    His eyes glazed with sleep, yet questioning, met her. His gaze traveled the distance between where he sat at the edge of the bed, to the dribble of blood rolling down her arm. “What about me? Where’s my fucking breakfast? I’d like to wake up, roll over, and get high too.”
    â€œFuck you, Eli.”
    Eliza walked to the faux kitchen—a counter, a sink, a hot plate—and began to wash dishes; an assortment of kept takeout food containers, a seemingly endless supply of spoons, and a pot. Their apartment was the first in a row of the shiniest-little-shit-holes along Fifth Avenue in Ybor City, Tampa Bay. Eli’s vocation of dishwasher had kept them in deluxe digs for a while, before he managed to get fired from almost every restaurant on the ten-mile stretch of the Seventh Avenue strip. Now they worked together selling themselves, usually Eliza’s self, whatever it took to maintain their habits and the lifestyle.
    â€œRoll over and get high is all you ever do, you fuck,” Eliza mumbled.
    â€œWhat!”
    â€œI didn’t say anything.”
    Eli stumbled around, checking the empty dope bags and gum wrappers that littered the apartment floor, wanting a miracle of found glory.
    Eliza finished up in the kitchen. She put on her self-styled lime-green and fluorescent-pink floral-print mini-muumuu, slipped on her white platform flip-flops, and headed for the door. “I’ll be right back.”
    â€œWhere are you going?”
    â€œTo Brett’s.”
    Brett was their sixty-plus-year-old neighbor. He was rumored to be a plumber, but they had never seen him head out to a job in