No1: AN OVERDOSE
PHOTO BY LUCIA AUERBACH
REBECCA KOPELMAN
At night, the girl saw birds. They had glistening beaks and slick black feathers, and would circle and peck at her till dawn. After all, with her heart out there on her sleeve like that, who wouldn’t be tempted? In the morning, deep, bloody craters lined her naked haunches and cheeks.
The girl ate a lot of fatty meat, which was apparently bad for your eyesight. It could make you see things, too, in high enough doses. Too much could even make your eyes go yellow and your tears smell like raw bacon. I’m not sure if that’s true--but doesn’t it sound like it? Meat overdose, it has to have happened to somebody in the billions of years that earth’s been around. You could overdose on just about anything.
Once there was an experiment, on lab rats. The scientists in their long white coats, with their clipboards and forms and what-have-yous, they just loved those poor creatures all day. They kissed the tops of their crusty little heads and played with them like they really cared, listened to their problems and told them that of course they were in the right. And you know what those rats did? They overdosed. On love. There’s a finite potential we each have, for love. Once you reach that limit, your heart can just burst.
This particular girl really was afraid of losing her mind. Not in the clinical, understandable sense, but a clouded, medieval one–the kind that drives people to haunt their own homes and scream through the night. Imbalance of the humors, melancholia, demonic possession, whatever you wanted to call it, she felt it coming on. Like a bolt of lightning, it would strike her down any moment, leave her charred and twitching on the spotted sidewalk, gripped tightly in the sweating fist of insanity.
She frequently forgot where she was, hobbling drunkenly down her street. Was she coming or going? She never recalled leaving. Was she drunk? She couldn’t remember, but didn’t think so. Just tired. Untethered. She could already feel her eyes moving away from what was there, seeing past or maybe through reality as it was. If it was.
Time occasionally slowed to a crawl around her and she breathed it in, struggling under the weight of the cold air. It had the same tangible stillness as her grandmother’s nursing home.
Infinity was but a few paces away at any given moment. She could see it, if she squinted really hard, shimmering above the cool ground. It looked like a pair of hands, marked with wet, bloody stigmata, waiting for her to step into their moist hollows. She often watched from a distance as she came unspooled, essence and skin and bones and bowels yanked from body, collapsing into warm oblivion.
Anyway, the birds. She didn’t really know why they were showing up--or whether they were even real--so she stayed up one night, with a friend. Around the time the birds usually came around, she roused her friend. Get ready, she told him, but cover your mouth, otherwise they’ll lay their eggs in there. He said alright, and sure enough after a few minutes they could hear the distant rumble of wings. Soon, the beasts were all circling, croaking and flapping feverishly as ever. The girl screamed like always, while her friend just sat, allowing the birds to tear into his soft skin.
Once they were gone, the girl asked her friend whether he’d seen anything, anything at all. Yeah, he said, the birds. Well? She said.
Well, he said, very logically, wiping a streak of hot blood out of his eye, I think we’ve both eaten too much fatty meat lately, so maybe we should cut down. I heard it can make you see things.
And the girl thought her heart would burst, right then and there.
