On Fire

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On Fire · Opening excerpt

Small towns don’t know what to do with their crazy. Big cities have tall buildings in bad neighborhoods where they can stash all kinds of weirdos; rich people get sent off on vacation to palatial estates where they can recuperate from their “exhaustion.” Small towns, though? Small southern towns? Around here, as long as you aren’t violent, you get bussed to a building that was once an elementary school, a building that has since been purchased by the local Baptist Church for pennies on the dollar and turned into a well-guarded Community Outreach Center.

Drug addicts, psychotics, dementia patients, bipolar depressives – we’re divvied up between the wings of a star-shaped structure with offices and a cafeteria at its center. And me? I’m in with the manics on B wing, but not because I’m disordered, per se. I’m depressed, absolutely, but I didn’t take a steak knife and slit my forearm from wrist to elbow-bend because I was having an “episode.” No, I had legitimate, real-world reasons for downing a fifth of bad whiskey and saying goodbye to this existence. It was just my luck that my lowered inhibitions also meant reduced resolve. Before I could bleed out, my cold survival instincts kicked in, and when I awoke – with the worst headache in recorded history, mind you – I was chagrined to find my wound encased in Reynolds Cling Wrap. I had used a whole goddamn box of the stuff.

The fucking arm hurt like nothing I had imagined possible. Throbbed like you wouldn’t believe. It was on fire from the inside out, and I wanted to rip that red smear of bandage off and finish the job, but Shit! The pain blinded me. Made me deaf. Made me believe that I was already dead, and this was my own personal hell. The real punishment: facing up to what I’d done and admitting to the world that I was a poor, incompetent coward.

Fuck it.