On the Savage Side

by Tiffany McDaniel

The first sin was believing we would never die. The second sin was believing we were alive in the first place.

I lowered my head for thinking of her as everyone else did, as nothing but some stupid addict and woman of little dreams and small mind. My aunt. A woman with a gap left from her rotted-out teeth that she’d spray water out at you through. Both she and my mother were women who could have been queens in a different parade, had they not been so at home in the hole they seemed to dig deeper with each passing day.

“Things have changed for you now, Arc. You’ve got to be like the Grand Canyon. Make your hurt disappear. But not your heart. You’ve got to protect that from your own bitterness that will come for you now.”

Who do you tell about the demons when the demons are the ones who you tell?

“You’re a pretty thing,” he told her. “Did you know, Arc, that snakes come out in storms? They eat the lightning. It lives inside them. Flashes out in the strikes of their tongues. Snakes are full of power from the heavens, and yet, they’ll never be more powerful than a big man.”

“Rocks can be flower bulbs,” she said. “If we believe hard enough.” She planted a rock in every place she had been with a john. “So something good will grow,” she said, packing the earth down tight. We clung to rituals like this because

It wouldn’t be until years later that Bayer, the folks who make our aspirin, coined the name heroin taken from a German word meaning ‘heroic’ because of the feeling the drug gave those who took it. They advertised it as a miracle. The perfect painkiller. It was the medicine of choice used to treat everything from bronchitis to tuberculosis. Mothers gave their children a small dose of heroin at night to help them sleep.”

“Wound a flower, make her bleed. In the pain, the flower cries and you risk becoming something else.”

It was a single moment that made the idea of returning to life unbearable. That was when I knew why some people did it.

“What they don’t tell ya in the history books is that war is fought with sober intention but not always with sober minds.”

Hitler had his own pill that he would send out to his Nazi troops. It was called Pervitin. A pill to make them better fighters. Little did the Nazi soldiers know, they were taking crystal meth.

Speed, cocaine, heroin. Our wars have been fought not with the sobriety that tradition so admires, but with the use and the aid of enough narcotics to super our heroes.

You think if you break the world, she’s yours. But you’re nothing but a tin god. And no matter how many times you try to break the world, she will never be yours. She will, until the end of time, belong to only herself. And for every snake you break, one of her sisters takes her place.

Lives lost to addiction are not always because the victim was the addict. Sometimes you die because the person you love is one.