There were seven of us living in a single hotel room shitcake hotel, a dark room with three blankets, piles of drug utensils, and a muted television keeping the room dimly lit. We sat in its glow like slabs of fast food. Between our dirty bodies, hidden under various blankets of garbage, were pipes filled with weed, hash, and opium. Wrapped in wallpaper, I huddled next to my boyfriend. Next to me, lay my boyfriend hidden under a blanket; my ass was sore from his fingering, a little hole torn in the seat of my pants. I swigged some wine and sat up, rubbing my head. 

I stood up in the corner of the room and pissed out the cracked window. A few stray beams of sunlight pierced the gossamer smokehouse and hit my eyes. My brain dried off. 

I walked out of the room, through the lobby past the abyss-eyed clerk and into the street, counting my dollars. I dragged my oversized shoes over sidewalk stones stained with gum, salt, dirt, eyelashes, newspapers, family pictures, diapers with the babies still in them, old men wrapped in newspaper like old fish laid out next to a dumpster holding cans of beer. 

I made it to the bar and ordered a double whiskey. I looked over my shoulder to see a man with no jawbone cough, hack, choke on my backskin. I cut it away with a pizza cutter and he fell shaking to the floor. I knelt over him and cut a silver filling out of his tooth with a butterfly knife.

I finished my drink walking up the street. Brown shutters watered down beat walls, raindrops plunked nickel sewerage coins. A car passed flinging a brick at me, which hit the back of my head. Blood poured; I staggered onto can pile, dropping handfuls of sunflower seeds and coughed up wormy apple blossoms that bubbled and melted landing on the salty sidewalk. I puked, but with a urinal cake wedged into my skull, it backwashed down through my body and squirted out my nose-- puke that tasted of Windex and rust flakes. 

A man grabbed my ear and lead me up the street, but I stabbed him in the asshole with my butterfly knife. I chewed through his achilles tendons, and I pushed him into a garbage truck passing by filled with starving dogs that rendered his body with their teeth. 

Limping up the street in a stupor, I stopped at a roadside stand speakeasy to pick up two gallons of wine. I hid in the back doorway of a Spanish restaurant that threw buckets of leftovers onto a corpse laying next to an immobile, drunken, homeless man.  I lay behind the structure, suckling on the wine, and I watched the faces walk past-- the man who was born with the bottom of his right hand stuck over his face, covering his eyes, nose, and all but the corner of a mouth, where he would gasp for air and insert the occasional cigarette or pipe. I watched as he walked around searching for these things, a few dollars in his pocket. 

He stopped next to me, the side of his body facing me, and I chugged more wine. His body shifted into a slump. He ambled by after I nailed a mouse to his ankle with a tackhammer and a molar. I finished the wine, then I used the hammer to pry a living crab out of my throat that had been swimming around in the wine, and had sliced through my vocal cords.

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