The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch Read Free Book Online Page B

covered in shrub scrapes and scratches and my head felt like cotton.
    Again.
    I wanted to do it again.
    I wanted to eat all the colors and see what I felt. No. I wanted to eat all the colors to get to the not feel. But even that was not enough for a burning girl.
    One night there were white lines on mirrors ready for me when I entered. “ Look,” I said laughing, “I’m Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz! Poppies!” Breathing in the white, breathing out comprehension and emotion.

    What I learned about Lubbock from the people in that basement was a different brand of education. Someone’s father had been kidnapped and murdered. Police found him in the stockyards under the hooves and shit of cows. Someone’s
brother had O.D.’d and killed his girlfriend on the way under with a shard of glass from a mirror. Someone’s mother had murdered his brother and sister - ages seven and 12 - because jesus told her to. They were wicked, jesus had said into her ear. One woman’s uncle was a pedophile, but no one in the family was willing to send him to the slammer, so they gave him an attic apartment. Another woman’s brother hustled coke over the border. One guy’s Mexican best friend had been found with his hands and his dick cut off next to the train tracks - the severed items in a Glad bag. Monty’s half-brother was in the state hospital for repeatedly raping a retarded girl neighbor.
    I don’t know how else to tell this but straight no chaser. These dramas … these over the top horror stories seething with blood and immorality … they made me feel better. Like television does. Less like a damaged daughter. A failed student. A slut. An athlete gone to seed. And what was in the basement helped feelings leave my body altogether, so I didn’t need to know who I was, or why, or anything at all.
    Two.
    Three.
    One.
    When I walked into the basement the second year, I was nearly always by myself. I didn’t care who else was there. I didn’t care what the room looked like. What posters were on the walls. What the shit brown couch had all over it. What did interest me was the set-up on the table. There sat a spoon and a tray with cotton, a lighter and a syringe. I picked the spoon up and put it in my mouth. Monty said “huhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhu huh where do you want it?”

    I said “Here,” and slapped my arm hard enough to raise a vein.

Zombie
    FOR PART OF MY LUBBOCK LIFE I BECAME A ZOMBIE. Not a flesh eating one. Gross. I’m no cannibal. No, I was of the high functional type, like so many of the people around you right. This. Second. We’re everywhere.
    In zombieland I met an M.D. one night at a club who snorted enough to drop an elephant. His license plate read “DR IS IN.” I met a cop with chronic back pain from a gunshot wound who smoked it rolled up in little brown cigarettes. I met a Mexican sculptor who cooked it up with peyote. I met a woman who took care of toddlers during the day and left reality every night and came back to tend to children in the morning with droopy eyelids. My creative writing teacher, two swimmers, a football star, the owner of a popular restaurant, musicians, artists, and oh yeah. Junkie zombies.
    I liked the fang of the needle. I liked chasing the dragon. I still like watching the action of a syringe in an arm. It actually makes my mouth water. Even in movies.
    30 seconds from being to nothingness.
    And I liked how my life, and what it was and wasn’t, simply left.
    When you enter zombieland, everything looks a little like it is underwater. Slow motion and thick. Other people look a bit cartoonish - their movements too quick, their mouths and eyes sometimes taking on weird shapes, their arms and legs occasionally morphing into snakes or animal heads. Sometimes you
find yourself giggling at inappropriate times. Also, things are sleepy. Like in a lucid dream.
    Actually, it’s exactly like lucid dreaming. According to neurobiology, in a lucid dream, the first thing that happens is that