Misty

Misty 1:
09 Sept. 2015
         Misty is sure she’s dying, has been for about two hours, as near as she can estimate through the fog. We find Misty lying in the rain in what is obviously the wrong side of town, and death is not coming quickly. She is exceedingly aware of pain in her chest and stomach, but it’s all coming through that dream-like haze. She can’t focus on any one part of the experience, but finds herself wondering when she will relive her youth, the whole “life flashing before her eyes” kind of thing, and this only the latest of her foggy wonderings. At some point during the last two hours she had wondered about the appearance of a bright and brilliant light, a tunnel, an out-of-body experience, something to signify that yes, the end is indeed near. Where were all of the dead relatives who were supposed to be there to beckon you home when you finally closed your eyes in this life? She had never given such things real thought, preferring to leave matters of spirituality to those better equipped for the pondering. Lying here in what she can only assume is a drainage ditch near her dealer’s duplex she suddenly finds herself very curious about the validity of such claims by the dead and dying. She hopes they were all lying.
         She wants very badly to simply roll over on her side and rub her aching arm, but is unable. Her body will not respond to her brain, as a matter of fact, she decides that her body has most definitely rebelled against her. She was supposed to be captain of this ship and yet here she is, suddenly aware that her bowels have evacuated themselves purely of their own accord, her bladder too. Mutiny’s afoot, Mr. Smee, that much is for sure. She knows she should cry, should care, should feel something, but she's not surprised that the only emotion is impatience. She wants death to just finish what it has started, have its say, but get on with it. Half an hour ago she had given up the hope that maybe the heroin had been bad, or cut with something that might be causing her to hallucinate. That might have worked if she were new to this game. She knows what heroin can do and what it can’t, and as much as she had wished for it to be the drugs, she knows it’s not.
         Hey, look here now, a memory, maybe it’s starting. Her childhood, she couldn’t remember much of that on any given day prior, but here in the gutter, some of it is finally coming through. “How sweet,” she thinks.
         A little girl with blonde curls, picturesque really, had she ever been that girl, she assumes she was; once upon a time, but she knows that the child is not named Misty; Misty is a whore’s name. Danny gave her that name not long after they had met. The name that she had left behind is presently eluding her, but that’s no surprise. Moving on: The little girl rides a tire swing into the blue sky and back down again, where a strong, sure, and dependable hand finds her back, and sends her back into the blue. She’s laughing, - Misty the child, not Misty the whore/junkie, no, that Misty hasn’t laughed for quite some time. Anyway, the child is laughing, and so is her father who is holding back for fear the child may fall if he pushes too hard, but to a child, it’s like flying. Things are so much bigger to the young; greater in every respect than the sum of their parts. She must have been swinging a hundred feet in the air the child would have said, flying where only the eagles were supposed to go. And her dad, who just-so-ya-know, could beat-up anybody else’s dad, steps to the front of his swinging daughter, holding his arms out to her. “Fly to me.” He shouts, laughing as he does.
         The girls own smile falters, yeah, it’s all fun flying on her little tire, but through the air with nothing between her and certain death – certain death, could a child really think such things – she is hesitant to jump. Daddy wins though, and she throws caution to the wind, flying toward him, her own arms outstretched, and lands gingerly in his grip, truth told never more than four feet off the ground. He swings her round-and-round as he has so many times just to hear her laugh, and pulls her close for a hug, a tight embrace that says “you’re mine, and no one can have you. No one. Ever." It’s a hug that the junkie from the gutter would barely remember missing all these years on her own. “Wasn’t he the liar?” she thinks.
         “What was his name,” she wonders to herself, surprised that she can’t remember, knowing that she should. She credits this one to the heroin, sorry death, this one ain’t yours. Focusing on the man whose embrace warms her even here in the drain where she lays, the scene changes from a spring day on a swing, to a rainy day in Detroit where she had been given her first hit, her first fix. Her boyfriend, and later pimp, Danny Valentino, what a name she still thinks, had told her that this stuff would make her fly, fly like she had never flown before. She doubted this as he put the needle into the vein in the crook of her arm, pushed the plunger slowly downward, and opened her eyes to a beautiful new way to forget; a beautiful new way to forget everything. He was right, this was flying. Daddy had never sent her to these heights, and she loved Danny for it. Eventually she would love him enough to do anything he asked, no matter how degrading it was, or how vehemently the voice in her head told her not to, that she was better than that, deserved better than that, a voice that sounded very much like the voice of the man laughing and yelling “fly to me!” But man, it was so worth it. She was really soaring, flying with the eagles again – no she was looking down on the eagles now, they were but mere specks against the green grass as she soared through the stratosphere. Any bad decision she had ever made was down there too, somewhere below the eagles, and most importantly, nowhere near her.
         It was the coming down that she remembers most, lying in the ditch. Daddy hadn’t been there to catch her, and she was falling from more than three or four feet this time. She had never experienced pain like she had that day, the most bitter-sweet day of her life. She had come crashing through the ozone, through the clouds, past eagles so fast that she was barely aware that they were even there. Her bad decisions, her life, were all there too as she fell, pummeling her way through them as they laughed and jeered her. Danny was there though. He wouldn’t catch her, she would definitely hit the ground, but that would be an easy fix, her new hero was in large supply as long as Danny was happy, and keeping Danny happy was one thing she knew she could do. And hitting the ground wasn’t so bad if it could be so easily forgotten. All so easy.
         Back in the ditch, the ditch that Danny had left her in, refusing to fix her because she had been a bad girl, a lesson he had said. “Lessons only work if the pupil lives long enough to learn from it you idiot,” she thinks bitterly, somewhere in the fog, and smiles, her body finally obeying a simple order. Her throat tightens and she feels something squeezing its way up and out. She can’t see what it is, but she knows it’s blood, can taste that coppery-bitter tang that should tell her something, but she is too far gone, things too faded for her to care, much less worry about what it means. She heaves again, expelling more blood and something meaty, and closes her eyes one final time. She is mutely aware that her eyes are supposed to be open, isn’t that the way all the corpses in the movies looked? - Those staring eyes, staring through you, staring at nothing until the gentle hand of a friend lovingly passes over them, closing the lids one final time. But hers still close; she is afforded this last bit of control, there are no friends here to do it for her when the time comes. She is thinking of Danny, how much she had loved him, how sick it had been, and how much she loves him still and wretches anything that is left onto the front of Danny’s favorite Metallica t-shirt, he had been gracious enough to let her keep it, her death shroud. “I deserve this,” she thinks, “Daddy you’re wrong, I deserve every bit of this,” her final thought.
         We leave Misty in the gutter outside of Maurice Barlow’s nest, his batchler’ pad, he calls it when Danny’s favorite girl is entertaining him. We leave her lying here, she can tell us no more; give us no further glimpse into where she came from, how she got here. She can only tell us where she’s going, and she’s said all she can on that matter. As we drift upward and away, we can only wonder if Daddy was there to catch her, and a quick glimpse of her death mask tells us that he wasn’t, nowhere near. 
         Now, to go forward, let us move back…