I take the orange box from the pantie drawer and gently slide off the cover. Inside is a small note written on a blue, heart-shaped post it note.
“You Found Me!” It says. “One pill will make you grow bigger and one will make you grow smaller. LoL. I’m not saying which is which, and I am saying you can take only ONE!” I start to giggle and I look at the pills that were beneath the note. They look like newborn babies sleeping in incubators. They are almost identical though one seems to have a strange insignia engraved on it. I quickly close my eyes and the first pill I touch I grab and I toss it into my mouth. I swallow it with a knotted feeling at the back of my throat and put the orange box back into the drawer and cover it up with the tangerine thong. I walk over to a painting of what appears to be a baby angel. I look at it and it is glowing, the eyes are precious and innocent but in the next moment they are evil and presumptuous. The little girl’s grin becomes a scowl and I start to feel like she is sucking me in, like she wants to grab hold of my throat with her teeth, rip it open and suck out gushing blood. I run away from the room and grab the black cat. I hold him close to me and ask him if it’s alright. His claws come out and prick my arms. I throw him away and he becomes a bat and smashes against different walls in the room. I turn to the white cat and she is grinning. Her eyes are swirling balls of green smog, her mouth opens and she speaks. “You faggot!” she yells at me, her voice some ancient brass instrument. I look down at myself and my skin is stained in tangerine. I try to wipe it off but the color gets more and more intense. I run to the bathroom and rip off my clothes and hop into the shower. The water is boiling and I feel bits of my skin coming off as each drop hits me. I cry for the first time in ten years as the tangerine washes away. I can’t find a towel so I dry myself off with the Globe and Mail. It doesn’t work. I go into Sara’s room and I roll on the carpet. When I stand up I am clean again and cold and naked. I find a shirt and shorts and I take Sara’s bike from the spare room. Her bike is pink and gearless and it has little red streamers on it. I wheel it out of the apartment and onto the street. I bike down the hill. The wind hits me like a thousand sweet breaths, the ones you feel right before you kiss. I imagine I am a sneeze flying through a nostril. I say “weee” as I glide down the road on my little pink bike. The streets are empty and it is dark. I begin to feel less self conscious than I normally would. I bike to the train tracks. I start to feel a light rain on my arms. The light rain turns to heavy and I find an old train car and sit under it. There is a little white butterfly on a leaf next to me. It’s hiding from the rain too. I don’t know how long I sat there, but I don’t sleep and I think of nothing for a long long time. I become one with the train tracks, one with the butterfly, and one with every little drop of rain that meets the Earth around me. “I left the door open,” I say to the butterfly. My lips are cracked. “The cats are gone.” |