Straitjacket, Poetry in Motion

Straitjacket, Poetry in Motion: To Need

Chapter Four: To Need

- it's the wrong -

My name is Dylan Locke, and you already kind of like me.

You relate to me because I'm human and angry, and you are too. You see, this, me talking to you like this, is a device authors use to endear an unlikable character to their readers, in order to make their actions easier to stomach.

Papa was so violent, what can I do but follow his lead? Puppy dog eyes there. What could I do?

Ah, I joined a gang. Dylan became a gangster. Sounds pretty damn cool, eh? So what, who cares if some people have to die along the way. Who cares? Who cared about me?

Can you feel me yet? I'm smiling, can you feel me?

He steps off the train, and the first thing he sees is a word, graphitized onto the brick wall.

Psychotek.

The ones who burn down hospitals, the ones who are constantly invading the news. Ah, but they slip through the police's fingers. And they will continue to do so. Some of them, at least.

He recalls the previous night, the inferno, the feeling of blood rippling off his fingers.

The Psychotek, yeah, yeah, he likes that. He's all for that. He does that.

He smirks to himself.

---

She overdoses so many times, injecting the needle's contents until the world blurs into nothing and her head falls to rest limply on her chest. She sits, back against the brick wall, gazing listlessly at the clouds above, counting the different ways she could join David in heaven. The cocaine and morphine don't ease the pain, but they erase her memories of everything, even if only for a little while.

James is all too happy to provide her with her little suicide carriers. He is what some would say, a drug dealer, low on cash and low on life. He had been dumped on the street, and then shoved in an orphanage where no one really cared about a filthy brat. So he'd tumbled off the path of righteousness, skidded to a stop in the pool of drugs, and made a home for himself there.

The prices are cheap. The drugs, decent.

Soon she is at his doorstep every day, begging for more, needing more, and the drugs make it so she can't even tell who he is, where she's seen him before, with another guy, with honey hair, and a woman, with hair like fire.

Honey hair.

And once more, he finds her. The one who watched her, all those years back. He is a man now, but she recognizes him straight away, even with his black pressed suit and combed hair, so different from the scruffy boy who had always stared at her in school.

She doesn't stop to think about why he would be at such a disgusting place, the back alleys where criminals went about their daily business. And what he would want with someone as pathetic as James. Because let me tell you, it's not drugs.

Maybe he'd felt sorry for her. Maybe she'd reminded him of himself.

He takes her in gruffly, takes her into his penthouse suite in the classier part of town. She remembers holding his hand, stumbling and falling all over the place, so high off of her drugs and her grief. His hand is warm, but it was scarred with the remnants of a million needlepoints, and she thinks that he is nothing like David.

And yet, she gazes at him with all the over eagerness of a dog.

She just wants to die with someone there with her.