Crawling on the Bathroom Floor By Carra Hood

    Mike Fleming CC




Crawling on the Bathroom Floor     
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I’m high on Tranq. My son hangs in the kitchen. At 5, he knows better than to follow me after I score. Instead, he opens the door to the refrigerator and starts throwing everything he can reach on the floor. He knows I’ll pass out soon.
 
A triangle has three codependent sides. Each side connects to two others at a point. The two connected sides form an angle. 3 angles form trilateral supports, a truss. Altogether the 3 angles equal 180 degrees. Altogether they’re undistorted by stress. Laid out end to end the 3 sides create a straight line. The shortest distance between 2 points.
 
Xylazine, a vet tranquilizer, is known as Tranq when mixed with Fentanyl. In the Kensington section of North Philly, it costs $5 a bag, ½ the cost of heroin to get the same high. Inject, snort, eat, or rub on a sore.
 
Her mother dresses in nursing scrubs and leaves the house at 5PM, driving Melrose to Baltimore, through West Philly, a straight shot to the University City parking garage for Hospital of the University of Philadelphia (HUP) employees. She parks in her assigned space on the second floor, #102. For 10 minutes, she sits in the car, heat blasting, eyes closed, taking deep inhales and exhales. She downs a flask of Stoli. Her mother works the night shift.
 
7th floor, critical care. Her mother hydrates patients and treats their pain with IV benzodiazepine or hydromorphone. Patients on the critical care floor are generally near death from gunshot wounds, drug overdoses (usually Fentanyl), MIs (heart attacks), sepsis, falls, old age. If a critical care patient makes it through one night, they usually die the next. That’s why nurses keep their distance.
 
Unlike heroin, Tranq marks users with necrotic patches, open sores, oozing, fiery, dying skin. My veins collapsed from years injecting heroin. Instead of shooting Tranq, I lick the right index finger, tap it in the Tranq powder until white covers the underside of my last digit, then I press the powdery finger into the ooziest sore. Hard. A few seconds later, I crumble to the floor like I have no bones.
 
My son finds a half-eaten broiled chicken on the second shelf of the refrigerator, puts it on the floor, and stamps until he flattens the bird. He swings the loaf of bread across the kitchen; it hits the window, and with a thud, lands on the counter. He doesn’t hear me fall.
 
At 7AM, her mother drives home, up Baltimore, all the way through Philadelphia to Delaware County. She hyperventilates approaching Melrose Avenue. Will she find her daughter crawling on the bathroom floor, aspirated from vomit or spittle trapped in her lungs?
 
They’ve been here before. Her daughter’s 39. Her mother blames herself. Addiction runs in the family. Her father drank until he got fired. His father gambled away his grandmother. Her mother’s mother took pills, any pills. One cousin and a nephew OD’d on opiates. Another cousin lost his life to meth. And her mother thinks she’s got drinking under control.
 
I don’t blame my mother. I love being high; I’m part of a family that loves being high. I know I could OD, know I could die in a car crash, know I could bleed out from a beating or a gun shot, know I could contract HIV. I laugh when my mother brings up rehab. Like that’s going to help. The last time, I held her head firmly, pulling her close enough to touch noses. I could have snapped my mother’s neck. Do you really care, do you?
 
Yes, I do. I do. But her mother can’t. She doesn’t. Doesn’t know how. How to care without enabling. Without seeming not to.
 
Nurses can tell when a patient is near death. It’s usually about breathing. Heavy, heaving intakes, rattling and rasping on the way out. At the end, nurses might administer an extra dose of morphine to quiet the patient’s gasps, suppress desire for oxygen, allow smooth passing.
 
Her daughter’s been using Tranq for a year now, and she’s finally lost my mind, thinking mostly in spirals. Words come out as gibberish. Her mother just nods. Oh yes or unhuh or of course.
 
Before Tranq, it was heroin, and then, after a 2-year stint in prison for holding up a convenience store, Methadone. Methadone numbs and provides only a soft high. Tranq has a short half-life, so it doesn’t show on urine tests; besides, it kicks users to the ground, and I’m on the hunt for kicks.
 
When a triangle loses a side, it falls flat, succumbing to gravity, scattering hope that angels rise from angles. 
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Bio: I have published essays, poetry, and fiction on similar and other themes over the past two decades. Last year, I completed a draft food memoir. One chapter appears in eMerge Magazine; another, in Hub Publication. A recent piece of nonfiction, published in Empyrean Literary Magazine, takes up the complex interplay of generational addiction and sexuality. My research and writing also appears in a range of academic and creative journals.