Lavender Fields

As the door eased shut the apartment door, he was met by the hopeful eyes of his girlfriend, Melanie. Her sun baked golden locks dangled to her shoulders, elegantly hugging her round, freckled cheeks. Her smile lit up the room on an otherwise damp and dreary day in the northeast.

“Did you get it?”

“Yeah,” he replied, “I got it. He said we need to be careful with these. They’re stronger than last time.”

She reached out and hugged him, pulling him into her, gripping his grey cotton pullover hoodie. He returned her embrace with a few gentle pats on the back before stepping away to remove his wet clothing. Knowing that she was more excited to try the new product than she was to actually see him was beginning to grate at him. The subtle sprinkles of mild discontent were either willfully ignored or blatantly disregarded in the midst of what they’d both describe as the high of their lives.

Stepping through the bedroom doorway, he removed his hoodie and tossed it on the floor next to a pile of dirty clothes. Melanie followed him into the room and leaned her back on the egg shell white wall, watching him find a shirt to change into.

“So did he mention me at all?”

“Why would he, Mel? He doesn’t give a shit about us, he’s a dealer. Stop being so naïve. You think he cares, but that only goes as far as our next dollar. Which right now is looking like a problem, isn’t it?”

Melanie’s mouth slacked open, in disbelief at the side of him that she had just witnessed.

“Don’t you dare treat me like I’m not trying, Daniel. I’m serious – no, look at me!”

Daniel did as she asked, and looked her in the eye as she continued on.

“Don’t act like we didn’t blow through twelve hundred dollars’ worth of any god damn thing we wanted. From alcohol to pills to that shitty dirt weed you get from the Mexican guy around the corner.”

Daniel sighed and knew that she was correct in everything she had just said to him, but it didn’t make him feel any less used.

“Look, I’m sorry, ok? Let’s just enjoy this one, huh?”

She walked over to him and gave him another hug, but this time pulling his head away from the left shoulder it rested on to give him the reassurance he longed for.

“We’ll be ok… and you know we will. Do you know why we will?”

He forced his way back into her arms before giving her the answer that she had driven into his brain.

“Because we have to be.”

“That’s right. We have to be, we’re supposed to be. So we will.”

Daniel reached into the pocket of his blue denim jeans and pulled out a sandwich bag tied in a knot that held eight white oval shaped capsules. As he tore the bag open, Melanie opened her palm and accepted her share of the score. They divvied them up evenly, four each.

Daniel took in the joy that overcame her, understanding that this was a feeling that he could never compete with. While he knew, but didn’t fully accept, that he was only contributing to her inevitable fall from grace, he rationalized it by telling himself that he was a willing participant. He had a choice, and as a firm believer in free will, felt as if this was their fate. The human condition itself had no known cure, but drugs like these helped with the constant symptoms.

In the kitchen, Melanie reached into the freezer and pulled out a half empty bottle of cheap vodka and two cups from the cupboard beside her. As she reached in for ice, she felt Danielle come up behind her, grabbing her by the waist and kissing the side of her neck softly. The ice cubes dropped into the glass and she spun around to meet his eyes, kissing him before softly biting his lip until he acknowledged the arousing pain.

“Did you already take yours? I’m about to take mine,” he said, opening his hand to show her his intent. Melanie poured them each a double shot, mixing with a splash of cherry Kool-Aid that she had retrieved from the fridge.

“Yeah, they went down easy too. Not like last time where I kinda had a hard time swallowing them.”

“I could say something right now,” Daniel joked. He chuckled to himself before grabbing for his glass and tipping his head back to catch the pills before washing them down. “Find something on Netflix, I’ll be there in a minute.” Melanie pranced into the living room and sat down on the black leather couch with the remote in hand.

Daniel woke up to a cold sweat, surrounded by nothing but purple for miles on end. The overpowering floral smell made him feel as if he was living inside of a dryer sheet, and as far as he knew, he very well could be. He didn’t remember much after taking the four pills in the kitchen of his home. As he rose to his feet, he stood even with the sprawling lavender flowers that made up the field in which he woke up in.

The sun was setting and the sky screamed orange as it did so, causing him to wonder how long he’d been here in addition to the question of how.  Daniel began to cut through the green and purple vegetation, hoping to find any semblance of life besides what encircled him.  After walking about a mile west through the sea of purple, he eventually reached a broken down tractor resting on a dirt road.

Approaching the tractor with irrational hesitance, he saw a mangled straw hat laying by the right front wheel of the red machine. Beside it lay a postcard, torn into at least a dozen pieces. Picking up the biggest chunk he could find, he examined it tried to make out what it read. The only letters that he could make out were a capital S and a lowercase letter o.

As he stared off into the distance, the once orange sky dimmed to pitch black. Raising his wrist, he looked at his watch and saw that it had stopped at 3:23 PM. Just as he placed his wrist back down to his waist, he heard a gunshot echoing from behind him. Daniel looked around him, front and back, and then again, deciding that his best course of action at this point was to run.

As he plowed forward, pushing stalks of increasingly large flowers out of the way, he reached a brick wall that had light poles dangling from above revealing graffiti written all over it. Messages warning him to, “TURN AROUND” and, “NO WAY OUT” taunted him as the gunshots got closer. Looking up to the sky, weighing his options, he noticed the wall itself was surrounded by barbed wire, flesh and blood hanging from the sharp edges. A blue spotlight shined down on him and the sky opened up, giving him a way out if he’d choose to take it.

Daniel threw his arms to each side of him, accepting the cosmic offer. An elderly man appeared to be screaming and shooting at him on his way up through the black hole in the sky, bullets grazing past his body as he floated into the infinite space that awaited him.

Daniel woke up in a cold sweat in his living room with a pounding headache. He shook his head from left to right, shaking himself back into a normal state. As he looked around the room, he noticed that Melanie was not in the room with him. Rising to his feet, he checked the bedroom to see that it was also empty. Making his way back to the kitchen, he saw Melanie’s glass sitting exactly where she had left it, only now with water inside from the melted ice cubes. Beside it he saw a blue bordered post card with a note written on the front side of it. As he lifted it off of the counter, four pills rolled off of it and onto the floor.

The sound of the rain pit-patting against the tin roof above him was the soundtrack to his most recent truth.

“Sorry I deceived you

I had to leave you

This is how it has to be

I’ll always love you,

Melanie”