It’s just a little finger of white powder straight to my gums. I don’t do long lines anymore. Just some bumps to get me through the shift. It's not for the high so much as it is for efficiency, you know, utility. If I measure it out right, absorb it right, I don’t even have a body. I can override the need for sleep or food or rest and then I’m a fucking machine. I don’t eat for days. I can handle so much.

I stand in front of the bathroom mirror at the bar, dabbing at the bit of blood from my nose, when I see a poor dusky, velvet moth confusing the vanity light for some kind of celestial glow. I shove open the window, gently scoop the fragile thing up in my hand, and release it. Now, I sweep the floors because a piece of shit lazy ass employee didn’t do his job last night. I set up the glassware, then pour myself a beer. I start sipping early, around ten in the morning; I nurse some kind of liquor all day long. The booze is the happy stuff and the coke keeps my engine running.

There is so much to track when the bar is full. Sandy quit, so I don’t have a choice about showing up. I manage this ship, and it seems like sometimes there’s no one there but me paying attention, hello!? The whole damn bar—I carry it on my shoulders all the shaken drinks, vodka, lemon juice, and sugar-glazed ice, the fucking shit-clogged toilet, the creeper at the bar with his alcoholic red nose that he would shove up that poor drunk girl’s ass if she’d let him. The girl is leaning away from his wheezy stink breath, tilting so far back I’m afraid she’s going to fall off the stool. I tell Paco to peel him off. Paco gives me shit, and I spit out, “Just do it—what, am I the only one who cares here?”

Sometimes, I’m so altered that I see a spectrum of light, rainbow apparitions, out of the corner of my eyes. I absorb the reverberations of all the energy in the room, the laughter, the wet pussies, the hard dicks, the taste of lime and gin, ginger, and bourbon, it’s like we’ve got one beating heart and it’s all in my chest.

I go home to my apartment—well, not home really. After ten years together, I left Johnny, and this new place is so goddamn not a home. The moving boxes aren’t unpacked, empty takeout containers are all over the counter. I feel safe at the bar; I know what to do, and I know my role. I belong there, me and the other lost souls with their tattoos and piercings and PTSD. If I go to sleep now, it won’t be worth it, so I do another dab of coke, drink whiskey, and wait it out a few hours.

At the end, I was sleeping in the living room most nights. I couldn’t stand to be too close to Johnny; even just the smell of him would repel me. I’d catch a whiff of his fermenting armpit or his sleepy breath and fight the urge to hold my nose. On days off, Johnny and I reclined on our separate couches, binge-watched art films, ate whole pizzas, and drank bottles of red wine. Sometimes, I felt like I was lying down in my coffin when I stretched out on that stained tweed sofa.

But at least I wasn’t alone and he loved me, Johnny, even when he found those texts where I offered to roll my tongue around an ex’s dick. Working at a bar, it's like a performance and when you give people their elixir, they think you are extra magic, a wizard; they pretty much want to fuck you. I don’t even remember half the sexting I do. I wake up to pictures on my phone of my tits sent to multiple people.

I’m not sure it’s better being alone, but at least the pressure to sleep with Johnny is over. I don’t have to hear his sighs and watch him curl away from me broken because I don’t feel desire except when it is forbidden, new, and delivered with slices and knicks. Yes, I am lonely now, but I don’t disappoint anyone. I don’t have to lie anymore about the coke because there is no one to lie to. I admit, the cycle of coke and booze is another grave, and except for the apparitions of color when I am high, I don’t see beauty much anymore. The last thing I painted was a mural of monarch butterflies in the bar bathroom, and that was five years ago.

********

I’ve been with Johnny for over four years now. He’s seen all my pieces, and he’s been encouraging me to put together an actual show. I had a stupid fantasy that someone might actually see something in my work.

Turns out, I never should have let him in. With his delicate gold-rimmed eyeglasses and manicured nails, looking so clean but with a definite stick up his ass, this gallery owner shows up at the studio I share with four other artists. This is my personal space, where art is born from me and kept safe, my shelter for a while, where I slept after the artists’ warehouse burned down. So now it feels like he’s snooping through my underwear drawer, sniffing my skin, sorting through my bones as he strolls around.

He stares at my art—some watercolors, some oils, some pencil drawings, and then a portrait of a girl; she’s the only one that isn’t entirely abstract. I sketched her with charcoal.  After I drew her basic shape, I took a razor blade, scratched her up in places, and tore the canvas a little so it looks like scars on her hands and on her neck. I smudged the contours of her body, scraped her torso. Her jawline is blurred, but her legs are outlined in a thick, solid form. One eye is clear, dark, and shiny; the other is covered in a delicately sketched web. Her left arm, I just completely erased, leaving her hand to kind of float in her lap.

At first, he’s quiet, arms crossed over his chest. Then he smiles, showing his teeth—sharp and yellow like a dog’s. He says, “It’s all really fascinating.” He uses words like gossamer, haunting, and fragmentation. I don’t know what the fuck he is talking about. I feel my throat close.

He says, “I can’t find the unifying theme here. Is there a thread that ties all the pieces together?” His words are bites, like he’s got my fingers in his mouth, chomping down on them,  crunchy fucking snacks. I tell him I’m not interested. I say, “You better go.” I lock the door, my chest heaving. After that, I don’t remember.

********

Sandy is all excited, waving her arms around like a fucking upended beetle.

“Oh my god,” she says.

She is standing in the bathroom of the bar, pointing at the butterflies I painted. As soon as she hired me, I got to work prettying up the place. In the bathroom, there are fifty of them, various sizes. I used metallic yellows, oranges, and blacks; everything is outlined in gold. Some of the larger ones have dark, shiny eyes on their wings.

“The colors, they shimmer,” she says.

I feel like a pink, juicy earthworm forced from the soil, all exposed on the sidewalk after a rainstorm. I sit down at the bar and finish up my beer.

Sandy pours me another and says, “Hey, I know a gallery owner. I could send him to your studio. I bet he’d show your stuff.”

Something feels off. I think maybe I should get up and go.

I say, “Why?”

She tilts her head, raises one eyebrow, and says, “What do you mean, why?”

“I mean, why would you do that? Help me like that?”

She shrugs. “Because your art is good, and I want to do something nice for you.” She puts her hand on mine and says softly, “It’s just basic kindness, you know?”

Kindness. I roll the word around in my mouth like a hard butterscotch candy, hold it there on my tongue, let it melt a little, melt me a little. We sit there quietly for a minute.

I keep forgetting there are good people. Johnny, for one. I feel safer when I’m near him, like one of those tall, strong redwoods. He’s quiet like a tree, too. Now, Sandy.

I say, “My body, it’s humming.”

She says, “What do you think that means?”

I say, “I really don’t fucking know, but it’s not a bad feeling.”

********

No note, no nothing. Maybe the voices told her to leave, or maybe she just thought of me like mold on old bread, something to pick off. Whatever, after three whole years, she just fucking left.

Sherry was on meds, but she was always missing her appointments at the community clinic, or she’d just quit refilling her prescriptions. She’d start to hear voices, real bad, see shit that wasn’t there. Sometimes weed and booze helped, sometimes they didn’t. She’d get so scared, so we’d sit next to each other on the old mattress, just rocking back and forth, both of us humming a little.

I try to sleep now without another body next to me. But I’m out of weed, I’m out of beer. And all night long, I hear footsteps and laughter, music, and there is the constant smell of incense, dope, and rat piss. I lie there clenching an open fucking pocketknife, my shoes are on in case I need to bolt.

Frankie, a jumpy grasshopper of a dude—all knees, elbows, and long, sharp nose—used to bring Sherry our weed. Now he walks into my area, flapping his gums about Ecstasy, how good it feels. He offers me some.

Pretty quick after I swallow the pill, my fear drops away. The warehouse becomes an animal body that we all live in. I can feel the building’s lungs expand and contract in a rhythm, in sync with the music. The warehouse brings me sweet air. I join the dancing.

When I don’t have weed and booze, X helps me get through the nights. And then I buy Ritalin or coke from Frankie to stay awake on my shifts at the coffee house. One time, I watched Frankie swallow a piece of cotton that was inside a bottle of Benzedrex spray, some over-the-counter shit people use for allergies. Genius fucking Frankie swallows a yellow, chemical-soaked sponge for a jittery high. That shit is for sure getting stuck in his intestines. I draw the line there, no thank you, that’s too low. I have my standards.

********

I don’t run away exactly. Dad watches me go. His icy blue eyes barely register that he knows me as I walk out the door. It has been years of trying not to breathe too loudly, keeping my face as still as possible so as not to set him off, years of blending into the jaundiced paint-chipped wall, and even then, I’d get whacked, my blood droplets left to dry on the peeling linoleum of the house we squatted in. Always butterflies in my stomach, cloudy images in the corner of my eyes, and bad feelings lodged in my hips. No food except school breakfast and lunch, no clothes except from the school charity closet, and regular beatings.

I find a warehouse to live in with other artists. I think at thirteen I am the youngest. People are mostly cool; they share supplies with me. I sleep with Sherry; she has gray streaks in her hair and doesn’t talk much. Sherry weaves these tapestries that, when you view them from a distance, look like rich, dark oil paintings, but up close, you can see it’s all made of fabric. She has a camp stove, and she shares her warmed canned soup, weed, beer, and her bed with me.

I lose time a lot, hours go by where I am pink and blue stipples and dots, intricate patterns drawn with colored pencils. I am pastel, watery impressions of feathers and beads, spiderwebs, and delicate wings. Everything I make is beautiful, people say. If I don’t have materials I find stuff, arrange it, and awaken to find a mandala made from rocks and trash underneath my feet.

I lose time with Sherry too. She takes my shirt off, we start kissing, and I guess I become a wild cat. I scratch and hiss, kick, and bite. She likes it sometimes but it went too far when I scratched her neck and started sucking at the blood. I don’t remember.

********

I don’t have friends, I have dead flies and cold, limp worms. Poor things. I store them in matchboxes, hold funerals, I cluck and hum to them. I put their delicate, gray bodies in their tiny coffins, dig graves beneath the oak trees on the playground, and mark each grave with a special rock. I cry for them. One time, some kids saw me scooping up a squished caterpillar, his green blood oozing. They started shouting “Dead bug lover.” They drove me with taunts and jeers from recess. I hang out in the classroom now. The teacher lets me stay if I wipe down the chalkboard. When she’s not watching, I scoop up ant bodies and cobwebs, stuff them in my pockets.

Dad has no love, he is no-love Dad, he is monster Dad. He kicks me, pulls my hair, and makes me grab food out of the trash and maw it around in my mouth. Brother and me, we don’t get to eat much; hunger is always there. Sometimes, Brother steps in front of me to take the blows from Dad while I cower behind. But Brother hits too; he ambushes me with blows to the back of my head, he rings my skull like a bell.

I hide outside. There is a whole world of sticks and leaves, rocks, and trash. I get lost arranging it all on the ground. I have no body, I am just a pattern of found things. Inside, there is a mattress on the floor. I wet the bed sometimes, so it smells. I wear double layers of pants at night, I think it will ward him off. I arrange the matchboxes around me, pretend they are walls but Brother crushes them and lays on me. I can smell his fruit breath. He is a giant, heavy night bat.

********

They jammed the door shut. We are stuck. Muddy dog prints and dirty shoe prints are on the faded yellow tile floor. I wet my feet in the toilet water. I march around, make my own footprints. I float my shoe in the toilet, it is my boat. I ride the side of the bathtub, a pony, giddyap. I stick my fingers up the wet, slimy bathtub spout. I can fit all four fingers, but then I get scared they are stuck. I yank my hand hard and I suck the blood off my scrapes. Brother and I lap up brown water trickling from the sink faucet. I soak toilet paper in the toilet water, wad it up, and mold it into snowman shapes on the wall.

Brother lifts me to look out the high window. A spider is crawling up the outside of the window. I tap the glass, hello Mr. Spider. I look below at an asphalt parking lot, and farther away, lots of cars. I can hear their engines buzzing like flies. Those people in those cars don’t care that we are here. Don’t care, don’t care, don’t care, I hum.

I think maybe I am just a doll with a plastic face. We can hear the thump of music, sometimes a woman screams. Brother bangs let us out, let us out, but no one comes. He is so mad, he is so bored, he kicks me. He starts wadding up the toilet paper into little balls, chewing on it. At first, he shoots spitballs at me; they smell like his sugary breath, but then he just swallows the paper. I lie on the cool tile that smells like pee until I sleep.

********

What does a baby look like after they’ve been left to cry for hours? Brother says Mom left us alone; she just took off and never came back. I guess I was in the crib when Grandma found us. Brother says Grandma was nice, but Grandpa was nasty. I guess Brother had to hide all small like a snail in the cupboards when Grandpa was around. I pretend Grandma held me and rocked me in a rocking chair. I bet she wrapped me in a blanket. I think she baked us cookies with still-warm chocolate chips before Dad took us back.

With Dad, we lived in a car for a while, and he kept telling me to keep my head down. I stared at all the tiny dots, the patterns in the dark green leather of the backseat, while Dad’s cigarette smoke filled my nose. I bit the inside of my cheek until it bled to keep from crying.

********

Through the bars of my crib, I see shadows flutter on the wall. I gaze at the butterfly mobile turning, turning above me, a spectrum of color. The mobile plays its song for me. The butterflies sing, “Before you were born, you were heat and energy, waves, and vibration. You were void of bones and skin, heart, and blood. You were made of a different material, you were of a different medium. Not so long ago, you were light and peace, you were free.” I reach for the butterflies. I kick my feet to the song. I was free, I hum, I was free.