- Endling, Part I: A Visit from an Old Friend
- Endling, Part II: Yesterday, Today, and Forever
By Draven Copeland, Editor-in-Chief
**TRIGGER WARNING: This text contains references to sexual abuse and graphic drug use. Please be aware of this potentially upsetting content as you engage with the text.**
The memory played in John’s mind so vividly it was like he was there again for the first time. He was looking up at the glimmering stars overhead, framed on each side by brick walls of city buildings that stretched up into the night sky, reaching so high that they seemed to slightly cave in on his vision from either side. Lying flat on his back, the asphalt beneath him was oddly comfortable as he gazed up at the beautiful twinkling lights above him. His nose glowed red, and it took him a moment to realize that the glow was actually coming from the neon lights hung from a sign on the wall behind him, bathing the alley in a potent but dark light.
“One more for the road?” Luke asked. He was laying beside John on the asphalt, the glint from the red neon filling his eyes and making their pale blue irises appear so faded they were nearly nonexistent. He looked exactly the same in the memory as he did in the present, even down to the baggy black hoodie and the subtle sparkle of jewelry, which was now twinkling red.
John laughed uncomfortably in response, his voice young but rough… even in his youth he sounded just a little bit sickly. “Don’t ask me that, man. You know what I’ll say.”
Luke’s smile widened brightly, attractive even in the unnatural lighting. He raised his hands in exaggerated surrender. “Caught me!” He laughed, before rising to a sitting position and reaching for the go-bag between them. “Fuck it. Either way, I’m doing one more. Can’t hurt what’s already beaten, am I right?”
“I don’t think that’s how it works, dude,” John chuckled.
Luke unzipped the black bag, pulling out a syringe and preparing it. John sat up to watch, impulses of uncontrollable desire flaring in him to take the needle out of Luke’s hand and penetrate himself with it. When Luke angled the syringe upward and pushed plunger, drops of the drug ejaculated into the air and John felt it, in his own way.
“See you when I land,” Luke joked. When he slowly pushed the needle into the vein in his arm and injected the opaque liquid into his bloodstream, John felt an indescribable void open inside of himself, a void that could only be filled one way.
“Fuck you, man,” John said, forcing himself to look away.
“Would… if I… could,” Luke replied, his eyes rolling into his head as he laid back and sluggishly shuffled himself onto his right side, the needle sticking carelessly out of his left arm.
John looked back when he was sure that Luke’s back was turned to him, feeling both pity and jealousy in waves that alternated through his mind. After a moment of hesitation that took everything in his mental power, his hands mindlessly reached out, taking the needle out of his friend and gathering the supplies from the go-bag to prepare it for himself.
When his hands had finished their work, he stared at the colorless solution inside the barrel of the syringe that was now a dark red deepened by the blackness of the asphalt below. There were dark specks that swirled slowly in the liquid, held nearly motionless by the syringe’s plunger. The thought of how euphoric he would feel watching those black spots fly down into the needle as he plunged the solution into his veins filled his mind as he imagined each of those impurities finding home in his body as he got what he needed.
He held the needle to his arm, the uneven trail of trackmarks on his skin leading him to his favorite vein. The needle wavered in his hand, inching closer to the skin and, just before he punctured the vein to watch the brief puff of blood mix in with the solution (his favorite part of the process, it gave him a mental orgasm every time), a horrific but strikingly clear image flashed in his mind. In that brief moment, he’d seen his corpse. Its eyes were glazed, one staring up into the sky and one rolled halfway back, and chunks of vomit spilled from its mouth, connected only by trails of viscous saliva. The needle he’d used was taken from his arm, and Luke was running away with it, his heels kicking high as blue and red lights bathed the alleyway from the street, overwhelming the scene with emotionless flashes.
Quickly blinking to eject the image from his mind, it reappeared every time he closed his eyes. In his subconscious mind, he wanted to see it one more time so that he could decipher its meaning, but, every time it appeared, it frightened him so deeply that he could do nothing but stare straight ahead. At the end of the alleyway, he watched briefly as a beautiful blonde woman was working her hands into the pants of a middle-aged man, his golden wedding band catching and reflecting neon as he fumbled through his wallet. John then looked down instead.
He picked up the needle that he had unconsciously dropped from the ground and carefully placed it back into the bag before leaning over and putting his head on Luke’s shoulder, waiting for him to breathe. After a few seconds too long, Luke did. He inhaled slowly and deeply, and John smiled in relief as he felt the shoulder rise. After a few seconds, the shoulder fell again, and Luke’s breathing returned to a relatively normal cycle. He was okay.
John laid down and put his arm around Luke’s slowly rising and falling body and closed his eyes. The sounds of gagging and grunting echoed down the alleyway, only just audible above the droning hum of the lights above, and John awkwardly nestled his left shoulder against his ear to shut out the noise and drift into sleep.
A muffled scream broke John’s concentration. It was followed by alternating gags and strangled screams before a brief gasp of air and a hard slap echoed back and forth down the alley.
The first thing John saw when he rose up from the ground was the gleam of a thin, sharp blade in the man’s hand. The blood that streamed from the woman’s cheek and down her arms was the second, its color almost invisible in the red lighting. The subtle sparkles of tears that ran through her mascara and down her face was the third.
“I paid fucking extra,” the man standing above the woman said aggressively, his voice carrying although he was clearly trying to remain unheard from by anyone other than the woman who had fallen backward onto the ground in front of him. “So I own you for the next 30 minutes, that’s the deal, right? That’s what you fucking told me. And I fucking told you that I like it rough.”
John shakily stood, fumbling over himself and falling into either the surrounding walls or the ground with every few steps.
“FUCK YOU,” the woman screamed, pulling a can of mace from under her right heel and spraying it wildly as she rose from the ground.
The man stumbled back into the building behind him, screaming misogyny and waving his knife around frantically as he rebounded from the wall. John shakily came to his feet and rushed to the end of the alley, watching the man’s blade swipe left to right, nearly slicing the woman’s eye. John waited until the knife swiped back and away from him and, when the opportunity was clear, punched the man in the face with as much strength as he could gather.
The man tried to gain his balance as he stumbled backwards and nearly out of the alleyway, still waving the knife but less frantically now (and mostly in the wrong directions). John turned to see that the woman had risen to her feet; she let her abuser pass before scrambling behind him and pushing him forward as he staggered towards a fire-escape ladder. The loud tonal sound of reverberating metal overcame the sound of fleshy cracking impact as his head slammed violently into the side rail, a flash of blood flying up into the air as his head whipped back. His body spun and fell limply to the ground and, just before he lost consciousness, the woman’s heels clicked across the ground before stomping on his exposed genitals.
Holding her cheek and panting with exhaustion, she turned back to John. “Took you fucking long enough,” she said.
