by Rick Ochre
Not to mention how easy it is to overdose. Eight pills. That’s all it takes. Probably less for a skinny bitch like Larissa. But I’m going to give them each a dozen. Be sure.
I probably won’t even have to get Tack’s .38 from the box in the closet. Those two, they’ll pop just about anything without any extra convincing. They love the prescription stuff—oxy, nembies, any of that shit. I’ll just tell them it’s something new I tried while I was gone. A little something to show I’ve got no hard feelings.
The funny thing? I never used to party with them when they brought all that junk around. I never did like that kind of a high. I always just stuck to beer and a little weed.
But that was the old me.
This is the new me. The fun me.
***
If you enjoyed the stories in this collection, check out Rick Ochre’s novels:
Starved: Inception (available now)
Starved: Mayhem (coming November, 2015)
…or read on for an excerpt from Starved: Inception.
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An excerpt from THE STARVED: INCEPTION
“Whatsoever is set before you, eat, asking no question for conscience sake” (Corinthians 10:27) — inscribed above the door of the Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene, University of Minnesota, 1944-45
August 1945
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
They walked—Carl and the others, the ones whose names floated away from him like butterweed silk on these long, hot summer afternoons, nearly seven months since Dr. Keys had drawn them here with his promises and his twisted science. Keys had played them like the chumps they were, and now they walked through the long days, walking until they were exhausted, walking until some of the men moaned, insensible of their own voices, and others cried like little girls. Little kindergarten girls, like Mary Davenport with her shining blond pigtails that curled at the bottom, a curl Carl wanted to poke his finger through all those years ago, when he and Mary chased each other around the swing set and she wore a dress, a flowered thing with red buttons down the back like glistening cherries. Cherries, cherries, oh, God.
Carl stumbled at the thought. Cherry pie cherry soda cherries in a white bowl leaking juice cherries popping in his mouth. If he had a cherry now he’d eat it all, stone and stem and the branch from which it fell, he wouldn’t care if the stem stuck in his throat and the stone broke a tooth. Hell, he’d eat his own tooth.
Stumbling had caused him to veer off the curb and into the road that wended away from campus to the northwest, through tidy neighborhoods of bungalows and two-flats, past clotheslines and cats sunning themselves on porches and ladies in their backyard gardens, pulling weeds between the rows of radishes and larkspur and pole beans. Carl had been watching those beans, all right, had seen the buds burst into white bonnet-shaped blossoms and waited until the petals fell from the vines, birthing tiny little pods that grew tender and succulent, swaying in the June sun only weeks ago. Back then he’d been stronger, back then he’d thought he could survive, but even then he must have known because he’d thought I could get those beans, he’d thought A fellow could slip into the yard for a second, be back before anyone saw. He’d imagined his hand stripping the pods from the vine, fast and wily, pushing them down into his pocket. It could be done.
Ha. Ha. He’d been a fool then, no more foolish than the rest of them perhaps, but a fool all the same. How could he have known it would be like this: skin thinning to leather, bones hurting where they poked from the inside. Ass sore from sitting with no padding. Ribs…he couldn’t look at another man’s ribs, jutting from their sunken chests, without imagining glistening, meaty crown rib roasts. Carl was sorry for it, but that was just how it was. And he would wager he wasn’t the only one.
But it was Dr. Keys who had turned them into this. He stared at them over his wire-framed spectacles, barely blinking, like a lizard—Carl and the others made bets on it, how often did he blink, once every ten seconds? Twenty? An entire minute?—while they girded themselves and shivered despite the summer warmth and tried not to beg or bargain or cry. Keys and his staff watched them clamber onto the scale, onto the treadmill, into their cots at night. They prodded the men with their calipers and measuring tapes and stethoscopes, and in return, the men gave up their expectorate and semen and urine and feces and blood, clippings of their hair, scrapings from their nails. They allowed Keys to peer into their eyes and throats and ears, to watch them at their toilet, at the table, at rest, in their agony and in their despair. Wearing their white coats, carrying their clipboards, Keys and his staff took the measurements, the issue from their bodies, with an enthusiasm that bordered on greed, and it was, in fact, their zeal in collecting the data that threaded through Carl’s first nightmare, when he dreamed of Dr. Keys—much larger than life, with pincer-like claws instead of hands—grasping, grasping, grasping at him as he crouched cowering in a corner, with nowhere to run.
But oh, how the nightmares had worsened since then.
A shiver wracked his body despite the still heat. Carl shuffled along the road, staring at the curb he walked beside. Up ahead half a dozen paces was Hank in his sagging trousers, doing no better; Hank’s ankles, between the hem of his pants and his unlaced shoes, were swollen and purple. Perhaps today was the day that Hank would fall in the road and then Carl would have to walk around him, or over him, a hard choice. Straight ahead was easiest. But first he had to get back up onto the curb, and he stared at it for a good long while before he took a deep breath and prepared to lift his foot and wondered if the exertion would kill him. And then he wondered if death might be a mercy.
***
We hope you enjoyed this excerpt.
The Starved: Inception is available at all major online retailers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rick Ochre’s fascination with the dark recesses of the human soul traces back to a childhood spent digging for bones in the back yard and a conviction that the neighbor down the street was killing and eating door-to-door salesmen. He wandered from one coast to the other, working as a trash collector, landscaper, painter, editor, teacher, and medical model before settling in the Pacific Northwest.