FROM ORIGAMI HEART, AUTHORED BY ME - AN EXCERPT FROM A CH. CALLED "SHARING NEEDLES"

The pills started to wear off around 4AM. I thought about taking a few more, but decided instead to go out to the living room and try to clear my head. My thoughts were racing again and thinking inevitably twisted my mind into knots, so I got out of bed, grabbed my bag, and went to the living room. Sean had moved into Karen’s room earlier in the night. I sat on the floor at the coffee table, cleared it of overfilled ashtrays, cigarette boxes, half-empty cardboard coffee cups, and various other addictive substances and paraphernalia, and pulled some red construction paper out of my bag. I started folding my thoughts into little heart-shaped, origami sculptures - a counterintuitive way of untying knots, but it was the movement of my hands as they folded the paper that made me precisely aware of what I was doing in that moment. It was a sort of meditative puppet show, sculpting my mind’s way to clarity. I zealously folded every one of my incessant thoughts into oblivion. I lined them up and spread them out on the table, like little heart-shaped soldiers, ready for war.
As my senses faded off, into the unmistakable blare and glare of a plastic infomercial on the TV, athletic people bounced inside the screen like catatonic zombies on rubber balls. There was nothing more horrifying to see at that hour. For some reason that morning I didn’t care. It didn’t matter to me when the sun rose or how it would look or even whether it would inspire me at all. My only desire was that once my heart-shaped army was formed, I could put them inside plastic cases on display somewhere for everyone to fawn over for a minute then forget about, but that just seemed like too much trouble so I just threw them away myself.
As I was clearing off the coffee table, replacing my hearts with all the other vices that were there before, I reached beneath the couch to make sure I hadn’t missed anything and found an unopened bag of fresh needles and a tin box. I opened the box and a little tornado of dirty brownish-colored powder swirled up into the air. It was a small stash of Sean’s dope. He must have forgotten it there before he went to bed the night before. I took the needles, closed the box, and put it all inside my bag. I grabbed a cigarette butt from the ashtray, ran to the kitchen, and shuffled around in the drawer for a spoon. I found one and threw it into my bag too. I ran to my bedroom to put on a t-shirt and got ready to go outside. I caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror as I passed by, and even though it was only one day after my sixteenth birthday, I looked different. I walked into the bathroom to take a closer look into the mirror. I didn’t know what it was, but there was an indisputable, new deviance in my eyes - somewhere, in the depth of blue, they had lost their innocence. I looked in the closet next to the sink, out of curiosity, and saw the sawed-off rifle, still there. I grabbed it to take with me. I was moving through motions so quickly, it felt as though I was on a war-mission, for no apparent reason, but there was no reason for a sawed-off, double barrel shotgun to be in the bathroom closet anymore, either and I wanted to have some sort of control. It made sense, in that moment that control came in the form of a rifle – the one that Karen, the not-so-called mother, once used to intimidate me.
The sun was about to come up I’d be able to see it again. I walked outside in my underwear and a t-shirt, my bag over my shoulder, and thought that my morning ritual seemed boring. I wanted to do something more self-indulgent, more destructive. Ever since realizing that I had created a fiction and substituted it for my reality, I became a pure and natural cynic. Nothing mattered and the boyish morning ritual of admiring the landscapes surrounding our house became more of a morning panic. I was tired of it and needed something else to escape the tension between my desires and my reality, because in that tension there lived a painful, greedy love - flanked between a deviant brand of rapture and expectation. I needed to touch the impossible.
Instead of walking the worn path to the guardrail, I turned, walked over to the barn, and climbed the stairs to the attic. I didn’t want to smoke-up – especially not after the day before. I wanted to shoot-up. I wanted to be like Sean. Just about every time I saw him, his head was in his lap, but he seemed blissed-out in his own state of perfect happiness, seemingly oblivious of everything. I wanted to feel that perfection. Like everything else in my life, it was the flaws in the initial design of happiness that I sought, in order to smash any possible pleasure that might come from it at all. I already knew how to shoot-up. I had seen it done a thousand times, so I figured that part would be easy.
When I got up in the attic, I hid the gun behind the mirror, shuffled through he bushy leaves of my little marijuana empire, then opened my bag and emptied it on the floor – into a pile of stolen paraphernalia. I took a thick piece of string, that I had been using to hold up one of my plant’s stems and sat down where I had emptied my bag. Better get this show on the road, I thought. I used the plant tie to use as a tourniquet on my arm and waited for my veins to bulge. I unraveled the paper around the filter of the cigarette butt to get the cotton out. I put it in the spoon with some dope. I drew some water from one of my metal watering cans with a syringe and squirt it into the spoon until it looked like there was enough.
As I drew the dope from the watery cotton, into the syringe, I realized that I never believed in love, not even when it smacked me square in the face. Love was nothing more than a barely leashed orgasm, chained to my own apathy.
“**** it,” I said, then forced the syringe into the biggest vein that appeared and injected the hope for bliss into myself as I pressed down slowly on the plunger.
I imagined that blood clots would fling like crimson spit from my arm as I injected myself, but that was far from the case. I hit it on my first try. I must be a pro, I thought, smiling and licking my lips in victory.
Once Sean’s venom started its course through my veins, the hot, dry air became smooth and light and what felt like an unaltered mania became the surreptitious deliverance of pure rapture. I felt the panic and every pain I had ever known, bleed from the depths of my very being, like redundant agony. I slid my back down the wall of the barn and sat there, my head floating away, my thoughts vapid but relaxed. I don’t know how long I was in and out of euphoria, but it started to rain outside. I heard it bouncing off the road, like a Morse-coded message, or a vulgar symphony bouncing against my catatonic mind. Maybe it was just an opioid-induced fantasy, but for once, I felt true pleasure and finally found an escape.
Lying there filled me with absolutely nothing, yet I felt as though I had the entire world readily available, as though there was nothing that I couldn’t accomplish. My feet were itching. I sat up and started scratching my feet, then my legs until they nearly bled and I had unexpectedly struck upon an erotic game to play with my skin. My senses left me, one-by-one, as I fell into the quiet space between the beats of my heart. 
I liked feeling so comfortably irritated.
A slight breeze billowed through the window into the attic, over my barely-covered crotch to my nose, and as I inhaled, I heard footsteps climbing the stairs to the attic. No one ever went up there, so I fumbled my way to standing up and tried to hide all the evidence by shoving it quickly inside my bag, but I wasn’t fast enough.
“What the ****? What are you doing?” Sean’s questioning voice loomed like a dark, omniscient vapor over my head. I turned around, red-handed with guilt decorating the expression on my face like graffiti. “I, um… nothing. Why?” I answered, oddly not afraid, because Sean was a true sadist. His pleasures were not only sexual, but also psychological and physical. He loved to inflict pain and as it happened, hurting me was his most decadent delight.
He walked over to me with a bottle of water in his hand, grabbed the bag from me, and dumped it out all over the floor.
“What the **** is this? You stole my **** and look at you. You’re completely ****ed-up. How long have you been doing this?”
“This is the first time,” I answered, “I swear. Please don’t tell Karen. You know she’ll kill me.” I begged him.
“Oh, man, I don’t know what to do.” He said. I just stood there waiting for something to happen, not sure if he was going to hit me or tell Karen, or what he was going to do.
“It felt so good,” I told him.
“No **** it feels good, but look at this. Look what it does to you.” He rolled up his sleeves, extended his arms, and showed me the inner creases of his elbows. They were so black. It looked like wads of phlegm had crawled beneath his skin, rested in the sockets of his elbows, and just died there.
“That’s gross,” I said with a snub on my face as I pushed myself back from the sight.
“It is gross,” he replied, reaching his hand into his back pocket.
“This is the one I use. Look at it.” He said. “It’s called a pin.” He pulled out a syringe and extended his hand, offering it to me the same way he did with the teddy bear. I took it from him to examine it. It was a rusty syringe, fish-hooked at the tip, with the numbers and measurement lines worn off the sides.
“Is there anything left?” He asked. I smirked and reached into my bag, taking out the tin box. I opened it in front of him. Straightway, he snatched it from me and started the process all over again for himself. He snubbed out his butt on the floor and unwrapped the cotton from the filter, took the cap off the bottle of water he had been carrying, dumped some dope inside and mixed it all together. Then he shot up right in front of me.
“What are you doing?” I asked him, having never had this close of an encounter with him. “What the **** does it look like, kid?”
“If you shoot up with me, I won’t tell your mother.” Was that really his ultimatum? I poked my mind for a response. If he told Karen, she would kill me. She would know about everything, including the weed. What choice was there? I had found a new pleasure and although we were in business together for three ****ing years and had shitloads of money stashed away, I never really bonded with Sean. It seemed as good a time as any other did. Besides, I was so scared of what Karen would do if he did tell her, I’d rather be high to face the music. I looked dead into his fading-away eyes.
“OK,” I said.
He handed his pin to me, but I put up my hand and turned my head down to look inside my bag for a cleaner one. The sight of his filthy spike was disgusting.
He guided me through it for my second time. He prepared everything to make sure that I had the right dose and that I wouldn’t OD. He even hit the vein for me, that time on the top of my hand. Within minutes, we were jammed out of our minds. We sat there, talking nonsense for a couple hours, enjoying the high, not wanting to even move. He gave me a cigarette and I knew then how all the holes ended up in the sofa and recliner in the living room. I laid back, the second-hand cigarette resting between my pale lips and closed my eyes to listen to my heartbeat.
I nodded out, burned a hole in the crotch of my underwear, and woke right up. He looked at me and laughed.
“Your first nod-burn. Wait until you think you’re burning yourself and you don’t even have a butt in your hand,” he said laughing.
Then things got a little strange. He reached over and put his finger in the freshly burned hole, stretching it out as though to rip it, but not forcefully. It felt unnatural, but at the same time, it felt deviant – so I sat there and let him touch me.
“Let me take a look at that,” he said. He put his hand on my crotch and started to fondle me with his open palm. I didn’t know whether to enjoy it or to get up and leave. I didn’t want to leave because I was so ****ed-up, and I did ask for something more unexpected than what I was used to. “Now that’s even better ain’t it?” He asked. “What’s better?” I asked back. “There’s nothing like getting off while you’re on dope. Actually, you can’t get off on dope, but it’s pretty ****ing nice to try.” He explained. He pulled my underwear down to reveal my full erection and started stroking it. “You got big.” He said as though he had seen it before at a younger age.
“It does feel nice,” I said to him hesitantly and scared.
He unbuttoned his pants, took out his three-quarter chub, and began to stroke it with his other hand. “Now, I definitely won’t tell Karen, if you don’t.” He said. Assuming he was offering another ultimatum, I let him touch me until we both just nodded off, clandestinely exposed.
The sound of Karen’s high-pitched screech from the front of the house snapped us both out of bliss.
“Xavier!” She screamed.
I knew that if I didn’t run inside instantly, she would unleash Sean on me. Then it occurred to me that Sean was already with me, so the thought of him having any power over me instantly vanished. What also vanished was the fury that I felt every time that She would let him hit me for her. She used him as a psychological and physical weapon, knowing that Sean had no inhibitions when it came to hurting me. In fact, he enjoyed it.
We both got up and shuffled around, trying to figure out what to do. He buttoned his pants back up and tried putting a more innocent appearance on his face.
“She knows you’re up here,” he said. “You go down first.”
“But I’m in my underwear and it has to be past noon by now. She doesn’t know I come up here.” I told him, pulling the bottom of my t-shirt down to cover the burn in the underwear. He looked around the attic for something to use as an excuse while I tried to adjust my clothing to a less divulging position.
“Here, take these.” He handed me a broom and an old newspaper. He got down, picked up a few pieces of glass from the broken mirror, and put them on the paper. “Tell her you were up here trying to clean up your mess from yesterday, then I’ll sneak out in a few minutes.” He ordered. I took broom and carried the glass on the newspaper as if I were serving dinner on a plate, and then walked down the stairs and out of the barn.
I walked toward Karen, still on the porch in front of the house. She was still in her pink, silky robe. She looked at me strangely, but just rolled her eyes and turned to go back inside the house. It was perfect, I thought. I didn’t even have to say a word. I threw the broom and the paper and glass off to the side of the porch and went inside. Karen was at the folded-down table in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette. She must have just woken up because she was still groggy and her hair wasn’t in its perfect place, yet.
I knew that Sean got Karen hooked and although she would never admit it, or shoot up in front of me, but she was almost as bad as he was. She tried to save face though, by going to church every week and living in absolute denial.
She jumped up from the table and chased me back out the front door, down the steps and onto the dirt. I stood there fidgeting, nerves swelling up beneath my skin looking at her standing on the porch in a holier-than-thou stance, wondering what the **** was going on. I thought everything was fine, but an evil glow in her eye told me otherwise. She walked off the porch toward where I had thrown the broom, bent down and picked it up, then broke it in half over her knee.
“You stealing my pills, you little punk? Look at you. You look ****ed-up right now.” She accused me. “I only took a couple because I couldn’t sleep.” I answered.
“Well get your *** over here.” She ordered. I walked over, within arms reach of her, and she grabbed me by the head, knocked me to the ground, and beat my leg with the broomstick until I screamed. Sean heard me. When he came from around the barn, Karen looked up at him and chucked the stick into the air. Sean was looking at her curiously. I writhed in pain, holding my leg on the dirty ground. “He knows what that was for,” she told him, and then she kicked dirt over my face and told me to get in the house. I ran to my room, where I remained for the rest of the day, until she had to go to work.
I didn’t care. The dope had me feeling light-headed enough to let the day pass until she left without even noticing that I was jailed in my room like a dog. When she did leave for work, I snuck out to the living room. Sean was watching TV on the recliner, smoking a cigarette. I sat on the couch and looked at him. He looked glossed-over.
“Good think Karen didn’t catch us up in the barn.” I said to him. “This bruise would have been a lot worse.”
“Yeah, it probably would have been a lot worse for both of us,” he said. It was then that I knew I could trust him. He fixed me up one more shot then we both just zoned out in front of the TV for the rest of the night. Every once in a while, I would look over at him and catch him with his hands in his pants and his head almost in his lap.
It got me excited, sexually. I was developing an attraction for Sean. It wasn’t a purely sexual attraction at all. I was attracted to the idea that because of our secret, he couldn’t hurt me anymore. I felt a sense of power over him. The table turned and on the flip-side of the past situation, I was in control. Of course, that made me happy, but I didn’t want to obsess over it. I stole what was left in his tin box, and then went off to bed before Karen got home – leaving him in his chair to burn himself to death if he wanted to.
Doing dope became a daily routine. I loved it. Sean’s habit had sunk into me and in no time at all, I was a full-fledged, sixteen year old junkie. It didn’t matter to me, though. I had found a cure for sleeplessness and a perverse friendship with Sean. Not only that, but I had no problem keeping a constant supply. Sean would nod off or go out to sell a few pounds of weed and at night, after Karen left for work, I would steal his junk little by little until I had enough to last at least six months. Besides, it was our secret. I didn’t mind too much when he would touch me. I sometimes caught him sneaking around the house in the daytime, peeking in my windows. Eventually, I started walking around naked, just to give him something to look at.
Nothing mattered and everything felt safe and warm and my life had no more pain. I only wished that I had found the **** sooner. It would have made childhood a hell of a lot easier to deal with.
Eventually, the dope became my inspiration. I slept only under the influence of heavy, head-in-my-lap narcotics. My anxiety was cured and I was the perfect junkie. There was no lie too verbose and no need for human interaction. Eventually, isolation became my choice drug and every day would just evaporate, beneath the pinch of a needle, into the notion that my reality had finally superseded my imagination.

Hello MXD... welcome to the writers forum... I read this story and can appreciate the detail that went into it... it is easy to follow and holds attention from beginning to end.. thanks for sharing...

I didn't read anything but the title. Sharing needle is like sharing disease.

You "write" a good story ...Would it be foolish of me to wish for a happy ending?...