Spring Cleaning

Make it as personal as you can. Believe me, you can't imagine a feeling everyone hasn't had. Make it personal. Tell the Truth.
And then write 'Burn This' on it.
-Burton (Burn This by Lanford Wilson)

Well, cleaning up in order to pack in order to move always does one thing -- it digs up the old memories burried at the bottom of your desk drawer. Not in a bad way, or really a good way, or really any way more than, 'oh, look at that, my life.' old letters from Rachel, and Emily, and Melissa... And bank statements? *throws out the bank statements* It's an intersting feeling, at least for me. Old letters are like old pictures, but better I think -- letters hold their own memories, inscribed on the paper. pictures only call up memories and, as nice as they are, they aren't very reliable. At least, not for me.

I'll have to go back and read all of these. Remember where I've been.

Homemade Brew

I don't know how he did it; his method seemed pure madness to me. To see him at work, you would think he was any other culinary-madman, and the mess he made of our kitchen matched the rank odors that swept throughout the apartment. Flour, spices, oils, and doughy-looking pastes covered every surface of the kitchen, including the walls and sink, and a fine white mist hung in the air. His arms, the sleeves rolled back behind his elbows, would be caked in a gray-green mud, more of the slop tumbling down the front of his shirt. He would be oblivious of it all, of course, ecstatic with his latest creation. In the end he would clean it up, though Erika would often help out, to make sure it all got up. Arthur was our Alchemist, though his potions often required special application, and Erika would as soon spit-up the mixture as benefit from it if he didn't administer it. He clutched her jaw at the point where it joined, splitting her lips and forcing her mouth open as her shoulders lay in my lap, her blonde head resting in the crook of my arm. She was still convulsing a little from the shock, but she was a slight girl and we were able to hold her. He poured half of the chalky-looking teal fluid into her mouth, some of it dribbling down her cheek. "Shhhh," he hushed her, glancing over his shoulder, toward the mouth of the alley, as a police siren wailed not far away. Blocky garbage bins, trash spilling over the lip and piling around the side, and gray mist from the sewage drains obscured them from the street, but they could see there wasn't anyone out there. Not yet, anyways. She sputtered and swallowed and he pulled the bottom of her shirt up, away from the angry wound in her side. Her yellow shirt was sticky with blood. "You're lucky," he said to her, "that the bullet passed through." Arthur looked up at me, and he knew as well as I did that luck had nothing to do with it. Just as I couldn't work with potions the way Arthur could, neither of them could focus their will as directly as I. I had shielded Erika from the worst of the gunshot, but it hadn't been enough. A gut wound was bad, and it was left to Arthur's potions to save her now. They would find us if we went to a hospital. He poured the rest of the liquid over her side. It sizzled and smoked purple as it ran over her wound, and she arched her back and cried in pain. "Shhh, Erika. The body needs to suffer before it can heal. You'll be alright." When the sizzling calmed and the hazy purple smoke lifted, Erika's side was tender and red, but the bullet hole was gone. "Come on," Arthur said, helping her to her unsteady feet and putting her arm over his shoulder. "She'll be weak and needs rest, and somewhere warmer than this shit-hole." I took her other arm over my shoulders, hefting my backpack up on my other arm. Her head lolled forward as though she were drunk, and her legs supported little of her weight. Like that, we stalked deeper into the alley, away from the main roads, back to our apartment.