FADING MEMORY
He told me he’d give me three hundred dollars for the leftover pills rattling around in the little plastic bottle my grandmother had left. The way he’d said it cornered me on my walk home from the bus- a little desperation and rasp in his voice- cut through my bones. I used to think he was hot (although I’d deny it), this teenage boy, just a few years older. His house was right next to mine. My friend had an older sister in his class, and she’d whispered to me, once, as he passed by, that he was hooked. I barely knew what it meant. (I tell myself, now, that I barely knew what it meant.)
I don’t know how he found out my grandma was taking OxyContin or how he knew she’d left any behind when my father drove her back up to Ocala. He leaned over me, and his breath stunk. But he was still this boy I looked up to, and I didn’t yet know how to say no, and the left corner of his mouth had the edges of a please tacked on to the edge.
As a kid, three hundred could buy you the world. I wanted to help my parents out, contribute something that would let my mom sleep at night. I remember a still-black morning, going to grab a glass of water. I remember her hunched form, staring silently at the clock from the kitchen table. I cursed myself for bearing witness.
We stood in the brush between our houses. He paid in cash, me the unwilling dealer, fifteen twenties in my pocket. His hand gripped the bottle so tight his fingers turned white. I couldn’t understand how pills my grandma took were strong enough to warrant such a desire.
We were both sweaty, him from that hunger and me from nerves, and we stood there, just breathing, for a few moments more. The sun bore down on us, threatening to rip me right open, tear each seam from the hairline down. Maybe I’ll always remember that heat, and what I was wondering. Where did he get the money? And at that moment, was it worth it? I think I was wishing I could grab the bottle back, but I was scared of the stains on his shirt and the faint shadow of a beard on his jaw.
I gave that boy the pills and knew they’d mess him up more. I let him count them up anyway, let him walk away in that glorious haze of a new addict just starting to fall.
My parents discovered the money around the house throughout the next few months and said some god had blessed them. I was no god; I was a twelve-year-old girl. I don’t believe they never suspected anything. I think they just didn’t want to ask, afraid of what they’d find out.
I don’t know where he is now. Just like my parents, I am too afraid to ask.
guilt for a boy I never knew
Oil paint
“This piece was inspired by memories, and how they fade/warp overtime. I combined a few separate memories of places/people to create a 'Space that doesn't exist', to show how overtime memories can morph and change until eventually all we remember is a place that may or may not have ever been real. I included elements of abstraction, as well as reflection and textured paint to symbolize the decay of a memory into eventually fragments of what they once were.”
MADISEN BAXTER ‘24 (FADING MEMORY)
Prose
“I wrote this piece as a narrative response to the book Dopesick by Beth Macy, which details the problem of the opioid epidemic in suburban America. Many times drug abuse is thought of only in terms of urban poverty or the ultra rich, but addiction can happen anywhere and to anyone.”