#voidlena

When Bob got his vaccines growing up– within those 11 or 12 golden years where he still got the privilege of visits to the pediatrician's office– his mom would almost always be there, holding his hand as the needle sunk in. "Don't watch," she'd whisper urgently, looking into him with a bruising stare and a bruised left eye. Concealer, he'd learned it was called, the patchy stuff she used to paint over the purple. And he'd learned, too, as she knelt over him with the alien-shaped applicator on the morning of his first day in seventh grade, that it was cold on the skin. So was the "setting spray," which was what she said made it last the whole school day.

On those rare days at the pediatrician's, he'd sheepishly pick up a Superman sticker at the check-out desk on the way back. But that wasn't the best part— far from it. Bob never even stuck them anywhere. Of course not. Just hoarded them in a stack, in the back of his sock drawer, for safekeeping.

No, the best part was from the shot onward, when Bob got to keep his mother's hand in his for as long as possible, secretly hoping this time would be the one where she'd forget it was there and let them stay connected forever.

She always dropped it when they got out of the building.

The first time Bob shot meth, needle sinking into pale flesh, wrists already scarred from past attempts, sitting on a frayed couch in a room full of strangers, he'd asked his dealer to hold his hand. Thinking, what the hell? He was already at his lowest. His dealer laughed, but the sound, the eyes he gave, were all horrifyingly sad. Ones you'd give at a funeral. And then, to his surprise, he laid his hand out, palm-up, over a Texas-shaped stain on the cushion. Bob took it. It was soft. So, oddly soft.

All Bob remembers from that night was the sink in his chest and the way he begged, screamed, as the lights turned from purple to bright red to a nauseating piss-color: don't let go, don't let go, don't let go. Was he saying it out loud? Did the mantra ever even leave his head?

His dealer ghosted him in the week following. Bob found out months later that he had been shot just two days after that night.

During the medical trial, it's all unfamiliar voices, unkind faces, screens and papers to sign and conversations and more papers to sign and so many fucking wavers it felt like Bob's inauguration as the king of Malaysia. Unfamiliar fear tickles up his throat and suddenly he's stripped naked and shivering on a blue, vinyl-sticky surgery bed, skin nearly translucent but firm as ivory, pricked down the arms and legs like an extension cord with what look like IVs but they're pumping all golden and then all black, like sludge, going in or going out, he has no clue, and that was when it starts, the burning, the streaming tears boiling into steam on his cheeks, the blinding pain as the lights start to flicker and the few nameless scientists that had lingered in the room with him— were they even scientists?— start backing away from the bed and suddenly he's a kid again crying don't go don't go don't go so Bob instinctually reaches out to grab for the hand of one of them, and–

Their body spills to the floor, an ink stain, a slide into eternity, some kind of soft-hearted murder. The room pitches into silence.

Bob doesn't even remember what they looked like. Can never, will never know.

Searing ache thunders through him— whether it's his own guilt or the serum blistering up in his tendons, the walls of his arteries, ripping through his synapses— he'll never know. When he blacks out, it's relief. It's the sort of finale to his highway pileup of a life he never deserved but always wanted.

Except, it's not. The curtains slide back open on him in a vault, now surrounded by new strangers, guns in hand.

Somehow, there is a third act.

And the next hand he holds, there are no needles in his body. No sting. No rubber glove snapping, no smell of anticeptic, no Superman stickers or stains shaped like Texas or funeral laughs or flickering lights. No rush of corrosive chemicals to surge through his bloodstream.

Just hazel eyes, blurry, blooming open like lily pads to meet his.

Just, "Are you okay, Bob?"

And then the next one,

And the next one,

And the next—

"Bob. Are you okay?"

No desperation. Just... light. And light. And more light.

So much light he can't even cup it in his pink palms, it spills out and it rushes up his sleeve, slipping under the long sleeves he never rolls up, and it's warm, like a summer night when the sky is clear. She's not the sun: it's a reflected light.

That's when Bob realizes, in between the fifteenth and sixteenth squeeze of palms, that she won't let go. He knows this more certainly than the scars of forever carved into his skin, the years of puncture stings, the decades of exit wounds. He knows this for good.