You walk the hill. It’s night. Earlier this Julian day you ate Trader Joe’s Fiery Chicken Curry. You liked it then, and it tasted great. For three bucks, it’s a steal of a meal. So you gobbled that gunk down like a hungry pig first in line for the slop trough, god bless baby, that tasted good. But your actions have consequences. You are not above justice, you damn fool. Whatever you think is wrong, always, always wrong, like when you chuffed that chicken curry down earlier this day with the expectation that it would merely give you sustenance and nothing else, you bitch of a baboon lost in the wrong part of the jungle. 

You were talking to your friend when it happened. You were in the midst of telling another controversial yet somehow boring story about the girl who came up to you at the Downer and told you the guy she was trying to hook up with was gay, you were telling the story about how she simply told you this and left, a patheic little story that ends with her walking away, oh but can’t you see you were nearly a pawn in her scheme? That you were just fodder for her mistaken assumptions, and nothing and ever more. You fool. You damn fool. You were telling that story like you thought it revealed something good about yourself, when it started. 

You thought you were safe in this narrative adventure, and up until now, you were lucky that your friend was even half-listening to you and not thinking completely about how you’re so wrong, about how there’s so many things about you that your friend hates, that you do so many wrong things that most people consider you a bad person. But not until it started. No, in that moment, you were half alive in the other’s mind, and for that you should be grateful. Then, like heat lightning screaming from heaven, it started. 

Poop rained out your ass. Your jaw dropped, you were fucking scared of this strange new thing being created right during your boring old story. You thought it was going to be a fart, you fool, and a silent one at that, because most of the time even your ass doesn’t have much to say for itself, much less your warped mouth. You don’t brush your teeth enough, not like that matters, though. You’re young, right? You can figure all this out later, you know, after college, when you know what you want to do with your life. But, deep down and buried in that pathetic bone cage is your heart, and if you were to take the CutCo knife set your parents bought you and carefully and precisely slice open your chest and the muscles underneath the skin, then proceed to take your tiny undersized hands and pull that beating organ out from where it belongs, and if you were to pry it open with the fingernails you haven’t cut in weeks because, hey, you’re a busy college student always doing things either for fun or for school, if you were to do all that and tear apart your own heart on a table, you will find that within it is nothing, no desire to be anything more than the cretin you are now, and certainly no will to ever break out of the cycle of failure you were destined to endure, like shitting your pants. 

You felt the warm sensation fill your undies before you felt the shame. You dropped your water bottle and ran to the bathroom, where you allowed the rest of the shit to shoot out your ass faster but much less accurately than a 17th century battery. It was a flume of green gunked beauty that lifted your frail frame up like a rocketship. Yet, you looked at the tile floor of your bathroom. There was a trail of green splots ripe for studying. You bent your body down to take a whiff, when more green shit dripped down your thigh. You snuff. It was shit. You looked back towards the toilet and saw nothing but pesto poop soup. 

Fuck you. 

Tonight is a different time, though the mistakes of your past still haunt you. Is that a fart coming up? Do you trust it? If you can’t trust your own ass, then who do you trust? Others? No. You cannot love if you do not trust, yet somehow you already know that and are fine with that because the most mature thing you have ever thought is that you are loveless and devoid of passion and the fire of life and some part of you thinks that’s okay while other parts of you, like your asshole, fight back with potency. 

You are drunk and filled with passion and laughter. You don’t watch your step because why would you? You, for the first time today and in a long time, are having a good time. You roam the hill with no free will and you are elated. So, you don’t watch your step. You don’t see the black ice hidden by the night. You step too confidently and proudly. Your foot loses its grip on the world, and flings itself up. You are going down. 

You are falling. 

It doesn’t take long. 

You hit the ground.

Your friends laugh. 

Pain shoots up your side.

Your mouth hangs wide. 

Your friends think you’re the worst. 

And now, your elbow is hurt.