Poison King

He was in love with poisoning himself.

First it was too much juice, enough to make him puke all across his grandmother's paisley rug. It was a family heirloom or something like that. She sat him down and told him the story so he would at least hold the memories of what he ruined except he was buzzing so hard with the urge to puke again that he remembered nothing other than the unshed tears in her eyes.

It didn't haunt him enough to change anything.

Candy was next and he wasn't as quick to throw that up but he did throw it up. In a sink. With some blood. The red splattered along the side of the white ceramic, clinging there like a red sunset that should have warned him away from the future.

He just stared at it. Curious.

Then alcohol, hot and heavy in his stomach, warm in his cold blood. He wondered late at night if he had ever been warm before. No, he decided, he hadn't.

One day, he woke up tired and never recovered. Threw the last of the liquor down the drain and turned his back on it like he did everything else because nothing mattered. Nothing filled the hole inside of him.

The blood was on his tongue all the time. From a cough. A tooth. Vomiting too hard. Biting his cheek.

Then drugs. Smoke. Pills.

They were cyclical friends, here for a month and gone forever, nothing more than a passing fancy to fill the vacuum inside him.

He poisoned himself with fruit and vegetables, eating so much he was sick. But it didn't stop. It never stopped. There was something cold and heavy inside him that could not be pleased.

And then there was the doctor's office.

The cold, clinical lights.

The diagnosis.

And then they shoved IVs into his arms with such a poison that it shredded his cells, made him vomit, and killed him on a molecular level. It tore him limb from limb with effortless ease. He sat back in the chair, buzzing with the poison as he stared over a lake polluted by truck traffic and sick birds.

He had become the King of poison.