Nosmirc

They warned him a million times not to venture to that wretched place. They cautioned him, and threatened him, and were very stern with him. They were not vague, nor ambiguous. They did not converse with him jokingly about this subject, nor with a smile on their face, much as a victim of a tickling would as they order their tickler to halt. As a matter of fact they were very brief, and to the point. All the lectures that were given out about this town were actually very austere, and rigorous. It's funny, really, and also a tad ironic that the very people that pushed him to the brink of departing to that unholy place were the very people that warned him of it.

Sometimes, it is better to not even bring up such places in an effort to keep the awareness levels of them down. What anybody doesn't know, won't hurt them. Many just wish the Fraud parents would have learned this lesson prior to the findings of their son Robert's carcass, faced down 2 feet deep in burnt newspaper, half eaten apple cores, half eaten corn stocks, and Nosmirc sludge. However, we'll start from the very beginning, digging deep down in efforts to uncover what drove young Robert to such lengths, starting at the birth of him. In a lime crusted 2 ft x 5 ft bath tub in the projects of Northern Crimson lay 17 year old Janice Fraud, clutching onto the dirtied hand of her not-so-faithful-at-the-time boyfriend, Jamaal Wilkinson.

Jamaal had been a rugged man who had sold rock during during the late 80s and early 90s, he was an addict. It was 1994 when little Harry was born, and Jamaal was doing the same old thing. Don't get it it mistaken, though. Janice was not exactly the epitome of perfection and honesty when it came to being faithful, either. She was no angel, not in the least bit. Janice pushed and pushed as hard as she could, gasping for air deeply, gripping tighter and tighter on her false love's hand. Pushing and pushing like her life depended on it, and it did indeed depend upon it. Harry Fraud was birthed. His mother tragically passed away in the process.

Soon after, Jamaal began shooting more heroin than ever before in a delerious effort to run away from his troubles. His logic was "Inject that sweet golden brown, and let all of your worries, troubles, emotions, feelings, and struggles float away through that half a milimetre sized hole". This logic was indeed correct, however his logic was correct for all of 30 minutes, before he came down from his glorious high. He was a long-term user. You see, Heroin does have an amazing feeling, it releases dopamine into your brain, which intensifies the euphoric feelings people on this drug posess. It releases all of those cells that make you feel happy. It exerts every single happy cell you have in your head, and when you come down from your high, you have nothing but negative, depressed thought cells to support you. While you're trying to score your next fix, gathering all the money you can find, those thought cells regenerate, but only at a certain pace or rate.

This is why I believe each high is less intense or lasts shorter than the last, because all of your positive thought cells have diminished and are slowly rebuilding, and by the time you get your next fix they STILL have not fully replenished. This leaves you doing more and more of this fascinating drug, trying to get the same high as before, believing you NEED more Heroin, when in reality, you just need more patience. Leaving you chasing the red dragon that slithers inbetween the lobes of the brain, tempting you like the snake in the tree to use more and more leaving you in a vicious, seemingly never-ending spiral. Then again, I think too much. That's just my opinion on the whole ordeal, though.

Please, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Quincy Hayes, and I've been friends with Harry since we were 9 or 10 years old. I consider him to be my brother. Me and Harold have been users since the age of 13, unfortunately young Rob's addiction had run him into the ground. The sad thing of all of this is that I still haven't learned anything from this whole unfortunate ordeal. I met Robert at St. John's Orphan Asylum For Boys. Looking back on the name, now, made us seem as if we were a mess of deranged lunatics, waiting to break free. However, in a way that's exactly what we were. Just a batch of bastards with no mother. A bunch of parentless children who were forgotten, left behind, beaten down.

We were all completely different, yet the same, the whole lot of us. However, me and Robert shared a special bond. What it was, I don't know, n'or did I care of finding out. As a lonely child, I took every friend i could gather, and believe me, there were not many of them. The very first memory of us I have is us getting into a rather brutal fist fight over a broken down toy car, with half of the paint ground off, and 2 wheels missing. It was more like a "c", because if it were a full sized car, it would not get started. It would just make a hard C noise every time you would attempt to fire the engine up. Ahhh, that toy car was indeed a raggedy old thing. Must have been over 30 years old by the time we got to it, and we were both 8 at the time of the tilly. If the car is still there then the car must be at least over 39, 40 years old. If you can't do the math that means that I'm 17, now. The altercation ended with a broken nose, however it was neither of our noses. This nose was the nose of a guardian at the orphanage, Ms. Shiela Roberts.

She was a miserable old hag. You see, what had happened was after the two of us had exchanged black eyes, Robert cocked back to pummel me a second time and ended up striking Shiela in the nose. Her nose popped and chilling screams rang throughout the Orphanage. Since me and Harry had despised that vile "thing" and howled with uncontrollable laughter at the ancient beast's demise, we decided that we would have each others backs forever. Looks like love can stem from hate after all. We were the outcasts of the place, the unwanted. One night we decided to leave and never come back, and that is exactly what we did.

We lived among the gutters, graduated to crashing on friend's couches, and finally rented a one room apartment, with a tattered couch and no appliances, only to get evicted a month and a half later. The two of us were not that great at keeping jobs. To us, our jobs consisted of two steps; buying new needles, and sometimes finding used ones in order to inject more of our powdered paradise. Sometimes, in an effort to acquire our "necessities", we would often steal and quickly sell anything we could. Bike locks, children's tricycles, wheelchairs, microwaves, anything we could find. We even collected beer bottles in order to return them to the beer store for an extra dime or two. This whole cycle of: get evicted, crash on friends couch, find jobs, move into apartment, get fired, blow money on our sacred dust, get evicted, back on the street - seemed to be getting more and more tedious each time around.

This cycle fully looped every couple months or so until we were both 17 years of age. Me and Rob would still be trapped in this dreadful unforgiving loop if the worst had not happened, but we'll get to that later. You see, we got evicted the one last time, and Robert had been fired from work that same day. I was without a job and he was the only one bringing in the income and paying the rent at the time. I never did find out what made him snap like that. I will never fathom what made such a great man (despite his addiction) crumble. I will never understand how he could order 2 remorseless shells to eject from the 3" chamber of that old O.F. 500 Mossberg pump, to pierce a hole in a landlord's chest that had just been doing his job. I will never forget the terrible sound of the ghastly breathing of the landlord as he plummeted to the floor.

The bang of the landlord's head on the soiled carpet, matched with the ghoulish switch of the pump and an inaudible bang, causing my ears to ring for the next 12 minutes. Rob had had that very pump in every closet he had owned in every apartment we had migrated to, at a consistent rate for ages. After that event we had decided to move ourselves to the most unthinkable of places. To Nosmirc, the forbidden town beyond the tracks encircling the glorious city of Crimson. So there we were, two lost souls, just trying to get away. Don't get me wrong, we did get away. We left that night for Nosmirc with not even a subtle intent of returning. We were no longer good people. We could not live in the city of Crimson, with all of the great souls and accepting faces. We belonged in Nosmirc, city of the unwanted. The city for lost souls, and terrible people.

We had caught a loud, red freight train that had stopped on the outskirts of the town for a checkup, and had jumped onto it while it was just starting to move again. We arrived the next night, at around 9:30. We had decided to get to know our spacious tomb, while the night was still young. We ventured into town and were greeted with the grimaces, nasty looks of the towns-people, and the wicked stench of dishonesty and crooked ways. It had all happened so fast. We had decided to see a movie, step brothers I believe it was. That is where Robert had bumped into a man who had looked dirty, with eyes that were glazed over. His eyes looked as if there was nothing behind them, yet a complex story that held everything he was together at the same time. Before Rob had bumped into him, he had this beautiful aura about him. The outline of his jacket almost glistened. He looked as if he didn't belong in such a guilty place, like a lost puppy-dog. As soon as Rob bumped into him, his look of innocence soon faded. I often like to think that the wondrous glow about him was just the street light.

The man began chasing Robert as if he was the last piece of food around at the moment of the apocalypse. They stormed through abandoned shops, alleyways and vacant lots. He chased Rob and I chased the two. Memories suddenly broke through my troubled mind like the Apollo through the atmosphere, me and Robert playing tag, him shattering Ms. Roberts's nose, the ghoulish pleads of the unfortunate landlord gasping "You fucker" as he attempted ever so desperately to make his scattered thoughts audible to us. I pursued the two further and further, leading myself into a cornfield, left with nothing but screams of Harry and his pursuer, I had never heard such piercing, sorrowful screams emit from my disturbed brother before. I caught a vague glimpse of a shimmer beaming from the only clean spot on a rusty sickle, I watched as it glided vertically. His pursuer had probably found it in the cornfield during the hunt. I watched as it disappeared into the cornstalk, matched by a faint screech in the distanced almost instantly.

I watched as it was within in view once more, watching helplessly as it declined into the field of half eaten corn stalks once more, again and again, the faint scream decreasing into a very sincere gasp for air. I ran as fast as my legs could take possibly carry me, and then some. I hadn't stopped until I had tripped over the carcass of my friend, desperate for air, landing in a pool of his own blood. His executioner was nowhere to be found. Me and Rob lay alone in that cornfield for what seemed to be hours. Him, indefinitely asleep in my arms, my tears dissolving the sanguine liquid caked onto his face. Screaming pointlessly for help with nobody around to listen. Just me, a guilty sickle, and the only family I had ever known slain in my own arms. To this day I still have not caught the deceitful man who would commit such a permanent crime. I gave him a proper burial. I dug for 5 and a half days a perfectly disfigured 6 x 6 ditch. A tomb carved with nothing less than 6 functioning, shameful fingers, 2 fractured fingers which occurred from a completely different event, and 2 ashamed thumbs. A tomb fit for a king.

I had no intention of changing. I still don't possess any intention or the willpower of doing so. All that still matters to me is that beautifully un-natural powder. It's the only thing that makes me forget, even if it is for a brief amount of time. I hate who I was, I hate what I transformed into, and I hate who I am and what I stand for today. Maybe if I had ran a little faster, or been a little more watchful over Harry perhaps, that my best friend's life could've been spared. Just maybe he would not have been laying a field that has been forgotten about for ages.

Just maybe he would have been able to change and just maybe he would have been able to have sought help for his addiction, his problems, his mental health. Just maybe could he had moved to a different society and started fresh, and new. Just maybe could he have played catch with a son one day, just maybe could he have been able to get up in the middle of the night to change his son's diaper, or go to his daughter's ballet recital. But that's in the past, and this is the present. All I can do now is look toward the light, whether that be my next fix, or the day where i finally gain the fearlessness to kick this gorgeous habit. The answer to if either will happen or not is maybe. Maybe, just maybe. Maybe.