Addiction
The first thing you hear is a whisper, "Wake up."
The first thing you notice is the unbearable headache. Your head throbs to your heartbeat. A horrible taste enters your mouth and shivers shoot down your spine as you realize how cold it is.
Your eyes open to see... Garbage. You are in strange land. The colors aren't what you remember them. All your senses have changed, especially your sense of thought. You grit your teeth... There is an unbearable urge to just rip your skin off. Goosebumps cover your pale, skinny body as the icy sharp rain hits it.
"Where the hell am I?" you ask to yourself as you take notice of your disgusting surroundings.
You feel the slimy, muddy ground. It has been raining for the past week. The mud covers your hands and you look down at your ripped up clothes. You see the red slime on your shirt and honestly can't tell if it is blood or mud. Completely disoriented, wigged out, you finally get the courage to stand up, but then realize you can't. Your leg muscles are heavily vascodilated from your acid binge. You get increasingly worried.
You look around. In the distance you see a hydraulic excavator next to mountains of trash. You are at a junk yard. Your mind scrambles to figure out how you got here. Nothing makes sense. You do your best to remember what you can. You remember now that you flunked out of high school. You remember that both of your friends died of a Fentanyl overdose a couple months ago. You remember that you threw away the opportunity your parents gave you to get a car if you could pass a drug test. You remember your girlfriend's face when you didn't get her a birthday gift because you spent all of your money on Roxy. And you also remember not feeling bad about it.
The headache is getting worse. You dig through your pockets and find a bottle.
"Oxycodone," you say to yourself, "thank God."
Your shaky hands open the bottle and the two pills you had left leap out and fall into the mud below.
You scramble to grab them but only push them further into the ground. You spend the next five minutes meticulously digging through the mud, inspecting all you grab until you finally recover them. They are covered in red slime but it doesn't matter, you eat them.
You sigh a deep breath of relief. Those will get you through the next four hours or so. You calm down and slump back onto your throne of garbage. It is quiet. You can hear every light rain drop as it hits the ground. After waiting some time, you feel ecstasy and relief come upon you. The pills are working.
But the peace is short lived... You get a familiar feeling of doom.
From around a corner of a trash pile, next to the excavator, come three bulldogs. Slowly moving and perfectly coordinated, they scan the area. As they come closer, your heart beats faster and faster. One of them catches sight of you and gnashes his teeth. The others lock on to your pale, horrified face and they start walking toward you, growling ferociously.
You try crawling away from them but slip on the mud and garbage. The effects from the pills get stronger and stronger. You feed disconnected from your muscles. Every action seems to have a two second delay from your brain to your muscles. You feel drowsy and lightheaded. You do everything you can to crawl away but your motor skills cease to function. You scream frantically as the dogs get closer. And as you make your last attempt to scrape through the mud, your leg and rib cage are bit by the dogs. Sharp shots of pain barrel through your spine, yet the drugs numb it out. A blanket of hopelessness drifts across your mind as you accept that your life is over.
Suddenly, in your sorrow and goodbyes to the world, large globs of mud pummel the dogs' heads. You look up and see Virgil coming to your rescue. The dogs bark at him, but their open mouths are hit with mud and they run away tails tucked.
"Remember me?" asks Virgil.
You stare at him blankly. You have no idea who he is.
Virgil continues, "Oh, right, I forgot."
He waves his hand over your head and you are transformed back to your old self. You now remember everything, and somehow you even remember the experience you just had.
"What was that!?" you exclaim. "That wasn't anything like I thought it would be!"
"We are just getting started," replies Virgil. "How was your experience?"
You shake as you whimper, "That... Was... Terrible."
"Good," says Virgil, "You now have a glimpse into the horrors that come from the sins of your life choices. Every action you take leads to very real layers of hell. The worse the actions, the worse the consequences. As the gluttonous are pelted with freezing rain in Dante's Hell, as they grovel in the mud, as they are tortured by a ferocious beast, and as they put their selfish addictions in front of everything meaningful in their lives, so do you in your addictions. All who share the same addictive lifestyle have these consequences in a sense. They just take different forms. Welcome to your first layer of hell."
You sit in silence for some time, thinking about all that you just went through. It was horrible, frightening, and lonely. You have no intention of going back, yet the experience sparked a great curiosity. You want to learn more.
"What is the hell that these other more grievous sins bring to one's life?" you ask.
Virgil smiles, "Traveler, your bravery impresses me. Come, I will show you the answers you seek. Meet Dan, a 43-year-old husband and father of two. After coming home from a hard day's work, he walks in the door of his suburban home to find that while his wife, Laura, had been cleaning their backyard pool, his children's school volcano project erupted prematurely in his office."
Author's note:
This story was inspired by the writings of Dante Alighieri in the Inferno part of his epic poem Divine Comedy. In his story, Dante meets the spirit of Virgil, who was from the Limbo level of hell and was sent there because he didn't accept Christ. Virgil physically leads Dante through nine distinct levels of hell, each with inhabitants that commit a specific type of sin or sins to be sent there. My story's focus was directed toward the third circle of hell, which is for those who commit gluttony. In this level, there is a bunch of mud, icy rain, and spirits of the gluttonous who grovel in the mud and are guarded by a three-headed dog named Cerberus that claws and tortures them. Virgil allows Dante to safely pass by Cerberus by filling its mouths with mud. I wanted to expand on the gluttony level of hell in Dante's Inferno while keeping as much of the imagery alive within the story. The mud, three dogs (Cerberus), rain, and general feel from Dante's level were the key areas that I integrated into my story. My style I have been using is probably best classified within the realm of modern urban legend myths. Similar styles can be found on the website Snopes (the Horrors section would be most related to my content). I am doing a modern-day story with the dynamics similar to A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. It connects with readers by showing them realms of hell that they build with negative lifestyles. I really liked this example because there are so many forms of addiction that exist in society today, and I feel that just about everyone can relate with the consequences of addictions/obsessions within their lives. I felt like this would be a good first story to draw readers into the deep feelings of the stories because it is likely the most relatable one. I am focusing my efforts on painting a picture of the psychology behind individuals in these horrible lifestyles, especially the negative parts. In this story, for example, I showed loneliness/relationship destruction, desperation, dependency, lack of empathy and regret, and horrible memories/past experiences.
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