Gloves Off: Round XXXIII

A lesson in subtle

Today we’ll take a longer look at Exchange by Katy Harrison

To read the story as originally posted, please click here!

Exchange

The needle punctures the orange peel and there’s a wet hiss. Juice splashes his hand and he says, ‘Pay attention.’ 

Presses his thumb and the plunger sinks down to the first black line. He pulls out the needle, leaving behind a dainty hole in the flesh. Placing the syringe in the box, he says, ‘Just the first 0.4mls. Then wait two minutes.’ 

My Comments: No quibbles here. I bumped a little when you began the second paragraph without a subject. This works better if you begin the paragraph with a subject, then drop the subject in subsequent sentences: He presses his thumb and the plunger sinks down to the first black line. Pulls out the needle, leaving…

You do a very good job of hiding the “I” and keeping the camera pointed elsewhere.

The needle is strong enough to go through jeans or sweatpants. Don’t boot the whole dose at once. You can bring someone back from the grave that fast, they’ll punch you in the dick and ask for their money back. 

He tells us naloxone has more than a ninety-nine percent success rate. That’s better than your favourite brand of condoms. Naloxone only reverses opiates. Morphine. Heroin. Codeine. Fentanyl. You can hook someone up to the National Grid, but without naloxone you’re no better than a fried orange. 

My Comments: Still good, good paraphrasing so you don’t overload us with dialog. But watch your verbs, please. Almost anything works better than “is” or “has.” For example: The needle is strong enough to go through jeans or sweatpants could be That needle could drive through jeans or a leather vest. “Boot” is a wonderful verb.

Likewise, He tells us naloxone has more than a ninety-nine percent success rate sounds so abstract compared to your other lines. Can you burn it? He tells us naloxone brings almost everybody back from the dead, almost. He shows us the bruises to prove it. Something that demonstrates the “kicks” mentioned earlier.

He says, ‘Everyone grab an orange and a kit. Stab like someone’s life depends on it.’

Our trainer is an expert. Not ex-junkie, but has lived experience. Instead of needles, it’s pins. Spoons are pans. Syringes are barrels. Injecting is digging and a script is methadone. He wears prison cobweb tattoos on his elbows and a clean wedding band.

Sharp citrus in the air and it smells like Christmas. Mama mixed dry peel with cinnamon.

My Comments: These words are wonderful, but from this point you’ve got to keep them present. Pins, barrel, pans. And you make a subtle suggestion of the narrator, very nice.

No one does this because they like it. Not like they used to like it. 

And stop. 

We don’t say that. 

We don’t say don’t do drugs. We don’t say you’re making a mistake. We say don’t share. We say use each needle once even if it’s on yourself. We say bring your used kit back to the Exchange. We say carry your naloxone. 

My Comments: All good. All wonderful.

Is there a slang term for naloxone? That would be an alternate way of revisiting it near the end.

After stewed coffee, he tells us about central nervous system depression, how heroin slows your heart rate, your breathing. How sometimes botulism gets into the chain and suddenly we have clients with their arms being cut off. Or leg ulcers being treated for the whole time it took me to finish college. Blood borne viruses, unplanned pregnancies. Endocarditis, when an infection blows your heart valves apart.  

Before we receive our Certificates of Attendance, he tells us the signs of an overdose. Tiny pupils. Slow breathing. Blue lips. Breathing they call the death rattle. Dial the nines and three clicks opens a naloxone kit.  

My Comments: All clear and effective until the last line. Dial the nines and three clicks opens a naloxone kit.  Does this refer to a combination lock or a dial phone? It sounds good, but you need to make it more clear—or, better yet, explain it later to give the reader the relief of delayed understanding.

We never beg or plead. Please, please, please stop. It’s killing you. Please don’t do this. Please. 

My Comments: Can you put a specific—an ominous one—into the middle of this? For instance: Please, please, please stop. Look at that crater in your arm. Look how deep. Please. 

That said, I would like to see something at stake, soon.

Using heroin and crack cocaine together is called speedballing. Crack is sold in stones or rocks. Heroin in bags. Crack is white, base. Heroin is brown, gear, smack. The shadows in padded jackets and hoodies inside the bus station lean out when I walk to work, muttering, ‘White or brown?’ They fall into step with me, tugging my sleeve. ‘You need tabs, bro? Xanax, DF118s, moggies, jellies?’  

It can take three years to qualify as a nurse. Five for a doctor. I can learn to dispense needles and reverse an overdose in the time it takes to watch Trainspotting. 

My Comments: Careful, here. I love the “horse” or theme of naming/defining things, but don’t overwork it. Excellent work with the verbs: lean out, fall into step, take. And you get extra credit for measuring time by a movie instead of minutes or hours. Especially a movie that helps describe the narrator. Nice.

And you’ve kept the “I” hidden for a nice stretch. Good job.

No one has names in the Exchange. Initials only. We play make believe that it’s confidential and no one will know. Just a sharp secret just between us. Next door is a chicken shop with a two star hygiene rating. A late night chemist. A pub with planks across the windows and chicken wire over the letterbox. No one should want to be on the road, but it’s always busy. 

Yellow tubs piled high marked SHARPS BINS. Copies of The Safer Injecting Handbook. Medical grade foil to smoke off. A dusty spider plant that no one waters. Condoms available in extra safe and flavoured. An intercom bleats when someone presses the buzzer on the street. 

My Comments: All good, but don’t let description get in the way of building tension. We risk forgetting the needles and oranges. And never forget to include a smell, smell gets under the reader’s radar—like you’ve linked the oranges to the narrator’s mother. Also, the stickiness of orange juice on your hands or on objects touched by sticky hands. Get a little tactile, and then you can goose your description.

FT usually comes in at the start of the week. She’s sweating, shivery and tells me she thinks she’s got the flu. Her elbow crooks are perforated, lacy like a doily. A fat gold cross nestles in the fist-deep hollows of her collarbones.

Not withdrawing, but rattling.  

My Comments: Beautiful. Would you consider switching paragraphs so we read “FT” before hearing that everyone uses initials? It’s always nice to demonstrate before you define.

She asks for blue and pink NeverShare needles. Ten for him and ten for her boyfriend.  

Ten little fingers and ten little toes. 

My Comments: Did you mean to write Ten for her and ten for her boyfriend ?

I unlock the cupboard and count out the 2ml needles, the plastic wrapped metal spoons, the cigarette filters. My hand hovers over the packets of powdered citric acid and vitamin c. I look back at her. 

‘Citric, not vit c', she says. ‘Vit C burns me.’ 

My Comments: All good. Glad you didn’t ask/answer the question about citric acid. Gesture and response is more effective.

We say smoke, don’t inject. And if you do inject, do it safely. Think of your body as a blast zone. The more you stick to the edges, the safer you’ll be. Hands, arms, ankles. If you’re going in the neck or the groin, you’re getting too old for heroin. Dig an artery instead of a vein, and you’ll bleed out in the time it takes for you to sing Happy Birthday.  

FT has a fat bruise on her neck. Tells me it’s a love bite. She weighs as much as a wet cat and smells like a dead one, but sure, it’s a love bite. Once the veins collapse you have two options. Switch to smoking or it’s UYB. Up Your Bum. Load a syringe, take off the needle, cram it in your rectum and hit the plunger. 

My Comments: Ah, you prove my point. Here you used FT, then you drop the subject in the next sentence. That always works better. I would like to see earlier language get used: barrel, pin, etc. Load up the barrel, take off the pin… That will keep the earlier authority-building details in the reader’s mind.

The forms ask me to ask the same questions for each person. 

What are you using? 

Have you been tested for hepatitis and HIV? 

Are you street homeless? 

Are you sex working? 

Injecting or smoking? 

Using alone? 

Do you carry Naloxone?  

Do you have contact with any under-18s? 

Do you have any children? 

My Comments: This is a smart dodge from putting those questions into dialog. Here my only concern is that we’ve lost the original thread of the trainer and the oranges. Would you consider putting that portion in the past tense, then as FT arrives switching to present tense?

Did you have a child? A boy? Looked a bit like me if I grew out my hair and wore a Spiderman t-shirt and just a nappy even though I was old enough for school? 

I ask, ‘Do you know someone called Jenny? Black hair, blue eyes, tattoo on her hip?’ 

FT shrugs and says, ‘That sounds like a lot of girls.’ 

Instead of smackhead we say opiate crack user. Never a headcase, but a complex needs client.  

My Comments: Wonderful. First you give the script, then you instantly diverge from it. You create instant tension.

What I gather is that FT might have a son, right? The rhetorical use of “you” makes me wonder if the you here is rhetorical or refers to FT.

I say, ‘The tattoo says Mikey and there’s a heart over the i.’ 

FT bites at the skin around her thumbnail and says, ‘Can I get those pins now?’ 

I say, ‘She’s my mother. Do you know her?’ 

Not overdosing, but going over. 

My Comments: Excellent work, linking back to the mention of the Christmas mother. You’re escalating tension. It’s through dialog, but good, subtle.

FT slides a hand over her crotch, ‘You want your mama? Honey, I can be your mother if you want. Price of a bag and I’ll be anything you want.’ 

Not a junkie whore, but working girl. 

I bag up her kit and push the black plastic bag across the table. I lower my head and the door shuts behind her before I finish signing the form. 

The buzzer goes. 

My Comments: Please consider staying in the crotch moment for a beat longer. Not just touching the crotch, but adding another suggestive-but-ambiguous action before the line of dialog. It’s such a physical moment I don’t want to see it resolved so quickly.

The buzzer makes a good way to mark the transition

LD limps in on crutches, one trainer empty due to having half a foot. Just the top half. He had necrosis start in his toes from sleeping in a wet tent under the bridge. Flies found him and by the time I met him in the Exchange, a trail of maggots dripped from each mushy footstep. Those maggots ate through the dying flesh and that’s why he has nearly two feet instead of one leg. Some people get lucky now and then. 

Today LD asks for foil. Tells me he knows a Jenny. Thinks he might have scored with her once or maybe lived with her. It’s all a bit hazy, he mumbles. He can ask around if I’m good for it? 

I hand him a foil strip of diazepam, blue 10mgs, and tell him I’m good. 

The buzzer goes. 

My Comments: All good. You’re smart about paraphrasing dialog to keep the scene short, and thus contrast the scene before it.

BR pulls down her sweatpants and beside her mound of stubble is a groaning abscess. Fat and eggplant purple. Fingertip sized bruises trickle down her thighs. 

She asks, 'Do I have a cream I could use?’ 

Green bubbles on the surface and an arm’s length away I feel the heat. In another few days she’ll have sepsis or an ulcer. If you want to know what an ulcer smells like, switch off your fridge. Leave the food in there and go away for the summer. When you come home, turn on the heating and open the fridge. Like an animal rotting in a collapsed drain, that’s necrosis. She needs to be in hospital yesterday. She nods and asks for another five needles. And strawberry flavour condoms if I have them. 

My Comments: Absolutely wonderful. Fantastic unpacking of details. Incredible on-the-body moment.

And the smell is bad enough I don’t ask anything.

The buzzer goes. 

RP has fleas. She’s breached an exclusion zone order to collect today. She flicks the black grains that crawl up her ankles. Smells like carbolic soap and cigarettes. Says she doesn’t need anything today, but heard I did. She holds out her hand.

Not a benefit scrounge, but economically inactive on health grounds. 

Fistfuls of Valium, Xanax, Percocet. Candy-coloured pills. A bowl of yellow stars, pink hearts. Blue moons and purple horseshoes. Scooby Doo on the television and mama needs her rest. 

My Comments: You’d better pay off what’s in that outstretched hand. Good shift into flashback. But I’m wanting to see what RP either brings or is requesting.

We don’t say rape, poverty, neglect. We say Adverse Childhood Experiences. We don’t say shitty parenting. We say high support needs. 

When the box of cereal is empty mama is still sleeping. The room is cold and mama’s friends have gone home. When I’ve eaten from both cat bowls there’s buzzing at the door.   

I open the door and put a finger to my lips.  

Not dying but, she’s sleeping. 

My Comments: If might be too cute or too pat, but would you consider the rescuer getting slugged in the nuts? That would cement the idea that he’d revived her with the injection. Your call.

And an excellent pay-off of the mis-phrasing, the on-going denial of reality in the euphemisms. Very well done.

And a dad-shaped man in green shoves past me, knocks me against the TV screen and Scooby Doo cracks. Runs to the sofa and stabs her in the leg.  

A whoop of air and mama gurgles. Static and footsteps and the squeak of wheels. A croak from the sofa. A shadow across my face and I shut my eyes. Hands grab me under the arms. Carried high above, I see mama lifted high also, to a bed on wheels, as the hands take me into the light. I sneeze in the sunshine and the hands curse. Wet runs through the nappy over the hands, the arms.  

Mama croaks, ‘You should have left us.’ 

My Comments: All good, but I’m still wondering about RP. I did love dad-shaped. Would you consider adding a beat to the television cracking? Is it a console? A flatscreen? I’d like to see one detail that nails it. The warmth of the screen? The static charge televisions can accumulate? A smell of ozone? Just one beat to step on that moment.

Also, rethink what the mother says. A non sequitur might be stronger, as you make this a little too clear. Since we never hear the narrator’s name, that might be a nice detail to blurt out.

Mama disappears into twenty-eight day programmes. Women’s refuges, jail. My address, my school changes faster than my underwear until it’s too late to know who either of us are. 

The buzzer goes. 

JR wanders in slow motion to the NEX. Pupils the size of pins. She mumbles out an order of ten one mil completes, slumps into the chair. Pale as a boiled egg. Her arms unfold and dangle off the chair. A hollow knock of knuckles on plastic. 

My Comments: Ah, I’ve been waiting for someone with a “J” initial.

Three clicks.

And JR, her faded blue eyes slip back inside her head. Her chin drops to her chest and there’s a thick snoring. She tilts, starts to fall softly. I catch her and she’s heavy as sand. I pull her down to the floor. Into my lap. Cross my arms over her chest. Pants ride down and I see a black heart the size of a pip.  

The buzzer goes again. 

My Comments: By now I assume the three clicks is a combination lock of some kind. But it would work better to make that a bit more clear at first reference.

Be careful about filtering through the narrator. I see could easily be Pants ride down to show more skin, egg white except for a black heart… You’ve done such a great job of submerging the “I” that I don’t want to see that “I” too often. I want the reader to become the narrator. Likewise, don’t filter with your nose too obviously.

Press my nose into her hair that smells like wet cereal and oranges. Christmas and non-school days and mama. She gurgles. Blueing lips match the colour of her hidden eyes. I pat her hand, the scabbed pocks between the fingers.  

A knock at the door. Another that turns to drumming. I run fingers through her dried up hair.

Thunk of a shoulder on plywood.

I close my hands over her ears. I let her rest. 

My Comments: Wonderful… except now I’m backtracking to see what’s plywood. It’s not the buzzer. The planks across the pub window? Everything has been so good so far, please unpack the plywood or clarify it in some way. Still unclear on the action with RP and the outstretched hand. Consider cutting the last line, because the gesture might land better than the explanation.

All in all, this is very effective. My only reservation is the opening scene with the orange and syringe. Take a look at putting it mid-story, or revisiting it for a beat closer to the end. Also, to step on the fact that the narrator can save his/her mother with the Naloxone, consider touching on that object being present. Don’t overdo it. But if you can remind us that the antidote is present yet unused, you might get a stronger reaction.

Can you explain the plywood thunk? Can you explain RP’s gesture? This is extremely close to being a fantastic, heart-rending story. You are a wonderful storyteller.