This is a sample section from my novel Crash Shadow, available on Amazon.com

A note

The passing traffic vibrated in her ears as she quickly walked down her street. The strings in her shoulders were twisting around. It was an unusually heavy commute on her street for that time of night.

It wasn’t until she rounded the corner and stood next to her apartment building’s doorway that a wave of fatigue washed over her, causing her to stop in her tracks. The weight of her arms and legs fell out of her as she experienced a wave of dizziness. A familiar listing of the ground forced her to lower her head and prop herself up against the doorway. Putting out an arm and grabbing the side of her apartment’s entrance, she let her heavy head hang down.

Raising her head and peering through her long and dark dreadlocks, she saw that there was no one around. She could relax.

Lowering her head again, keeping her eyes closed for a few moments, she let the heaviness rest in her arms and her shoulders. Opening her eyes, her jaded vision was blurring. No problem. She was used to such things.

As she let her mind get its second wind, she thought about what she had to eat at home. She knew she needed to eat.

Her sight began clearing up. Lifting her head, she stopped herself.

There were small bits of paper littering the entrance to her apartment building. They were torn bits of lined binder paper.

Kneeling down to take a closer look, there was something about the white bits of rendered pulp that was attracting her attention. She picked one of them up.

She picked up a few more pieces. It was a handwritten note that had been torn apart. She squinted at a larger piece.

“I hope you understand…” said one ruined section.

She picked up a few more pieces. “I know that we were close…” “If you could only realize…”

Skye began scooping up all of the pieces, putting them in her jacket pocket. Looking around, she found at least a dozen more pieces out on the sidewalk.

Taking one last look around the doorway and sidewalk, she decided that she had found all of the pieces that had not been irrevocably swept away by the languid street wind. She felt a charge as she quickly unlocked the front door and skittered up to her flat.

Up in her room, Skye took out her speed baggie and put it in her bottom dresser drawer. She carefully extracted the ruined pieces of paper from her jacket pocket, double-checking to make sure she had gotten them all out.

After having thoroughly searched her jacket pockets, she went to the corner liquor store for a forty of Budweiser and a roll of Scotch tape. She also grabbed a few packages of Chocodiles as well. Coming back from the store, she double-checked the entrance to her building and the surrounding concrete for any more errant pieces of rented note. Spotting one final piece that she had missed, she grabbed it and ran up to her flat.

Carefully setting everything up, she shook out the dregs of her week-old speed baggie onto her mirror and carefully opened her forty. Opening the Chocodiles and laying them out, she snorted a couple of quick lines and took a few hits off the Budweiser. Lying down on her stomach, just over the edge of her futon, she collected the pieces of paper and arranged them on the floor.

The pieces of paper were bright against the scuffed and dark wooden floor. It looked like a sardonic jigsaw puzzle. The note had gone through a fairly violent rendering. Some of the pieces were long and thin, while other pieces were wider and shorter. A few were so small Skye was wondering if she would ever be able to fit them in at all. She laid out each piece flat before trying to piece them together.

A few pieces jumped right out at her, appearing to be obvious candidates for joining. Carefully maneuvering two strips together, she was able to line up the dark blue-inked letters to verify that the pieces belonged next to each other. She laid the two pieces down, side by side, carefully aligning them, and slowly stretched out a piece of tape.

With surgical cautiousness, she aligned and pressed down the tape, joining the two pieces. Lifting up the newly-mended section of the note, she admired her work. She had pressed it back together perfectly. It was quite clear she would be able to read the note if the rest of her joinings were as competent.

Skye spied a corner that read “Joey – “, which she elected as the best candidate for the beginning of the letter. A few moments later she found another piece that read “Love Always, Eve.” She put the pieces on either side of the field of scattered paper pieces, each in its own corner.

A few more moments of searching and she found a few other pairs of pieces that went together. She was always quite cautious with her taping. She knew that once they were taped together, there was no realistic way she could separate them again.

After a while she had several small sections pieced back together. The author had written on both sides of the paper. Skye got a small charge when she realized that two re-taped sections had a common edge, and she was able to join them into one big piece.

Turning the piece around, she could make out a few short sentences. The section was large enough that she could read part of the note, but she resisted the temptation. She didn’t want to read any of the note until she had the entire thing put back together.

She lost track of time as she worked. Bringing out her new baggie of speed, she did another line. She could still feel her weekend burn out as a light feeling centered in her head, as well as a slow weight on the upper part of her back, but her curiosity kept her energized as she kept plodding through her meticulous task.

After a good long hour of work, she taped together the last few pieces. The note was almost completely intact.

Turning the note around, she was examining her handiwork. She had completed the pieces in almost perfect condition. It was perfectly legible, almost as if it had never been torn to tatters at all. Many of her repairs appeared to be seamless.

She decided to have one more line before reading it. She wanted to be good and wide-eyed for its revelations.

Snorting up a decently sized line, she did not feel too much of a jolt. She had been running on crank for too long. It did, however, lighten her skin and bolster her eyes.

Taking another few hits off of the Bud, she carefully picked up the taped together note and began to read it properly.

“Joey, you and I have been going out for a long time now. Maybe it does not seem that long to you, but it does to me.

I know a note like this may not seem a proper way to tell you about something like this, but I did not know what else to do. I do not know if I could stand to tell you this face to face, and I think a phone call would be even more hard than this letter.

I’ll never forget the first time we met. You were so energetic and you had such a nice smile. I really liked your sense of humor. You were always so crazy and always so willing to make everyone laugh.

But now all you do anymore is get wired, and get stoned, and get drunk. All you do now is get wasted and fucked up and burnt out. I know you said I was a hypocrite because I smoke pot and drink beer and do speed. But I only did speed a few times, and I don’t smoke pot all the time. I do drink when I go out, but only when I go out, to a party, to a club, to a friend’s house. I don’t drink all of the time. I don’t smoke pot all of the time. I don’t snort speed all of the time.

I know you think that woman with the weird and scary black hair in your apartment is a speed freak, and I know you are thinking about asking her if she knows where to get any speed because you said you don’t want to buy speed on upper Haight anymore. I know all of this because you told me all of this. You told me when you were really really drunk. You told me before that you were going to stop doing speed when your dealer stopped coming to the cafe and you couldn’t find him. Now you’re thinking of asking some stranger who happens to live in your building if they know where they can get you drugs. It’s too much. It’s too crazy. You don’t know what kind of fucked up things that woman does, or what kind of fucked up people she knows. For all I know she’s going to get you hooked onto speed even more than you are now. She might even get you hooked on something worse, though I don’t know if there is anything worse than what you are already doing. My God Joey, she might even know people who could have you killed. She is a very mean and strange looking person and I wish you would not get mixed up with her at all.

I know what you are going to say. You are going to yell at me that I’ve done speed before too. I did. I did on that weekend at Nikki’s, and that other time over at Steve’s. I may have done it once or twice before, but not that often.

I would ask and plead with you to stop, but I know I can’t get you to stop snorting speed all of the time. I don’t think there is any way I can still see you anymore, not when you are doing this and planning on getting mixed up in all kinds of things which will just mess things up worse than they already are.

I’m sorry, but that’s my final decision.

I know you are probably angry, but please know that you will always have a place in my heart, whatever happens.

Love Always, Eve”

Putting the note down, Skye crossed her arms. Lying on her futon, she stared straight out over the floor.

A sudden tightness shot through her arms, legs and shoulders. She bolted to her feet.

Taking the note into the bathroom, she quickly tore it to pieces.

She flushed the pieces of the re-rendered note down the toilet.

http://www.amazon.com/Crash-Shadow-Tale-Two-Addicts/dp/151691001X