The Accidental Addict

creative nonfiction
by Ed Cohen

I just spent five days in the hospital.

On May 27, I had cervical spine surgery to remove bone spurs pressing on a nerve in my neck—the source of pain and weakness in my left arm. The surgery went well. I was sent home with Tramadol, a pain medication I was told was the “safest” option and not addictive at the dose or duration I’d be taking it.

🗓️ Week 1: It dulled the pain.
🗓️ Week 2: I timed doses to keep it away.
🗓️ Week 3: I felt buzzed.

I tried to taper. My body crashed.

Tremors. Nausea. Anxiety. My blood pressure spiked to 160/100. My surgeon said I’d reduced too fast and told me to take “catch-up” doses. His PA gave me a plan that would’ve kept me on the drug another 16 weeks.

With my history of heart attacks and kidney disease, I knew I couldn’t do it.

At 2 a.m., my wife Pris rushed me to the ER. I was shaking, drenched, surging with panic. The doctor said I’d “fallen behind” and sent me home with instructions to take more Tramadol. My BP hit 188/113.

We drove to a different ER. That doctor did what the first should have: admitted me.

Within hours, I was in a hospital bed, hydrated, monitored. They stopped the drug.

A nurse heard my story and said: “You’re an accidental addict.”

That sentence punched me in the chest.

My father was a violent alcoholic. His addiction and eventual suicide left scars I spent a lifetime trying to overcome. I thought I was nothing like him.

Now, here I was—being told I was one of them.

The hospital team managed each withdrawal symptom in real time: tremors, panic, nausea, BP spikes. I slept 15 hours a day. My body began to reset.

Today, I came home—drug-free but not yet free of symptoms. Rebound is real. I still wake up with restlessness, emotional spikes, and BP swings.

This happened because I trusted what I was told. Because no one warned me how fast this could spiral.

I’m angry.

This isn’t just about me.

It could happen to you or someone you love.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Ed Cohen is a global leadership coach, keynote speaker, and author of Vulnerable: One Man’s Journey from Abuse to Abundance. His writing blends personal experience with purpose. He lives in Southern California with his wife and two dogs. Learn more HERE.

 

Communications Breakdown

by Melvin F. Gruschow

Avery Jackson was running through the streets of New York City, a copy of the Times crushed absentmindedly in his sweating hand. He had read through most of it, and was perusing the business section on his lunch break when it happened.

He could barely think, instinct was driving his dazed and swiftly paced march to his apartment. He shouldered the front door open, the doorman nowhere to be seen as the masses bumped, yelled, and churned behind him. He climbed up the stairs, the walls of the building slightly muffling the droning outside. He could hear crying and wailing from several floors as he passed. A door from a floor beneath him burst open, and voices, a man and woman.

“We just need to catch the train out of town, there’s time honey!”

The woman’s voice was breaking as she spoke, and Avery could hear the muffled cries of a babe.

“Darling, we only have minutes-” she wept.

Avery pushed on.

He arrived at his door on the fifth floor, room 504. He was fumbling for his key, and turned the handle in frustration.

The door was unlocked.

Avery froze for a moment.

He’d forgotten to lock it on the way out. Probably absorbed in a meandering thought about work. On any other day, this might have had some sort of consequence.

He stepped into his small studio flat, and looked around.

The couch pointed at a small television set, his hifi against the wall with the apartments singular window. A framed photo of himself holding a diploma, his parents beside him, was sitting on an end table. Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was sitting out of its sleeve, ready to be played once he had returned from work.

Now that he had arrived into a familiar space, the fight was leaving his body.

Where could he possibly run in time? What would he bring?

He gathered some clothes, tossing them into his briefcase, but was slowing, and tears were muddying his vision.

After a minute his hands slowed their packing, and then ceased moving.

Standing there, he felt time ease through him, every second seemed to drag, creeping slowly, almost physically walking before his eyes. But it wasn’t slow enough. Not enough to cling to, to satisfy, to absolve.

He flipped on the stereo, watching the record spin for a moment before slumping onto his couch.

It Makes No Difference Now began to play, the piano tinkering and singing out through his speakers. There was an impossibly bright flash somewhere out of view, but seeing it didn’t matter.

The light was thousands of degrees as it hit his building. Avery Jackson and the newspaper he had held whose headline read Communications Breakdown Between US and Cuba, turned to fire, turned to dust, turned to atoms in an instant. The only thing left, a shadow, and a memory.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Melvin F. Gruschow is a 32 year old software engineer, father of two, and a scholar of curiosity. He likes to obsess over thoughts, his and others, and do his best to jot them down accurately. Bluesky.

 

Dead Again

by Thom Hawkins

When the night-shift orderly, on his way back to his quarters, told me that Mrs. Dunhill had died again, I knew I was in for a busy morning. Family is seldom present for a second death, so much of the burden falls to the admin staff to put the deceased’s affairs in order. In many ways, a first death is a much simpler affair, so those who opt for an additional death do so only when circumstances make it worthwhile. Mrs. Dunhill was one of those individuals.

It had only been six and a half years since Mrs. Dunhill arrived at our facility. Her daughter, Shelley Dunhill, herself in her early sixties, called rarely. Our residents are kept in a medically induced coma and communicate only through vital signs. On those few occasions, usually around Christmas, when Shelley did call, her speech was slurred, and she seemed less anxious about her mother’s quality of life and more about the quantity.

“Do you think she’ll live mush longer?” she asked one Christmas Eve.

“It’s hard to say, Miss Dunhill. We don’t like to speculate.” I pulled up her mother’s vitals on my screen.

“I want her to live forever.” Mrs. Dunhill’s minimal brain activity plodded forward, showing no signs of abating. If someone asked me to draw a graph of forever, this is what I would draw. “I mean that,” Shelley added as if I’d challenged her. “Forever.”

“Have a good holiday, Miss Dunhill,” I told her, eager to get to the staff potluck before all the canned cranberry sauce was gone. “I’ll talk to you next year.”

“Next year,” she echoed. “That’s just a few days away. You think she’ll die that soon?”

“She’s already dead,” I pointed out.

I didn’t know how Shelley Dunhill would react to her mother’s second death, but I assumed she would absorb the news with her typical aplomb. After lunch, I made the phone call. The satellite line had a lot of static. Forever, I thought. Static is what forever sounds like.

A click, followed by a weak “hello?”

“Miss Dunhill?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry to tell you that your mother has just passed.”

“Again?”

“Yes.”

She was silent then, and the longer she was quiet, the louder the static became. When she did speak again, it was like the static had become an ocean, and she was drowning in it, filling her mouth with buzz and spitting it back out with words.

“What do I do?”

Fortunately, I am well-acquainted with death and all its niceties. I explained that her mother’s body would be disposed of according to the dictates of her will. That description was usually received better than telling the next of kin that the bodily remains would be incinerated and the ashes flushed down to the ocean floor beneath the facility.

“Do I need to …?”

I interrupted her before she had to say it. “No, Miss Dunhill. We take care of everything. As the police are fond of saying—‘nothing to see here.’” I omitted ‘please disperse,’ though I considered it an appropriate phrase to get her off the phone.

The buzz crescendoed like a wave.

“Your lawyer will be in touch, Miss Dunhill.”

“Okay.”

“Please disperse.” I hung up the phone before she could say anything else.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Thom Hawkins is a writer and artist based in Maryland. His stories, plays, and experimental fiction have appeared or are scheduled to appear in Always Crashing (Pushcart Prize nominee), Collaborature, Encephalon Journal, Excuse Me Magazine, Gargoyle Online, New Myths, Oyez Review, The Scop, Shoegaze Literary, Slippery Elm, Variant Lit, and Verdant Literary Journal.

 

After

by Jenny Morelli

Since that November, civilized discussions have failed and all there’s left to do is eat ice cream, watch Lifetime movies, and shower in the stillness of our house among the hills where we absconded after that fateful day.

We’ve escaped what once was and still is for those who steered right and not left, but sometimes, when the air feels cold and thin and clear, I’m compelled to yell from the hilltops ‘Doesn’t this hate and blame and paranoia ring a bell?’ or wander back to that place that was once ours because she was certain, that friend I once had, that things wouldn’t change, but back then, they couldn’t see, those most delusional, who are now watching through their binoculars, paranoia perched on their shoulders.

They’re watching, I’m sure, and waiting for us, although we’ve never returned; haven’t and couldn’t and wouldn’t, because it wouldn’t be a return. What we left is gone, and what remains was left behind by us, who’ve been left behind by them.

So here we sit, nestled safely between the indifferent hills where the pages from our stories have been blown wide open, eagerly inviting us to write our own future, one where we can live in peace and tolerance, acceptance and uniqueness, because we remain the enlightened ones, and our future, despite our precipitous present, will need to know that we were the brave ones who left so we could write.

We are the ones diminished from the deaths of those who fell for simply being who they were. We are the ones who embrace mankind.

We are the ones for whom the bell tolls, not the cowards who stayed and prayed and slayed, and we are the ones who’ll live on long after our demise, so that others can learn.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Jenny Morelli is a NJ high school English teacher who lives with her husband, cat, and myriad yard pets. She seeks inspiration in everything, including her nightmares. She’s published in several literary magazines including Spillwords, Red Rose Thorns, Scars tv, Bottlecap Press and Bookleaf Press for four poetry chapbooks. Website: JennyMorelliWrites.com

 

The School Board Calls for Reductions

by James B. Nicola

Last November we learned how the original Americans saved the surviving Pilgrims’ lives by feeding them and teaching them how to farm in salty, sandy soil, and then invited them to join them—join their tribe, not just settle nearby lands. It seems they were natural Christians and already knew that all peoples were really one Great Tribe beneath the Sky. Eventually the originals were massacred by their guests, who founded a church so they could live with themselves, perhaps, or at least slay in the name of a Prince of Peace. Nathan P. showed us all this in a book. We confirmed it on the Internet. But now the book, those websites, and Nathan P. are gone. The School Board’s keeping its promise to reduce class size.

Later we learned of Wilmington and Tulsa from Freddie D. and now he too is gone. The Daily News reported how the School Board keeps its promises.

Last week we learned that lynchings spread as far north as New York and Minnesota. And sheriffs looked the other way for over a hundred years, sheriffs that people kept voting for, who called themselves Good People. Eventually even cops, with the squeeze of knees instead of nooses, and kids with thirsty guns, got in the act. Cops and kids and courts—some, though not all. Nomey C. and Sammy C. told us all this. We confirmed it on the Internet; there were no books to find. But now those sites and Sammy C. and Nomey C. are gone.

Yesterday we learned of Nazis and the Holocaust and swastikas, and that on January 6, a lynch mob at our Capitol not only boasted a noose, but also swastikas and battle flags of treason. Quickly we confirmed this with photos on the Internet and saw the noose, the swastikas, and battle flags of treason, and that some mobsters had guns, the day that five were slain. Howie Z. told us this. Today, though, all those sites are down and Howie Z. is gone.

The School Board, up for re-election, reminds us of their great success in reducing class size.

We miss our friends and meet to discuss remembering them in a book, but on second thought perhaps a fictive poem or flashy fiction would better contain the truth, lest we, too, help quench the School Board, thirsty as kids’ guns, and, so like you, begin to disappear. ###
in honor of Nathaniel Philbrick, Frederick Douglass, Noam Chomsky, Samuel Clemens, and Howard Zinn

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
James B. Nicola is the author of eight collections of poetry, the latest being Fires of Heaven, Turns & Twists, and Natural Tendencies. His book Playing the Audience won a Choice magazine award. He has received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, and eleven Pushcart nominations.

Credit: Originally published in South Shore Review, 2022

 

Pull

by Craig Borri

The door chime pinged as Mark Jackson walked into the shooting range’s service area. He saw Ben behind the counter. That was good. He liked Ben.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Jackson. How are things?” Ben always called him Mr. Jackson. It was a nice touch.

“Not great, Ben. It’s been a rough week. I thought hitting a few targets might relax me.”

“Yeah, I know how that is,” Ben said as he got the M1 Garand off the rack without asking. It was Mark’s favorite rifle, accurate and it packed a punch. “Hey, did you hear they’re talking about doing away with the Early Release program?”

“Yeah, I heard,” Mark said, shaking his head in disgust. “It’s that damn Senator Conway from California, the one with all the pull in Washington. What are people thinking? Do they want to go back to the way it was in the late 90's and early 2000’s, with the prisons practically overflowing? Early Release has been a godsend to this country.”

“I know. I guess some people can’t leave well enough alone.”

“You’ve got that right.”

Mark paid his range fees and headed out. It was a good day for shooting, clear with very little wind, and plenty of light from the setting sun. There were a few people hanging around watching. He stepped up to the firing platform and nodded to the range master.

“Okay,” the range master said. “First up is Otis Anderson, fifteen to twenty for assault with a deadly weapon, out after two years.”

“Pull!”

There was a loud clunk as the spring-loaded circus cannon shot a screaming Otis Anderson towards the outer prison wall and freedom. Mark’s first shot hit him in the leg. The second was a miss, but the third was a real beauty, hitting him just under the chin and blowing his head clean off. The headless body landed in the safety nets beyond the wall, and the onlookers cheered. Mark flushed with pride.

“Nice shot,” said the range master. “I make that 100 points for a Clean Kill, with a 50 point bonus for a Head Shot.”

Next up was Frank Jones, doing twenty to life for rape. He got another Clean Kill with two shots in the chest. Last up was Phillip Williams, doing a ten year stretch for car theft. He didn’t do as well with him, only getting a 75 points Crippling Wound with a shot that shattered his spine. Williams was picked up by the ambulance waiting outside and taken to the hospital, where he would receive minimum lifesaving treatment.

“It’s too bad they’re trying to do away with Early Release,” Mark thought as he turned in his rifle and received Ben’s congratulations. It’s not like the prisoners were forced to take it, and they did get a good sporting chance. Besides, it was therapeutic. He was whistling as he walked back to his car.

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Craig Borri is an old software engineer with four kids, one wife, one grandson, and one somewhat annoying dog. His life is boring enough that he'd much rather write stories than biographies about himself. Bluesky: @craigborri.bsky.social

 

Book Begone

by Peter Gregg Slater

“Am I correct, you want this book banned?” the President of the Wonham High School Board asked the parent standing in the overflowing auditorium.

“Yes, from the classroom and the library. Like the Board did earlier this evening with Keith’s Prom Dress.”

“Give us more specifics.”

“Where to begin? There’s drunken driving, a fatal hit and run, adultery, violence against a woman, racketeering, a homicide, and a suicide. Plus a racist.” Murmurs of dismay in the audience.

The Board conferred, sotto voce. after which the President announced, “By a vote of 8 to 1, the Board bans The Great Gatsby".

━━━━⊱༒︎ • ༒︎⊰━━━━
Peter Gregg Slater, a historian, has taught at several institutions, including Dartmouth College and the University of California, Berkeley. In retirement, he has devoted himself to creative writing. His poetry, fiction, parody, satire, and creative non-fiction have appeared in DASH, Workers Write!, The Satirist, Masque & Spectacle, and Defenestration.