This couch reeks. I haven’t had a decent meal in days, and I’ve been wearing the same button up shirt and slacks since last Sunday. I may have left my cup of coffee out on the counter and the T.V. on blasting white noise. I hope Mrs. Casto can hear it next door. My name is Jason Morrell. I work as the CEO for a car company you probably drive by every day on the commute to your ridiculously under-paid job. I don’t have any kids, no wife, not even a girl friend. I don’t own any pets and the only slut with a key to my high-rise studio apartment is the maid that shows up to clean up after me on Mondays and Thursdays. Living in New York City has its ups and its downs. The noise is almost always unbearable; I can’t get a good night’s sleep for shit anymore. There are rats everywhere. When I say rats I don’t mean the furry, diseased rodents running amuck under the busy rush hour streets, I mean the swindling, cheating bastards and the mothers with their whining, annoying brats society deems children. The better half of the situation though? Around every whore’s corner and just down the alley from about every hot-dog stand is a spot to grab a kilo of the best sugar you’d only ever dream of. The powdered confection that looked like shifted baker’s flour was the story of my life.
      
      Every Sunday morning I would wake up at 6:30AM. I would go to the bathroom, take a piss, and then make my way to the kitchen for a cup of coffee and the daily paper. Around 8AM I would take the elevator down to the lobby of my apartment building, get my Bugatti from the ginger-headed teenage freak of a valet boy and drive to Edgewater, a few blocks over from Harlem. I would park on Broadway and walk for about ten minutes to a small alley way down beside one of the old run down theatres. Walking down the alleys in N.Y.C. gave me chills. You always hear about these people walking down the street minding their own business and some crazy, sick guy comes out of nowhere and stabs the shit out of you. I just didn’t want to be the victim. This alley, though, is where I get my weekly supply. This is the only dealer that I’ve ever met that’s female, and maybe that’s the only reason I come back to her so much. Irene Dover didn’t call me Jason. She didn’t call me Mr. Morrell. She called me baby. “How much do you want today, baby?” “How’s my baby doing this week?” She sweet talked me up and down that alley more than once. Irene was a brunette. She was tall, great chest and a nice ass. Why was she dealing the spread? Possibly she was in it for the cash. Maybe she did it for fun. Who knows why people in New York do the things they do. All I knew was I liked looking at her, and I didn’t care how I got to see her.
      
      That Sunday though, which is now 3 days over with, was the day she hit me hard. She asked me, in that sweet succulent voice that made my groin twinge, “Baby, would you like to stay a while?” I’d get in there and get out and be home by 5. Just in time to do whatever the fuck it was I did on Sunday afternoons at 5. I got in her car and that’s all I remember. I woke up on this rank, maggot infested couch in the bottom of some old abandoned building that no one’s heard of in decades, strapped to it with what seems to be barbed wire and somehow feeling euphoric. I felt superbly light. I could barely feel the couch. I knew it was there, it was just distant. My body was distant. Knowing this feeling, I knew I had been snorting lines like no tomorrow,  and maybe that’s how I passed out. I could smell something cooking, like a steak or a piece of really fatty pork. It smelled so delicious and I wanted it badly. I wiggled my fingers a little and felt something warm and wet. My head fell to my chest, unable to hold it steady. I looked at my legs. They were gone. From the knee down I had no legs and there were pools of blood everywhere to confirm that someone had just recently removed them. My head spun as I started to get sick. The smell of the searing flesh filled my nostrils. As I sat there, thoughts about absolutely nothing started slowly crawling through my head, and the only thing I could do was laugh. “My legs…She’s eating my legs.”