Home Remedies

Fallon is deeply apologetic about the lack of recent posts; her life has quite literally flipped upside down. When things die down, she will be back. For now...Enjoy a new first chapter

9 steps I’ve followed since before my consciousness began. Or perhaps I read them somewhere in a book picked up from somewhere just as distant. One: lay down, two: Close your eyes, three: Feel how your skin melts, four: Feel how your organs melt, five: Feel how the rot fills you, six: Feel how the mushrooms start growing, seven: Only bones are left, eight: This is it, nine: Embrace it. There is an illusion somewhere on the intersection between poison and its antidote.

I tell my doctor many different ones, listed from memory. Opioids and Naloxone or Cyanide and Hydroxocobalamin. I remind her of carbon monoxide and oxygen. I tell her exasperatedly of the Latrodectus species, the black widow and their enemy: opioids and benzos. She asks me where my knack for remembering comes from. I do not tell her that somewhere in the constructure of my skeletal system, lies an index of many things. The largest lymphatic organ is the spleen, there's 72 muscles in the human arm, how much damage you can do to spinal nerves before a person ceases to walk again.

She asks me a restructured question, what my favorite fact is. I tell her the angles of cut points on a body, how all the perfect lines come straight out the core of a person’s torso. I neglect telling her which cut point is my most usual. I will tell you of course. (Carotid). She asks me why I dedicate my time to nonsensical facts, and I return back to caressing the edges of my eyebrows. Poison is sexy. People think its crude, brutish, this blunt instrument of death. It has whispers that a bullet or a blade could never dare to imitate. I’m sure I’ve seen oleander flowers. I imagine what just a taste would be like. Would my insides unravel like a poorly stitched seam?

I am beckoned closely to poisons, I trust them, and they undo me. Arsenic clings to the blood, to the marrow, its patient. Cyanide is almonds on the breath, like its apologizing for what it's done. Almost sweet. Aconite staggers your heart as if it's lost the will to beat. I found poisons in my home. Diazepam, Lorazepam, 0071-0150 and 0023-5878 respectively. Do you know what happens when you combine Zolpidem Tartrate---Ambien, with a tincture of belladonna? It dances in the veins, dilates the pupils, makes the heart flutter. Aconitum napellus—monkshood, devil’s helmet, propranolol, the beta-blocker. The aconite slows the heart, the propranolol made it elegant. One-part powdered aconite root to ten milligrams of propranolol, dissolved in ethanol. Strychnine was tricky. Too much, and it's all convulsions and noise. Too little, and it's practically useless. Foxglove pairs with raw caffeine. Seep the foxglove in vodka for days—72 hours minimum—then mix it with powdered No-Doz tablets. I ordered precursor chemicals from obscure suppliers. Sodium azide. Phenobarbital.

I remember my first real synthesis: a solution of dimethyl sulfoxide laced with ricinolein acid, extracted painstakingly from castor beans. The need to create. My skin. The acids from early attempts...hydrochloric, nitric—corrosives--left faint scars. There’s texture now. Distilling aconitine from wolfsbane, unaware of the drop on the counter. Touched it with my finger. Just a pinprick, really, but it burned like ice. My hand stayed numb for hours, and the tingling didn’t stop for days. Beneath my sleeve is a phosphorus burn. It gets in the air, clings, burns straight through the flesh. The wheeze comes in the winter. I underestimated potency only once. My heart skipped beats for hours, everything was quite yellow. I knew I’d gone too far when my fingertips started turning blue. The most embarrassing, Dimethylmercury. Not on purpose, of course—But I didn’t realize my gloves were too thin. The tiniest exposure, and days later I couldn’t stop shaking. It’s neurotoxic you know. My handwriting still isn’t as steady as it used to be. But I count it as a blessing—How many people can say their mistakes were that profundi? No, I never attempted to poison her. It's reductive. Poison is deliberate. And her? She was chaos. She never ate the same thing twice in a row. Half the time, I never actually witnessed her eating. Water here and there. She was restless, always forgetting. Poisoning someone like that isn't just difficult—it's impossible. She would've had to play her part, and she wouldn't. Injections would be absurd. Needles leave bruises and punctures. And I’m not a coward regardless. It would’ve been a waste of supplies.

There’s plenty of potential violence hiding in my home. It starts with the kitchen, of course. Real genuine ingenuity comes in the how of things. For instance, you can file down a cheese grater to create jagged edges. I’d take it to the garage late, run it against the edge of a rusted saw blade we didn’t use. Springs from our mattresses were pliable if yu heat them up just right. Use a candle to soften them and bend them into makeshift garrotes. Blades were tricky to work with. I’d clamp them in the vice and saw them down again, keeping pieces in a shoebox. I once pulled apart an old lamp, hid a broken glass shard inside the base, and rewired it so it still worked. My husband surely noticed it was heavier. You’d assume I was paranoid, or planning. I wasn’t. Not really. He didn’t notice. And even if he had, what would he have done?

I have extreme substance abuse in my file but I’m sure my husband’s is longer than the normal grocery receipt. A walking, breathing pharmacy, really. His favorite was hydrocodone that rolled around the ashtray next to his recliner. Watson brand, little white pills with the “853” etched on one side. He had a prescription for his back pain, supposedly. They put him on Lisinopril for high blood pressure, 10 milligrams at first, then bumped him up to 20 because he wouldn’t change his diet. He was on so many prescriptions that the pharmacist at the corner—Herr Weber—once joked he was single-handedly keeping Bayer in business. He had this fungus on his nails, yellow and thick like old parchment. The doctor gave him Terbinafine. I was not surprised when I married him. His mother was the same way. Diabetes, hoarding, depression. I learned to live around him. I didn’t attempt to poison him either. I don’t have to. He is doing a fine job of that all on his own.