the day's drudge ~

today's scene is a rewrite. i'm unraveling first person narratives and it's really harder than i expected. keep telling myself i must be fearless!

The Company We Keep: take 2 (this scene: "Mild Poisons").

10,453 / 75,000 (13.9%)

scene synop: james goes to the doctor to fetch drugs on lewis's behalf. at the doctor's office he runs into the deputy in the company of a young prostitute.

darling:

Young, pretty little thing. Scarce into her menses, I’d wager, though my nose was too full of sawdust from the building site to catch a whiff of anything that might be interesting.

i'm really going to miss james as a first person narrator (sigh!)

mean things: it's james ~ pretty much anything out of his mouth is inclined to be in bad taste. but he's usually pretty funny even when he's being a jerk.

random fun fact: after the civil war more than 400,000 men suffered from "army disease" (a.k.a morphine addiction). morphine was considered "safer" than alcoholism or opium addiction and would remain the primary pain killer for decades until replaced by cocaine, which was believed less habit-forming.

in my story lewis kicks his morphine addiction but remains an alcoholic for a decade, spends the next decade suffering from sobriety, and eventually ends up addicted to cocaine. this experience, sadly, is typical of his generation. (laudanum (opium and alcohol) was replaced by morphine, then cocaine, then heroin, which was the worst of all!)