Steven was thirty two years old, but his knees felt like they belonged to a eighty year old grandfather whose trying get up from a wheelchair.
Sitting on a damp cardboard box behind a fastfood restaurant, he stared down at the tiny plastic baggie in his trembling hands.
It was his last ten dollars worth of powdered relief, mixed with what he was pretty sure was fifty percent baking soda and ten percent crushed drywall.
He didn’t care though. When you reach a certain level of rock bottom, you stop asking for a certificate of purity from your local dealer.
You just take what you can get and pray your heart doesn’t explode before the high hits.
Steven had a lot of bad habits, but his worst one was definitely existing. His mother had always told him that he was destined for greatness, but she also thought the local milkman was a CIA operative, so her judgment was a little flawed.
Over the last decade, Steven had accumulated three grand theft charges, five probation violations, and an impressive collection of missing teeth.
He was a multi-time convict, a professional failure, and a man whose greatest accomplishment in the last month was finding a half-eaten burrito that was still warm.
"Just a little bit," Steven muttered to himself, his voice sounding like gravel grinding inside a blender. "Just enough to stop the shakes, then I am going to get a job. Maybe at a bank? No, they check backgrounds. A car wash? Yeah, car washes love guys who look like diseased raccoons."
He poured a thin line of the white powder onto the back of a sticky cracked smartphone screen. The phone hadn’t worked since 2023, but it made a fantastic little table.
Before Steven could even bend down to take his bitter dose, the heavy steel back door of the restaurant burst open with a bang that sounded like a cannon going off.
He thought it was Boss Jimmy coming out to throw hot grease at him again, which was usually how their nightly interaction went.
But instead of an angry fat chef with a greasy spatula, five heavily armed men in black tactical vests stormed out into the alleyway.
"POLICE! GET ON THE GROUND! DON’T MOVE!" someone screamed through a megaphone from about four feet away, which was entirely unnecessary considering how small the alley was.
Steven froze. He was holding his cracked smartphone like a sacred religious artifact, his eyes wide and bloody red.
"W-wait, hold on!" Steven yelled back, his voice cracking violently. "I don’t even work here! I was just looking for the bathroom and I got lost!"
Nobody was listening to him. It turned out that Boss Jimmy wasn’t just selling burgers and dried chickens out of the fastfood. He was running one of the largest illegal distribution hubs in the entire city.
The alley was suddenly filled with red and blue flashing lights, shouting officers, and the terrifying sound of heavy tactical boots slamming into deep water puddles.
"DROP THE DEVICE!" a cop shouted at Steven, pointing a rifle directly at his chest.
"It’s just an Xphone!" Steven panicked, holding it closer to his chest like a baby. "It’s battery is dead!"
In his blind panic, Steven made the absolute worst decision of his entire life.
Instead of dropping to the ground and putting his hands behind his head like any sane criminal would do, he tried to save the powder.
He couldn’t just leave ten dollars worth of crushed drywall and cheap chemicals behind. That was his breakfast.
With the agility of a frightened tiger, Steven shoved the cracked phone into his coat pocket and bolted down the dark alleyway.
"He’s fleeing! Suspect is heading east!" a voice roared into a police radio.
Steven ran as fast as his malnourished legs could carry him. His heart was hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Wet garbage bags exploded under his feet as he kicked through piles of rotting vegetables and old wet cardboard.
"Stop right there!" an officer yelled, chasing right behind him.
"I can’t stop!" Steven screamed back over his shoulder. "I have terrible stamina! If I stop now my legs are going to cramp up!"
The alley ended in a sharp turn that opened up toward a dark street.
He lost his balance immediately and crashed his shoulder into a dumpsters.
"Fuck, my spleen," Steven groaned, rolling off the dumpster and stumbling back onto his shaky feet.
He managed to take three more desperate steps toward freedom when another officer stepped out from around the corner of the building, weapon drawn and eyes wide with pure adrenaline.
"FREEZE!" the officer shouted.
Steven didn’t freeze. His brain, fried from years of bad choices and chronic substance abuse, gave him the worst possible instruction. It told him to jump over a low wooden fence.
As he spun through the dark air, his heavy coat swung wide open, revealing the metallic shine of a long silver spoon he had stolen from a soup kitchen earlier that afternoon.
In the dark alley, under the flashing police lights, the shiny silver handle of the spoon caught the streetlamp light just right. To the jumpy officer standing ten feet away, it looked exactly like a drawn handgun.
BANG!
Steven felt a sudden, sickening thud right in the middle of his upper back. It didn’t even hurt at first. It just felt like someone had swung a heavy wooden baseball bat into his spine with maximum effort.
The momentum of the bullet knocked his chest forward, slamming him face into a pile of black trash bags sitting right next to the fence.
"SUSPECT DOWN! SUSPECT DOWN!" voices shouted in the background, sounding distant and muffled, like they were underwater.
Steven lay there in the wet trash, his nose buried in a soggy pizza box. He couldn’t feel his legs anymore. In fact, he couldn’t really feel anything below his neck.
"Oh shit." Steven whispered into the soggy cardboard. "That was really rude."
Blood began to spread rapidly across his back, soaking through his ragged jacket. The boots of police officers surrounded him, their heavy flashlights blinding his peripheral vision.
"He’s got a spoon! It’s just a spoon!" someone yelled in realization. "Call an ambulance! We need a medic right now!"
"Good job, fuckers," Steven thought, his vision starting to blur heavily at the edges. "Shot over a dollar store spoon. My ex-wife is going to laugh so hard she pops a blood vessel."
The pain finally arrived, burning hot and terrible in his chest. Every breath felt like inhaling liquid fire.
Yet, despite the sheer tragedy of dying in a pile of garbage on a rainy Tuesday night, Steven felt an odd sense of dramatic peacefulness washing over him.
He thought about his life. It really had been a complete disaster from start to finish.
He had dropped out of high school to join a rock band that never played a single show.
He had tried to rob a gas station with a ripe banana once because he forgot his fake gun at home.
He had burned every bridge, disappointed every friend, and spent the last five years running from his own terrible choices.
"Is this it?" Steven thought as the blackness crept further into his eyes. "This is how the great Steven ends? Shot in the back by a cop who was scared of a fucking spoon?"
He tried to spit out a mouth full of nasty rainwater, but he didn’t even have the physical strength for that anymore. His lungs were filling up fast.
"At least I don’t have to pay my landlord that back rent," he reasoned internally, trying to find the silver lining. "And the moron Eric can’t ask for his twenty dollars back either. Technically, I win."
The cold concrete beneath his cheek felt softer now, like a cozy feather mattress.
The bright police lights faded from harsh white to a dim grey, then to absolute darkness. The shouting of the officers drifted away until there was nothing left but complete silence.
Steven took one last, raspy breath, let out a tiny sigh, and died right there on top of the trash.
He was completely dead and his story on New York was over, ending in the most embarrassing way possible.
He was pretty sure that was the end of everything...
Until a bucket of freezing water slammed on his face.
"Get up Philip! Time to work!"