The Bitter Part Comes Later

He noticed the bitterness first.

Not enough to complain about. Just enough to make him pause with the glass halfway down, lips tightening as if his mouth had remembered something unpleasant before the rest of him did.

I watched from across the table.

Henbane is an old plant. Patient. Medieval. The sort of thing that has spent centuries listening to people pray over mistakes they had already swallowed.

Strychnine has less patience.

He rubbed his eyes.

“Dry in here?”

“Probably the heat.”

He nodded because people enjoy explanations, especially small ones.

Five minutes later he was talking too quickly. His sentences arrived with pieces missing. He laughed once, abruptly, at nothing in particular, then stared at the window as though someone had moved behind it.

Nobody had.

Probably.

His fingers began trembling.

That interested him more than it interested me.

He held one hand over the table and watched it twitch.

“Coffee,” he said.

“You didn't have coffee.”

He looked at me.

For a moment I thought that might bother him.

Then something tightened through his shoulders.

Not pain exactly.

More like his nervous system had received an instruction written entirely in capital letters.

He stood.

The chair struck the floor behind him.

Henbane was still rearranging the furniture in his head. His pupils had become enormous, black and astonished, and he kept looking past me toward things that hadn't been invited.

The other poison was less imaginative.

It preferred muscle.

His jaw locked.

His back stiffened.

Every sound in the room suddenly seemed offensive to him. The refrigerator motor clicked on and his entire body reacted as though the machine had insulted his mother.

“Turn that off.”

I didn't.

He tried to cross the kitchen.

His legs disagreed.

There is something remarkably bureaucratic about watching a body lose authority over itself. Departments stop communicating. Management panics. Somebody in accounting starts screaming.

He caught the counter.

A spoon fell into the sink.

The sound was tiny.

His reaction wasn't.

He folded backward violently, every muscle pulling against every other muscle, his face caught somewhere between fury and disbelief.

When it passed, he stayed very still.

“Hospital,” he whispered.

I picked up his phone.

For a second his expression softened.

Hope is embarrassing like that.

I placed the phone beside him.

Just outside the reach of his hand.

Then I went to turn off the refrigerator.

No reason to make things unpleasant.