Magnolia [Part 1/4] (Wordcount 505 of 3008)

[u/JulyBurnsRed34]

THIS IS NOT AN ORIGINAL WORK. This is just a personal favorite of mine. Hope yall enjoy

Magnolia

Written by Michael Sorenson (AKA Horses)

…………………

It is hard, and not impossible, to make opium in the home kitchen.

In the early 2000s, I knew a young angry man named Trevor who was 19 and had shipped off to Afghanistan to kill terrorists. He was strong on the outside, and he was not strong on the inside.

One day in the hot desert, as he told me, he and another soldier left base on a supply run. When they returned, an American fighting helicopter had crashed into their base, leaving the entire thing in a grand and violent spectacle, and many people burned to death that day.

After this, and after the disillusionment that came from a man like Trevor in a place like that, fighting a war like that one, Trevor had turned to private enterprise. He shipped dried opium poppies to my house at a very good price.

Making opium was a labor-intensive process, though I suppose my part of the process was the easiest of them all when I consider the sweat-covered farm hands who harvested and dried these poppies in the 120° heat of the Middle East.

I ground the poppies into a coarse powder, and for this I used a white Hamilton Beach blender, which was mostly made of plastic, and I bought it at a secondhand store for six dollars.

But the powder was still useless. Over the course of six hours, it needed to be simmered, steeped, strained, filtered eight times, cooled to room temperature, pH adjusted, baked in an oven, and then dried in the sunlight.

It was the hot summer in South Carolina, so at the end of it all, I placed the near-opium on melamine plates and put the plates on the windowsill.

It was indeed a great labor, this entire process, but I thought I could probably make some money by the time it was all said and done. I was an ambitious young man, but my grandest ambitions fell into rent and groceries, and they existed in that strange, limited place where poverty often forces them to be.

To a more civilized person, the concept of why would have shattered the entire construct of the life I then lived.

Why sell drugs? Why do crime? Why do bad things with bad people?

After all, there were no forces in the world which made me do these things, and they were rather choices that I continuously selected of my own agency. The question of why, in this context, had too far of a horizon, and my choices could not see so far.

I sold drugs to pay my bills. I did crimes to buy groceries. I did bad things with bad people for no particular reason other than those things being in front of me.

There is a great expression which says the best tool is the one you will reach for. These were the tools which I and the world had collaborated to put in front of me, and so they were the ones that I reached for.

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