





































71

SAVANNAH HOPE

EDEN

My underbelly tickled as his shaky hands lit the small flame that caressed the 
silver cusp in which I dreamily laid. It made me laugh, he was helping me prepare. 
His eyes were dark and longing, he needed me and that made me laugh more. He 
believed he had handled me before, but I was in on this one. I knew it was the last, 
the final leg of our long voyage.

He put me on the table, which was the only thing in the room. He shook. He 
picked up the tube and gently emptied me into to it. The last leg, my evil mind 
was on his defeat. He tied the rubber across his arm and smiled. I was his love. He 
thought he was in Eden now, but his garden hadn’t even begun to grow.

I was angry with laughter as he brought me up to his arm. He ran the tip against 
his cool skin. And when he pushed down with the inevitable vaccine of me, I made 
his garden grow. First wrapping vines around his wrist and shoulders and then his 
skull. My strong roots cracked into his skull, splattering bone against his four walls.

I twisted the vines into his mealy brains. Eden was growing. His heart was pre-
cious, and I took separate stabs at it, as he began to convulse and grab his chest. Only 
I could control the vines, they were mine. His heart was pricked with thrones from 
the green vines and blood trickled down into a waterfall of heat over his cold skin. He 
must remember that he had injected me.

He thought Eden was where he was going, that’s what I usually did for him. 
But I thought he might want to see the true strength of “out-of-body” experience. I 
laughed throughout his veins, and he shook in my fury that he had inflicted. I was his 
love, and he had wanted me.

The bones slide down the four walls, which he had never really left. He watched 
them drip and didn’t know if the “trip” was true or really a journey to somewhere. I 
knew where, but it wasn’t his Eden. I made the vines snap up through his fingers, he 
clenched his fist down. He was trying for an equal fight, but that didn’t count in war 
where you called out your enemy, or love.

The veins lite with my anger and his flesh burned like paper, he watched his 
fingers disintegrate. Ash piled around him and Eden’s fresh gardens wilted in them. 
There was a pounding on the door, a dealer. He couldn’t answer, because my work 
had enveloped his lips and they seared with the paste of my love.



72

The smell of his cremation festered and lingered throughout his Eden. A smoke 
collected at his feet and he twisted about trying to escape the choking pollution. The 
vines grew 

stronger around his ankles slowing him down. Maybe now he would appreciate the 
Eden that he had created.

The needle which he had used to inject me, splintered under the garden vines 
that now covered the entire room. I laughed again, staring at him. For the first 
time he saw me as his administer. And the Eden that he had painted up in so many 
dreams melted. There was nothing but him and me. 

He had loved me and smiled for me, and used me so many times. He didn’t 
know that each time was an infection, and now his fever was going to burn forever. 
He had allowed me, his love, to bring him there. That at least, he had to admit.


