The Art of Drinking Charcoal

by Caitlin Garvey


The white Styrofoam cup holds the black matter—a mix between liquid and solid form—and it’s handed to you by Tammy, the nurse, who says, “Drink this. It will save your life.” You’re there, in your green hospital gown, because of a sleeping pill overdose, and when Tammy speaks, you notice that some of its blackness is seeping down the side of the cup, and she says more: “Our cups are flimsy. Drink fast.” She stares at you while you stare down at the charcoal, a black residue, ash-like and porous, the remains of the campfire you attended in the woods when you were 16 and drunk for the first time, the night after your mom had a double mastectomy; the blackness at the bottom of the bowl that you used to smoke weed before a school presentation because, as you told yourself, it worked better than anti-anxieties; the mud pit in the park across from your house in which you made sticky sludge angels when you were six years old and smiling with your best friend; the wet cement parking spot in the alley where you and your first girlfriend carved your names, not just as an act of rebellion but also as a chance to declare yourselves as a same-sex couple, carving your identities to feel more at ease with them; the black hair dye that you applied to your friend’s roots when she wanted to look edgier for a boy and it ran down the sides of the clear bathtub. Now, when the charcoal drips down the side, you want it to drip more, but they’re staring at you and you can’t just let it drip and you can’t empty it into the drain. You take your first sip: it’s cold and you can’t swallow it as is—you have to chew it a bit to get it down, and it sits between your cheeks and stains your teeth so your smile becomes a moving x-ray; you dribble a bit of it down your chin on purpose because living becomes less likely the less of it you drink. “Just chug it,” Tammy says, and as you sway from exhaustion, you hear the echo of your high school friends telling you the same as you hold a PBR on its side, the faint voice of your mom telling you to “just plug your nose already and swallow the damn medicine,” and then you think of water, plugging your nose and jumping into the deep end, its clearness, swimming in a meet with your mom cheering from the bleachers, jumping into the cold waters of Lake Michigan to swim three miles to fundraise for cancer research after she died, the pureness and warmth of a bath. As Tammy stares, you drink more, and there’s something about how she rubs your back as you drink that calms you, that makes you feel like you should do as you’re told. You vomit in your mouth from the chalky taste, but swallow it back down. You sip more quickly since you’re on a mission now, trying to remove the substance from your sight, trying to reach the bottom of the cup, and in doing so, you recognize that you’re going to fail, that you have already: not with finishing the cup but with ending your life. Hours later, long after you’ve thrown out the empty cup, you rush to the bathroom—a side effect of charcoal consumption—and vomit up what took you so long to get down, a long and huge release, a vomit so uncontainable that it sprays in a web-like pattern over the toilet bowl and stool, and you’ve made your mark—The Kiss of the Spider Woman—black matter zigzagging and striping the white seat, expelling death and creating a mess of memory. When you’re done, you wipe the stool and toilet seat down with paper towels, making them white again, but aware of their power to trap and flush death and aware that upon them lies your imprint.
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