An Autumn Hunting

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She hadn’t managed to pull the syringe out of her inner thigh before the heroin slammed into her nervous system with the mindless ferocity of the snowstorms that race down from the Tien Shan mountains. Her body sprawled across a chaos of unwashed clothes, grease-stained pizza boxes, crushed Baltika beer cans; all the garbage junkies accumulate when nothing else in life matters but cooking up the next shot. Her cheap unbranded jeans were baggy and bunched around her knees, so I could follow the progress of her addiction by the track marks riding up and down her left leg like cigarette burns.

She might have been a pretty girl once, dreaming of true love and the next party, but that was all history now. Not for her the first kiss, summer evenings with friends by Lake Issyk-Kul, the rich scent of cut lilies, the crunch of fresh snow underfoot. Now a different kind of snow had consumed her, buried her under a blizzard that blasted death across Central Asia and on into Russia.

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