Kind of a weird situation to think about. Little kid doing drugs. Sorta out of the ordinary. The title is from a song by RUSH.
Zack Ritter shuffled some of the bottles of shampoo around and moved the bath toys onto the counter top, placing them strategically so that it wouldn’t appear as if they had been dumped up there haphazardly. He crawled in, under the sink, into the cabinet, watching not to strike his head on the piping as he had last time. He closed the door and smiled his boyish smile in the dark where no one could see him. His sister told him he was too fat to fit in that space and, while it was cramped, she was wrong. She made a point of refusing to check for him during their games of hide a seek as a matter of principle and, knowing this, it was the only place he would hide. Eventually she convinced herself that he really couldn’t possibly be under there at all and would give up and get angry before even stepping into the bathroom.
He could spend an hour or two in there even if he knew his sister had long since stopped looking for him, and he would play with the bottles on his lap in lieu of the friends he didn’t have. The depth of the black never scared him because the space was small and the door was immediately in front of him. Occasionally he would grope for one of the aerosol bottles and spray it for a moment or two and inhale. Dizzy, he felt. It was a sensation of weightlessness, or no, of being in a limitless expanse of darkness. The sensation was heightened when he would use more than one can at a time, and it wasn’t long before he was begging his sister for any excuse to play hide and seek so he could breathe in the fumes again.
Every time he went under he would hold down the nozzle for just a moment longer than the previous time until he really felt as if he were falling, spinning, deeper and deeper into a hole from which he could never escape, but he loved it. It was sanctuary from the nasty lunch ladies and the other children at school. He was far away from everything else, and he fell asleep in that hole. Slowly, as if falling through an increasingly thick fog until he was completely underwater, a dark, cool water. And in the moment when he stopped breathing, nothing made any sense, and it didn’t have too.
His sister gave up looking for him, and when his mother panicked and called the police, the last place in the house that anyone checked was the cabinet under the sink.
