Fine, crystalline powder lay scattered along the cracked molding between the mattress and the wall. The tiny white grains met crumpled tissues and hairballs under the lip of a dingy fitted sheet. They sparkled incongruously along a thin trail across the floor of Derek’s shabby room, reflecting where, it seemed to Derek, there wasn’t any light.

The ripped windowshade cast a jagged knife of daylight on faded Variety clippings taped to the opposite wall. The outline looked like the tapering gap between a pair of legs… the legs of a runner in mid-stretch, making time against the plaster.

Derek Blakeney contemplated the runner.

Headless, torsoless, it had started over near his closet, narrow and slow. As the afternoon wore on, the shadow widened and the jogger seemed to catch its stride, legs reaching like a steeplechaser’s. Its progress across the wall became terrific… a yard, at least, in the last twenty minutes.

At last Phiddipides crossed the finish line and expired in the shadow of the closet door.

Evening. A time for decisions.

He had known all along what his choice would be. Derek’s hands trembled as he reached for the shoebox by the foot of the bed, his unbuttoned cuffs revealing an uneven chain of needle tracks.

Bless the mercy law, he contemplated as he opened the box and took out a sterilized package. Bless the legislators who legalized the paraphernalia, the syringes and needles, so those on the low road won’t have to share it with hepatitis and tetanus.

He broke the sealed wrapper and pushed the bright needle through the rubber cap of a tiny bottle of amber fluid.

Bless those who legalized the new drugs, so an addict needn’t commit crimes to support his slow road to hell. He doesn’t have to drag others with him, anymore.