Stacy in Hell

STACY

HELL

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Synopsis: A cautionary tale. The title says it all.

Author's Notes: This story is rated R for language and content. It was written in response to Angelinhel’s “Stacy Challenge” on PPMB from April 2007.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Angelinhel for the spark, and Psychotol for the corrections.

Stacy Rowe was considered a mousy, quiet girl in high school. That all changed when she went to college and people were nice to her. She made lots of friends and even met a wonderful boy! As luck would have it he was rich and they fell in love and got married right after they both graduated with really good grades. Stacy's life was perfect. She had supportive friends and a loving family. Since they were rich, she spent her time helping the less fortunate and raising her kids. Yes, life was blissfully wonderful.

One day Stacy awoke to her picture-perfect world, devoid of any strife...

Stacy DeWitt-Clinton ripped the last page out of the spiral-bound notebook when she finished reading her high-school doodling. “Fuck that shit,” she hissed, throwing the cardboard back of the notebook into the overflowing waste can beside her. She coughed on the sinus-blasting cat-piss atmosphere filling the trailer home’s kitchen, then took the notebook page and formed it into a funnel shape that she stapled together, then stuck in a ring clamp attached to a clamp stand. She was out of coffee filters to use in processing the packs of little red Sudafed tablets she had hammered into powder earlier that morning, when she had also smashed six batteries to pieces and extracted the lithium strips from inside them. Her husband would never know. She loved that.

Ted’s not the only fucking brain around here, she thought. I’m plenty fucking smarter than he is. I’ve watched him make this stuff so many times, I could do it in my sleep. He’s so fucking naïve. He didn’t even know about chewing gum until he met Daria, didn’t know about dating or making out until he met me, got us both hooked on meth and got us kicked out of college, so he’s not that fucking smart. And what he doesn’t know about me cooking up a batch of this shit for myself isn’t gonna hurt him. I absolutely fucking deserve it. He’s won’t be back until three a.m. from selling our last batch and fucking around on me with every underage slut in Swedesville. He thinks I’m clueless, but I know what he’s been doing. I know everything he’s been doing. Jesus, he’s so fucking naïve.

She wiped her nose on her arm, checked the hotplate and the flask with its bubbling contents and the plastic tubes running from bottle to bottle across the kitchen counter. It was the nicest, cleanest, neatest meth lab in the world. Ted was so anal about that, didn’t want to risk any trouble making it, always made Stacy clean up after every batch. You have to do your part, Unicorn, he always told her. That was his pet name for her, Unicorn. He’d given it to her when they started dating. She’d liked the name then.

“Fuck that shit!” she repeated. She liked that phrase a lot more than she liked being called Unicorn. “Fuck that shit” said everything that there was to say.

She bent down and checked the propane tank with the blue-tinged fittings, filled with stolen anhydrous ammonia and sitting on the floor between her bare feet, the pipe from it running between her thighs and cut-offs up to the sink and her meth stove. A cute little fan unit took the cat-piss air leaking from the propane tank between her feet and the meth stove in front of her, blowing it outside through special ducts and vents Ted had installed.

The garbage can beside her was filled with empty blister packs of Sudafed and busted batteries from Ted’s last batch, wadded strips of unused duct tape, fast-food waste, used matches, burnt aluminum foil, damaged lengths of plastic tubing, broken glass flasks stolen ages ago from a chemistry-lab storage room at college, red-stained coffee filters, and uncountable beer cans and sixteen-ounce Ultra-Cola bottles either she or Ted had killed off. Some of this trash had spilled onto the kitchen floor as well, but she’d clean it up before Ted got home. She promised herself she would. The open kitchen cabinets were filled to bursting with cans and bottles of drain cleaner, pure liquid ammonia, three kinds of paint thinner, rock salt, denatured alcohol, lye, and starter fluid. Ted liked to experiment, searching for better ways to produce more powerful meth. His experiments had burned one of his fingers half off, but he kept at it. He acted like he was still in school in chemistry class. Such an asshole.

“I’m so fucking glad I’m not in school anymore,” she said, thinking aloud. “That was such fucking bullshit, I hated it so fucking much. School’s for assholes like Ted and Daria.” I know what’s really important, she continued to herself, eyeing the flask. It isn’t popularity, and it isn’t fashion, and it sure isn’t being beautiful. I’m free of all that now. All that counts is just feeling good. That’s all there is, because nothing in the world feels as fucking good as using up a whole batch of meth all by yourself, absolutely nothing. She absently picked at a sore on a sunken cheek and checked on her cooking. An hour remained before her batch was done.

An hour if she did it the way Ted always did it. I’m way fucking smarter than he is.

“I can’t wait any more,” she muttered. “This Unicorn’s gonna get high or die.” If doing it Ted’s way would take an hour, she would add more heat to the process and take only fifteen minutes, if that. She reached over and picked up a handheld flame torch, twisted the knob until she could hear the gas roaring out, then stuck it under her arm and picked up a book of matches. She lit one and held it up to the hissing torch nozzle, which had filled the air before her with propane gas.

She didn’t immediately feel the explosion, which threw her backward though she kept her footing. When she came to, staggering, her face and arms were roasted. Her eyebrows were gone and her tangled hair smoldered. She thought boiling water had been thrown into her face when the pain hit. With a shriek, she blindly ran for the sink to splash cold water on herself. As she did, she kicked the propane tank into a cabinet door, snapping off the badly corroded top nozzle. A caustic geyser of anhydrous ammonia blasted upward, stripping clothing and skin from every inch of her above the knees, turning her into one great open wound from pubis to scalp. She reflexively inhaled to scream even louder but instead filled her lungs with a trillion stabbing needles of pure ammonia, and suddenly she didn’t have lungs anymore.

Then the ammonia cloud contacted the still-burning torch on the floor. The trailer went up like a thousand-pound IED under an ammo truck, consumed in a white-hot fireball a hundred feet wide that rose into the night as a gargantuan red mushroom cloud.

Having made a quick sale but finding no teenage meth whores to celebrate with, Ted was driving into the trailer park when the ammonia cloud detonated. He slammed on the brakes and watched in shock as flaming pieces of the trailer began crashing to the ground. Car alarms and fire sirens broke out from all over. Dogs howled and children screamed. After a moment to figure out what had happened, he spun the truck around and headed back to Swedesville as fast as he could go. He didn’t regret losing Stacy. It was long past time for that. Sometimes unicorns had to die, and his Unicorn had been dead for a long, long time. He knew she’d do something stupid eventually.

He shook his head as he got back on the Interstate. “Fuck that shit,” he said, and he laughed. He liked that phrase. It said everything that there was to say.

Author’s Notes II: The info on meth manufacture was taken from government and law-enforcement websites and from a 2005 A&E documentary on the subject: Meth: A County in Crisis. The details were left deliberately vague and misleading, just to be clear about that.

Original: 04/19/07, modified 05/07/07, 03/12/08, 05/04/10

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