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ask so many damn questions? Can’t he see I’m not fucking coherent? “Pain.”
    “What hurts?”
    My finger points to the great offender. “Migraine.” My voice is barely a whisper now. But only a little bit of time passes before I feel a cool cloth across my forehead. Again I want to laugh, knowing it won’t help. But just a bit later I feel something else, and I recognize the cold of a cloth wrapped in ice across my forehead. My hand latches onto it like it’s gold and I move it over my left eye, the same one the axe man is hacking into.
    “Need meds.” I lick my lips, or try to anyway.
    “Where are they?”
    “Home.”
    “What do you need?”
    My mouth is so dry, it’s difficult to talk. My tongue works around the inside trying to stir up some saliva. “Maxalt. Tramadol. Lortab.”
    “Not sure I can help you with those.”
    The pain comes in waves and it’s on the increase again. My breathing is erratic and if I don’t get something in me, I’ll go insane. The only thing I know to do is to make something else hurt worse than my head. So I jerk my wrist against whatever it is hooking me to the bed.
    “Stop it. You’ll hurt yourself.”
    My mind processes that he’s angry with me. I don’t care. That’s the idea, I want to say. But I’m at the point where I can’t speak again. The only thing I focus on is making something else hurt worse than my skull. But I don’t succeed because he grabs and holds my arm before I can do any real damage. My loose hand fists his shirt and I try to pull him to me, but I’m so weak with pain, I fail. How can I make him understand how badly I hurt?
    He must understand that I need to tell him something because he leans close to me. “Do something … anything,” I groan in his ear. “If I can’t get my pills, I want to die. Please.”
    “Christ. What the hell is wrong with you?” he asks. Then he pushes me away. This is the mother of all migraines. They’ve been bad before, but I’ve always been able to medicate. I won’t make it if I can’t get something in me.
    His fingers touch my neck and he says, “Damn, your heart rate is through the roof.” He gets up and I assume he makes a phone call because I can hear him talking to someone.
    Rolling to my side I try to look where he’s gone. I see a handgun on the small table about five feet from me. If I can get to it, I can end all of this. Right here and now. The pain will be gone forever. I don’t think twice before I try to sit up and reach for it. There’s one problem: I’m so wobbly, weak, and dizzy that my equilibrium is sketchy. Standing will be a huge issue. But I go for it. Jackpot. As my fingers wrap around the beautiful, cold metal, I pick it up. But I’m so shaky, it may be a problem for me to fire it. I’m still going to try.
    I turn it toward me and take aim and as I squeeze, he yells, “ Noooo!”
    N othing happens. I squeeze harder, but by that time, he slams my hand against the headboard and knocks the gun away. It skids across the bed and thumps to the floor, shattering my last hope for relief. That slight bit of work has zapped me so I collapse on the bed, thinking how my big chance at ending my pain has slipped through my fingers because I was too weak to pull the gun’s trigger. How pathetic is that? I can’t even kill myself.
    “What the hell are you doing?” he asks . He grabs me by the neck and forces me to look at him.
    “You don’t understand,” I whisper as I reach for my head again with my free hand. “I can’t do this … anymore.” And the writhing takes over.
    My mom… somehow, thoughts of her soothe me. I try to focus on when I was young and we’d do fun things together. Once she took me to the county fair and we rode the merry-go-round. Afterward she bought me cotton candy. And she laughed at me because I had sticky stuff everywhere. When she grabbed my hand to hold it, we stuck together like glue. She told me how she didn’t have to worry about losing me