Note: This story was dynamically reformatted for online reading convenience.
 
 Tanya loved the needle.  She was eighteen years old and looking for
oblivion.  There was something about the cherry blossom of blood flowing
into the clear vial as the plunger pulled back, that excited her.  Her
boyfriend Alex was her first connection.  Alex always found the junk.  He
knew people.  All the wrong sorts of people.  It never took him long to
score.  In those early days, the two of them could hold out until late in
the day.  It was almost romantic, the way they shared the ritual of
preparing the drug.  Setting up the works by candlelight.  Tanya would sit
naked on the kitchen counter, and slide the thin, cold tube of steel into
her arm.  It would make her vomit, that first rush from the hit.  It would
make her come.  She learned to associate the two sensations.  Alex liked to
watch her convulse.  Her thin, pale body shaking with repeated spasms of
sickness and pleasure.  Sometimes she would be overcome, falling to the
floor.  Her black hair would become matted to the sides of her face, her
body slick with sweat and vomit.  Alex would stand over her and masturbate,
adding his seed to the viscous fluids on her body as she faded in and out
of consciousness.  The junk bound them together.  They were in love.

   She was a fan of Keats and Shelley, a devote of arch prose.  She
imagined herself as the tragic heroine of her own passion play.

   Tanya started collecting tattoos.  Her first was an elaborate arabesque.
Interlocking lines of crimson and black flowing from the base of her spine
above the cleft of her buttocks and ending between her shoulder blades.  It
took seven hours to complete.  She had to take a break to fix up in the
middle of the session.  The jab of the syringe just one more puncture of
her self.  After that, she developed a fetish for all kinds of needles. 
She learned how to mark herself up.  Her first effort was a simple, double
line of black dots marching up the skin of her forearm.  When she felt
nervous, whenever Alex was late, she would pass the time playing connect
the dots with safety pins.  She kept herself thin.  She avoided daylight.

   One night, Alex didn't come home.  Tanya waited in the apartment,
sitting in the dark.  She ran out of pins and started to shake.  She drank
from a bottle of vodka, trying to stay calm.  Eventually, she passed out,
little crimson drops slipping out of her body and staining the fabric of
the couch.

   Tanya woke up sometime later, feeling sick, this time from a lack of
junk.  She looked out the window.  It was still nighttime.  As far as she
was concerned it was always nighttime.  She was still alone.  She put on
her favorite coat and left.  She never saw Alex again.

   Youth is it's own currency.  Tanya knew this with a junkie's insight. 
She had herself to trade.  She walked downtown.  It didn't take her long to
find what she was looking for.  She went up to the first hustler she saw
and showed him her arm.  He brought her inside the hallway of a building.
She knelt down, opening her mouth.  He took out his cock, slipping the
stale tasting flesh between her lips.  She gagged a bit at first, then
caught a rhythm.  The hustler came in a weak spurt, dribbling his come over
her tongue and coating her lips.  It wasn't important.  The tiny glassine
packet he handed her afterwards was.

   For the next few weeks, Tanya shuttled back and forth between her
apartment and the downtown.  She fucked strangers, letting them do what
they wanted with her body.  Her mind was retreating to a small place inside
of herself.  At the end of the month she came home to find that her key
didn't fit in the door.  She slept in the hallway.  The next day she
attached herself to the first man on the street who offered her what she
needed.  He turned her out.  She didn't care.

   She shivered on street corners.  The other girls didn't like her.  She
looked sick.  She had trouble getting work.  Her pimp cut her loose when
she stopped bringing in enough money.  With nowhere to go, she walked from
block to block.  She was grateful when the car pulled up beside her.  Tanya
got inside.  He drove her to a quiet place.  He held a small vial of clear
liquid under her nose.  She inhaled, a sharp, chemical tang filling her
mouth and throat.  Something happened to her, like a series of flashes
going off in front of her eyes.  Saliva dripped from her mouth, spooling
onto her breasts.  Somehow her clothes had come off.  He was licking her
neck.  His tongue like a cat's, rough and pointed.  Her head lolled to the
side.  His cock was out, squishing wetly between his fingers as he worked
it in his fist.  Something was penetrating her, it hurt.  She looked down
between her legs.  There was something metallic protruding from the lips of
her vagina.  He was pushing it into her with his free hand.  It went all
the way into her.  Something loosened inside of her, causing a sudden
lubrication.  Her body shook with a violent orgasm as she simultaneously
ejected a stream of bile from her mouth.  On the seat next to her, the man
worked the ice pick into her vagina, hardly reacting as she passed out. 
Her last thought was of how beautiful it was to be penetrated this way, by
a giant needle.