Slicing Tomatoes

After I got home on the first day I didn’t want to go straight to bed. I wanted to stay up for at least a little while, so I decided I’d make salsa.

I got all of my ingredients out – the tomatoes, mango and onion were all in a bowl on the kitchen counter, the spices were in the cabinet and the cilantro was in the refrigerator. I was feeling very sluggish and a bit spacey -- almost kind of drunk, but in a very uncomfortable way -- so I was being very slow and careful with the knife.

As I was slicing the tomatoes, which were room temperature, I discovered that my sense of touch had been altered by the poison that had been slow dripped into my veins an hour earlier; I was acutely aware of the feeling in my fingertips, and while carefully cutting the tomatoes into small bits, I noticed that the juices felt unusually cold, almost eerily cold, like that skin tingling chill that comes from a damp wooded area on a warm night.

It was very strange, and I tried to explain it to Bryan, who was in the kitchen with me, but then I discovered that my brain had been poisoned as well.