Dust Bunny Angst

    It was quiet in the dust world last night.
    At least here in this tiny corner of it, this flat where the dust bunny from last week is still hanging around, coming to me intermittently with confessions of angst over certain elements of the dust-fueled world in which she lives. Last time we talked, she told me how she got into "the dust." She's from a small town almost a hundred miles west of here, one of those little "Hickville, USA" places that exist all across this country, with a couple of stores, a gas station and a church with a perpetual "Welcome" sign out front. But it wasn't small town life that drove her toward the dust, she told me. It was her mother.
    "My mother took  my son," she said. "I had him just after I got out of high school, and I was living at home for a while, but then I moved in with my boyfriend, and there were drugs and stuff, and she called DHS and took him."
    I told her that I didn't think that people, even mothers, could just "take" other people's children. She said that her mother was able to do it because she lied and said her daughter was on drugs, when, in fact, at the time, she was just into smoking a little of bit of pot occasionally and getting drunk if someone happened to stop by with a bottle of Fire Ice 101 or something.
    "I just don't want you to think that I'm some kind of druggie or something," she said. "I mean, the first time I even heard about dust was just, like, two months ago. I was at this guy's house, just hanging out, not there to get high or anything, and this other guy comes over and he had, like, a forty bag of dust and he asked me if I wanted to get fucked up. I almost didn't do it because I'm scared of speed and shit like that. But sometimes I just get, I don't know, really depressed about not having my son, and I just do shit to feel better."
    She knew she was in trouble the minute she picked up the foil, she confessed. It was "pure shit", not like the shit some people claim is pure, but really isn't. This dust was so good, she insisted, that she was able to remain high for ten hours without having to "walk the dog" again. And she didn't see any of the weird hallucinations that she sometimes sees when she smokes inferior dust. It was just a good feeling...like riding a unicorn, if there really were unicorns.
    As she shared this little snippet of her drug-taking history with me, we were sitting on my leather couch, and she was smoking a Marlboro cigarette that she'd found on the floor of my son's room. She was leaving a lot of lag time between drags, though, and I was having a hard time focusing on her pain because I was afraid that the ash from her cigarette was going to drop onto my leather couch cushion and leave a burn mark. That didn't seem to bother her in the least. She just went on talking in this dull, flat, monochromatic voice that seemed to reflect her appearance: older than her years, sallow-skinned, empty-eyed, sad and shadowed and gray.
    Still, as dust bunnies go, she was at least relatively polite. She offered to help me clean up around the house, which, she pointed out, definitely needed it.
   "But I know you're a writer, so I can understand that," she said, as though it made sense. "And I don't want you to think that I'm just hanging around here so I can get high."
   I let her sweep the floor and put some clothes away. Later, when I told a friend about it, she asked me how I had dared to let some random drugged out girl touch my things, which she could easily steal and sell for money to buy more drugs. I told her that I didn't know. Mostly, I said, it was because the floor really did need sweeping and I didn't think that she'd be able to get much money for a pile of my old clothes anyway.
    I suppose, if you don't live with it every day, it would seem strange, all of these random girls and young men who come in and out of this house, under the guise of being my son's friends, but in reality as members of   a not very exclusive club that nevertheless charges a very high membership fee. Of all the people who come here, it's the girls who interest me the most, probably because their socialization and biological temperament impels them to seek me out and attempt to win my friendship. Even the ones who eventually end up stealing from me. One of the early ones, who I met long before I'd had occasion to learn much about dust, actually sat and consoled me when I found out that my ex-husband's gargoyle of a girlfriend had arranged a holiday schedule that would interfere with my own plans for spending time with my adult daughter and high school age son, who doesn't live with me, over the holidays. On hearing the news, I was overcome with a depression almost as severe as the one that immobilized me when he first left me a year and a half ago to be with the gargoyle,  and I sat down at my computer and cried while the people visiting my son went about their business, seemingly oblivious to my distress. Finally, this girl came out of my son's room, leaned over my chair, and rubbed my back, saying, "Your husband's a jerk. I haven't known you very long,  but I can tell that you're a very special person who deserves better." Then she went away again. And I cried even harder because a girl with arms covered with bruises from needles and a waist with the circumference of a celery stick (another dust plus, as one particularly witty dust bunny would be wont to say) thought that I was special. That's depression.
    It's also sad. Because not two weeks later, the same girl returned to our flat and tried to rob my son at knife point, ordering him to give her "all your shit." He was never in any real danger, of course, because she was maybe a foot taller than Tinkerbell and the knife was just a little penknife I'd seen her use to scrape dust residue off the sides of plates so that she could form it into lines for snorting. But in the ensuing struggle over control of the flat door, a mirror was broken and I became, for the first time since I'd learned about the dust, afraid for my safety. I had always been afraid for my son's----ever since he took his first step as a baby and I realized that it was the first of many that would take him farther and farther away from me.
    It's getting on to late afternoon now. I have to do more than think about dust bunnies and their problems. But I won't be missing anything because there's sure to be at least one of them here waiting for me when I get back.