Divine Intervention – by Malcolm Ivey

I think I had been up for four days when I robbed the second gas station. But it could have been five days or even six. I don’t know. Days run together when they’re not separated by sleep.

Armed robbery was a new low, even for me, but then so was crack cocaine. In the six months following my first hit from a crack pipe, I’d lost everything — my car, my job, my girl, my family. I couldn’t stand the weak thing I had become and by then, I was ready to die.

My plan was simple: rob and get high until the police got behind me, then blow my brains out. Although cocaine is not classified as a hallucinogen, sleep deprivation most definitely is. And as I was exiting that gas station, I was seeing and hearing all sorts of things — police search lights, sirens, footsteps, voices…