The Final Toast
Language: en
There was always a bottle of pesticide sitting on our dining table. Paraquat. A restricted herbicide. One sip, and your lungs turn to stone; you suffocate while fully conscious. There is no antidote. My parents would often slam that bottle down in front of me: "If you don't study hard, you have no future! Are you trying to kill us?" "If you drop out of the top three in your class next exam, your mom and I are splitting this bottle right here!" They tightened the screws, day by day, until the day the SAT scores came out. I was the Valedictorian. Top fifty in the state. And I had a…