Three Pills and Two Different Sighs
He sat at his two-chair table after work. His forearms heavy in the apartment’s kitchenette. He sipped black gunpowder from a chipped and stained ceramic coffee mug, and stared at three pill bottles sitting across from him. The ups and downs of being bipolar were down down down again, and the therapist agreed that it was time to change meds. He sipped black gunpowder, and let out a sigh that was years in its building. He knew it would be weeks before he felt anything from the new pills, whether relief or increased agitation, and he sat and wondered for 60 seconds if it was worth it to continue on. He sighed again. A sigh with long days behind it instead of years, and opened the pills and swallowed all three at once with the chilling gunpowder. His coffee mug was empty. He scooched back, and stood to reload it.
Like a Childhood Ghost Story
Larry turned the radio down in the minivan. “What the hell?” he said, as they drove past the small town courthouse square. Thirty people stood with forty signs protesting the president.
Wanda, his wife of 26 years said, “it’s a big nationwide doo-hickey. Protesting in every city in the country today.”
They were one block past the one block long picket when Larry said, “what the hell they mad about anyway?”
Wanda snuck a peek in the door side mirror and smiled at the bright neon signs and chants disappearing there and said, “I think they’ve got reasons.”
Larry let his foot off the gas pedal of the minivan and nearly applied the brake pedal in the middle of the street, there two blocks from the Wal-Mart, looking briefly at his wife like he’d just heard her childhood ghost story.
Wanda smiled and turned the radio up as they coasted in to the big SuperCenter parking lot. Neither of them said anything on the way in to get the week’s groceries.
Dan Denton writes poems for breakfast, short stories as afternoon snacks, and his latest novel, The Dead and the Desperate (Roadside Press, 2023) was written late at night. A longtime union autoworker, he now lives, writes and wanders in a tiny travel trailer home that he has dubbed “The Scrapes of Wrath.”
