1
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Like every morning, she opened the carton box of all her medicine and popped the assigned quantity from their blisters into her hand. She saw two little greyish roaches scurrying up the corner of her living room wall. She paid them no attention. A small millipede appeared out her right sleeve, his chubby shiny body wriggling on her wrist. That tickled!
Her cat waited patiently on a stool, like an old school circus lion. She swallowed the pills - all seven of them - at once, with a sip of black tea she had brewed slightly too long. It was bitter, it was hot. She didn’t mind. She took the kibble container from the cupboard and the black cat started swerving madly around her legs. She put an appropriate amount of little brown squares and the furry beast started devouring like a famished animal.
She walked gingerly on the grey cobblestones, it had rained recently and there were several tricky ones that would send cold and dirty water right up your legs should you step on them. She felt like Indiana Jones for a bit. Choose wisely, Anna, she thought, working with wet feet would be horrible. The sky was grey. Oh there was sun, probably. Right there, behind these dense autumn clouds.
After a twenty minute walk, she arrived at work, a small neighborhood library, a grey square box with wooden accents around the large windows. She liked the symmetry of the building, it was the opposite of dull. The wood had started to age and was greyer in some places and almost black everywhere the rain touched it. She found it fascinating. You could almost feel what the house would feel, where it not an inanimate object, of course.
As she put her hand on the door handle, she noticed a small spider crawling. The little arthropod walked all over her knuckles as she opened the door. She entered the warm space, said hi to the colleague on the front desk and proceeded to the back, where piles of books waited on her, like multiple needy cats happy to see her every morning and get her attention. She would sort them, file them. Funnily enough, since she began taking antidepressants, her dust allergy was completely gone. She had replaced half a pill with seven full. The thought made her chuckle. She took a pile of big art books from the floor and several tiny silverfish scurried away. Those might be real, she thought, furrowing her brows. Maybe she’d say a word to her boss at the end of the day. They could damage the pages after all. She looked at the little slivers of silver disappearing under the plinths. They were beautiful, though.
After three months of Abilify, one of the seven pills she was on, she had started seeing creepy crawlers everywhere. Her doc was very nice, very nice smile, perfect white teeth. Anna felt weird about her own slightly tea stained teeth every time. The Doc was always upping her dose, in concern when the prescribed regimen didn’t seem to do much. She meant well. Anna didn’t like seeing the alarmed look on the Doc’s face. She much preferred focusing on her pretty face for those weekly twenty minutes. She stopped mentioning the creepy crawlers when the second upping of Abilify failed to change a thing. Even the tick ticking of tiny feet she noticed right there on the Doc’s window. An isopod, on the windowsill. Beautiful.
“Goodbye, Frances”, she said as she passed the front desk. Her colleague looked at her a bit puzzled. She wondered why. She did feel tiny feet crawling all over her head but surely nobody else could see her hallucinations.
