Howie Good
Pills

Our leaders communicate in shrieks and howls. Babies are sent to prison, their mothers back over the border. Strands of cancer cells climb the outer walls like ivy. Rather than answers, we are given pills. Not much here can be called natural. The Wampanoags, the tribe that helped the Pilgrims survive their first Thanksgiving, still regret it 400 years later.

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It was a year of shadows and mist. The voice in my head that used to offer guidance had turned implacable, menacing. Unlike the pharmaceutically blessed characters in TV ads for medications, no pill enabled me to go skydiving or whitewater rafting or on an African photo safari. Some days I couldn’t even make it out the front door. I lived with the incipient panic that I imagined many must have felt during the Revolution when the Committee for Public Safety arrived in town with a traveling guillotine.

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The pills I take at night to get to sleep leave me feeling dazed all morning. I stare stupidly at the white screen of my laptop while rubbing the top of my head in a forlorn attempt to stimulate the language center of the brain. I think once again of Bruno Schulz. Only the first sentence of the novel he was writing when he was murdered survives: Mother awakened me in the morning, saying, “Joseph, the Messiah is near. . . .” A Gestapo officer shot him down in the street in broad daylight. It was a kind of hobby, to be honest.

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Re:Vision

Among the few items on the store shelves were jars of contaminated baby food, flags of no known nation, and slippers made of bubble wrap and duct tape. A fluorescent pink headline on the cover of a women’s magazine on display at the checkout promised to reveal how to be productive even when clinically depressed. I handed the cashier a coupon I didn’t realize had expired. “What are you, stupid?” he snarled. I took it to be a rhetorical question.

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“I’ll lick stamps,” I told the gargoyle from HR during the job interview. “I’ll lick whatever you want.” He shook his big, ugly head no. With that, I found myself back on the street. It had just started to rain when Jesus appeared to me. My first thought was that he looked nothing like his picture.

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Deranged angels hoot all night in the tree outside your window. Better get used to it. Horror is everywhere. If you go searching for some way of escape, you’ll just end up in a 24-hour McDonald’s beside a woman with fangs and a moustache. I’m not there even when I am. And if the sky brightens, it’s never for long.