Panning for pills

My age starts with a one and my hair is impossibly soft — static in the way only a child’s can be. Home is a vitreous china bowl, a sink estate. Something warm and pleasant is pressed up on the inside of my pocket - a fabric shield covering my heart. It’s September - summer still has one foot stuck in the door, and I smell like new school-shoes with lily of the valley mixed in. Its 4pm and sunlight trickles down concrete tower-blocks, then vanishes beneath the earth. Eventually night takes the form of a fire blanket draped over us in an attempt to soothe what isn’t happening. Movement is predictable in its unpredictability. Clatter, shout, nothing then repeat. Maybe a siren.

The handles of a plastic bag dig into my palms. I can feel the contents begin to shred my dignity. Medicine from inside our cabinet, hidden amongst bread and fruit. I sort through and pick them out - panning for our pills instead of gold. Transferring them into my school bag - buried now beneath pine cones and soil. They’re real and solid; little-big antidotes that I can’t bring myself to try, just look at, keep hidden from hands which say “just another.” They pry apart the thin mental foil like the eye-eye I saw on the discovery channel. It winkled out grubs embedded inside tree bark with one long slender finger.

At the end of the week a woman lies in her yard, gulping down remnants of sun before dormancy seeps in. Before it all blacks out during winter and the towers become giant concrete tombstones, planted in the center of nowhere. All the greenery surrounding killed off by cold. Her neighbour has boxes piled up over one window and bedsheets for curtains across another.

Our home smells of damp and mould spray. My sister takes the butterfly from my hand and crushes it between her teeth and tone. But the tips of her fingers - the ones that pulled an elastic band too far, and hung origami cranes from my ceiling, still stroke hair from my face as I lay in her lap. I’m waiting for something to soften at the edges, and take an opportunity to ask what the matter is. Everything is good, everything is solid.

Then it all becomes impossibly slow - the red glow of sunlight piercing my eyelids dims. It’s night now. I’m sprawled out clock-watching. My mouth tastes of metal. I’m waiting until sleep floods the crack beneath my door. The back of the box said to leave undisturbed for six hours, but I’m woken by that hollowed out noise. Half awake, I think it’s a fox down the street. But it’s coming from the bathroom.

*

I scooped up her vomit from the laminate floor like it was liquid gold. I remained by her side, pressing salt in the wound. Four blue lights — I could hear them coming like horses charging closer over the horizon. Two stab vests, eight wheels. Red coat. Defeat.

It’s all quiet until the tap turns on again and water fills the sink.

Agnes Pelton, Departure, 1952