BY Garrett Stack
Missy counted cash first thing in the morning. It wasn’t her favorite thing to do because
of all the blood that got on her hands. Luckily, by 8:30 most of it had dried, and she liked taking
the dollars from their neat zippy pouches and fitting them into the tight little register slots. She
played with the zipper—zip, ziiiiiiip, ZIP—while she hummed, the only noise other than the
central air.
She also liked the clear baggies that the pills hung in, row after row, like bats sleeping.
Except not bats, because bats were gross like blood, so maybe icicles. Yes, icicles like they used
to be, clear and fresh, hung in this cool clean space. She smiled at the thought, Missy the Ice
Queen, alone in her ice cave. What a nice way to start the day.
She checked the time and saw that it was 9:00, so she put on her headset and pushed the
button to raise the metal doors that fronted her window, opening the pharmacy for business.
She watched as the doors made it about halfway up the track before getting stuck, and she
sighed, her mood already dented. Didn’t they ever learn? You can’t hang on the doors. She could
see four or five pairs of legs dangling in front of the window, so she lowered it back down slowly
about a foot before jerking it upward, shucking two of the hangers on.
She repeated this process a few more times until only one poor fool was left clinging
above the mass of heads and hands that pounded silently on the window. Missy shrugged and
reeled the doors all the way up. She couldn’t actually hear him scream as his hands were sucked
into the powerful titanium gears, but moments later as he dropped past her window, she could
see a flash of his anguish, backlit by the scalding morning sun like an artsy photo shoot. All he
left behind was one red, shortened handprint on the otherwise crystalline window.
Missy tutted before clearing her throat.
“Next in line, please.”
She toggled the switch on her headset to the external microphone and jerked. The roar of
sound that hit her ears was startling after the morning of quiet preparation, and she chastised
herself for forgetting to turn the volume down. She remembered that when she used to drive to
work, back before she moved in upstairs, that she would sometimes forget to turn the radio off
after her commute home and be startled in her morning garage the next day. Lots of things had
changed since then, but Yesterday Missy was still not Today Missy.
She turned the volume down and smiled at her first customer. He was a smallish man
who braced his hands on the window, swaying with the pulsing crowd. Smart, not to fight it.
Smart too, to ignore the hands grasping at his ears, his open mouth, the frayed collar of his t-shirt
that read “The War on Drugs.” Missy thought that was just about hysterical.
“Please,” he said. “Help.”
“Of course,” she said brightly. “Name and date of birth?”
“James O’Hall—”
But Missy never heard the end. Halloran maybe? Or Halliburton? Or maybe Halloween?
How spooky would that be? She had to content herself with speculation, because he was gone,
sucked down into the crowd. Maybe he would get back to the front of the line a little later.
“Next in line, please.”
“Take her,” a woman yelled, holding up a small child to Missy’s eye-level. The child and
mother both looked a little too yellow, too hairless. This was something she had been noticing
more of lately, the baldness. Could be something in the water. The baby knocked soundlessly
against the permaglass, staring at nothing.
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
“Take my baby,” the woman yelled again. “She’s sick.”
“Ma’am, we don’t take in the sick here. We’re a pharmacy. We just dispense medication.
Does your child have a prescription that needs filled?”
“No,” she sobbed. “Nonono.”
“Well, I recommend you try the hospital over on 22nd Street, then come back if and when
you need a script filled. Okay?”
The woman was beating her head against the glass, moaning, “nononononononono.” The
baby didn’t say anything at all.
At first the crowd seemed reluctant to push the mother out of the way, but suddenly there
was a parting and Missy saw a big man surrounded by a cadre of big men pushing their way
violently to the front until they’d disappeared the woman, baby and all. She was never a fan of
line-cutting, so when he finally approached the glass, Missy decided to be rude.
“Next in line.” No please for him.
This fella seemed to have snatched the hair from everyone else and stuck it to his own
scalp and face and neck and chest. He had sunglasses on. The morning light was the same
electric lemon as a Volkswagon and it came pouring in from behind him as his friends protected
his space.
“Hello there,” he tried to peer through the mirror glass as if looking for a nametag, but
had to settle for “Miss.”
She brightened a little.
“My name is actually Missy.”
“Get outta here,” he said, and leaned an arm casually against the window.
“It’s true,” she said.
“Well if you’re pretty as the name, we should go out sometime.”
She smiled before she caught herself and got down to business.
“Name and date of birth?”
“John Smith, 10/10/10.”
She typed the info into here computer, but nothing popped. “I’m sorry, we have no
prescriptions for that name and DOB.”
He shook his great shaggy head. “I can be so forgetful without my meds. I meant
11/11/11, or maybe 12/12/12.”
She tried the new configurations and the computer bleeped happily, feeding her a printout
with a long list of prescriptions. “Back in a jiff, Mr. Smith.”
She took the headphones off and the world returned to soundlessness as she wandered
back into her cool clean space, thinking happily of ice
Garrett Stack's first novel is The Duke of Ash Avenue (Catamount Press, 2024). His fiction was most recently published in X-R-A-Y, New Plains Review, and Cowboy Jamboree. He lives, works, and will die Middle Western.