Prompt: A Favorite Song (300 words or less)

From the kitchen window I could see only an opaque apparition of myself backlit by an unsettling yellow halo from the overhead light. It was like déjà vu. I could not remember when or where I’d encountered this same apparition of myself in a kitchen window before, except that it was now familiar and unsettling, like a memory from a past life. Except I don’t believe in past lives, or after lives, either. I believe that this is it. This is my only life. During the day, from that window there is a view of a courtyard where the trash bins are kept, and there is a bicycle rack, too. I do not have a bicycle. In the summer months, wispy bits of grass and weeds sprout from the cracks in the concrete, but never enough to be inspiring, and it isn’t summer anyway. The trash bins are earmarked: Garbage, Bottles & Cans, and Paper like laundry sorted into Whites, Darks, and Delicates, each to be washed separately. Sorting the trash makes me feel good about myself, as if I were to be lauded for doing my bit to combat global warming, and never mind that sorting the trash is city mandated, nor is global warming the accurate term, or even the preferred term, for climate change. Nonetheless, I call it global warming because I picture it in images of polar bears set adrift on melting ice floes, or birds nesting in the wrong season and then waiting in vain for their eggs to hatch, or migrating butterflies that wind up freezing to death. Global warming is one of the world’s wrongs that I care about deeply, except for times like this when all I care about is sleep, and also there are those times when I care about nothing, nothing at all.

It could’ve been that I woke up because I had to cry, the same way people wake up when they have to pee.

Two amber-colored vials from the pharmacy were paired on the kitchen counter like salt and pepper shakers. Lunesta ’n’ Ambien. With the help of one or the other or both, I might’ve dropped off to sleep—not drifted off, but dropped off like a drunk passing out. But I wouldn’t have slept for long. Two or three hours, tops. The Lunesta tablets were blue, and the Ambien were white. I alternated. Two Lunesta on one night; Ambien on the next. I did this to prevent building up tolerance to one or the other of them, but I need not have bothered. Neither of them worked for shit. I decided to take one and a half of each, which made me think of that song, that one about Alice in Wonderland, or maybe it was Through the Looking Glass, whichever, it was about Alice popping pills. It’s not a song from my generation, but I know it was Jefferson Airplane. Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane. Gracie Slick. Imagine having a name like Gracie Slick.

In the kitchen drawer where we kept scissors, Band-Aids and kitchen matches, we also kept the gizmo for cutting pills down the middle. The gizmo worked like a guillotine.

And the Red Queen’s off with her head.