Trouble
flash fiction
My doctor says we’re in serious trouble. Not ‘says,’ but, ‘is always saying.’ Microplastics in the blood. Repetitive motion injuries from a life on the hog slaughtering line. Cancer they’re practically giving out like fries with your entrée. “And, with the fish platter, sir, is leukemia okay for your side?”
Once, I went in to request a refill of my depression meds. I call them my don’t-be-sad pills. Off he went on some jag about a gene that does this to us, does that. So, I asked him, “Is there any hope at all, doc?”
“For what?” But then he laughed and said, “I suppose. Maybe.”
“Where?”
He was washing his hands, but I heard him over the water: “Have you never heard of dissent, my dear boy?”
Trouble to me is an ocean wave bent on scraping every last atom of human civilization off the face of the planet. Don’t think it couldn’t be done. Remember Sendai, Phuket? Practice runs. How to protest that, how to make a stand?
After the doctor’s office, I went straight to the pharmacy and took my meds in the car, dry. On the way home, there on the little side street that connects to mine, sat a vulture. It was picking apart a cat, one from the pack of neighborhood strays. The bird was huge, enormous. A ten-foot wingspan at least, and the color of the bones of a campfire after a downpour.