Capsules
Joellyn Powers
Joyce sat in the back of her mother’s car with her feet shoved beneath the seat in front of her. Her mother kept fluffing her hair, and Joyce wanted to sink her teeth into the back of the leather seat so her mother would turn around and drive her back to the hospital, where she could be re-Rorschached and re-sedated. It would be nice, like being pulled backwards on a bungee cord in a blue, blue sky. Joyce reclined her head and covered it with her hood. Outside the car window, a smashed rabbit’s tail twitched in the wind.
In the hospital, she had sex with one of the orderlies in a supply closet and they told her she would have to leave. It was like Girl, Interrupted, except without Winona Ryder and without chicken bones beneath a bed.
The orderly’s name was Roger, and he always wore a T-shirt with Luigi from those Mario Brothers games on the front. He wore it beneath the blue smock that constituted his uniform. Every morning, when he gave her the two little white pills in a paper cup, Joyce would wink at him with her left eye. She knew she looked stupid – she was wearing a sweater with a reindeer on it and slippers that were so worn she could feel the coldness of the linoleum beneath her feet. But Roger was lonely and his hands shook when he handed her the capsules that she always swallowed dry. When his hands slid beneath her sweater later that day, she felt his fingernails against her nipples, and it was a feeling like she used to get on New Year’s, at ten years old, watching Dick Clark count down the seconds until the new year began.
There’s a dead rabbit on the road, Joyce said to her mother.
Huh, she said, fluffing her hair. Those things happen, every day, Joyce.
Joyce half expected her to start in again about how people and little tiny baby animals die in gruesome and unexpected ways every second of every day but she didn’t. Instead, she pulled into a gas station and said through the rear view mirror, Sorry, I can’t hold it any longer.
She watched her mother walk into the station and leaned back with her eyes closed. On the black screen of her eyelids, she watched her clothes come off, one article at a time, reindeer sweater on the floor, gray sports bra crumpled on top of it, polka dot panties down around one ankle. It wasn’t the first time she did it, but it felt like the only time it had been done in a bad way. Roger was afraid, she could tell, but he couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t, and even though she wanted it (Joyce wanted it so badly) she hated him as soon as he began to fuck her. Among the mop handles and toilet paper she and Roger sweated and panted until they both collapsed onto the floor. He set a hand on her forehead. It felt like a butterfly, resting there, waiting.
Aw fuck, he had said, and Joyce thought he was going to cry.
Instead, Joyce set a hand on his stomach and watched as it rose and fell with his breath.
There was a tap on the car window. I’m gonna fill up while we’re here, Joyce’s mother said. She filled the car with gas and got back in and pulled onto the highway. It all seemed like one swift movement.
On the road, Joyce watched for more road kill but it was getting darker and all she could really see was the flash of lighted windows off to the side. Swipes of gold and silver over the black night like a million shooting stars smeared into one and rubbed with a thumb into the sky. She pressed her forehead against the glass, felt the cold of the pane and the hollow knock against her skull. Her mother’s left hand was on the steering wheel, her right searching for a radio station.
Mom, Joyce said to the air vent above her head. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
Her mom pressed button number two on the radio and looked over her shoulder. A flash of white from eyeball.
I will not dignify that with a response, Joyce, I won’t. You know what you did and you know it was dirty and awful. You know I was trying to get you help. Her mother said those words to the windshield and Joyce thought about how everything they said to each other bounced off of the glass and back into the stale air of the car. You know I was trying to help you, Joyce! her mother screamed.
Joyce remembered that in cars such as these you could roll down the windows with the push of a button. She lowered her window and was surprised at how fresh the air smelled, how wet and how green. She stuck her hooded head out of the window and into the air rushing past. She smiled into the trees, into the homes, into the gravel beneath her mother’s car. Her teeth like bone jewels, hanging onto nothing.
Get back in here! her mother yelled, get back inside! But Joyce pressed the window button so that she felt the edge of glass against her throat, like a modern-day guillotine on wheels. She thought of Roger, fired, alone in his apartment sitting on the couch in his underwear. Maybe playing video games or drinking a beer.
She kind of wanted to laugh, but the window caught against the ridges of trachea beneath her skin and instead she just stayed there, a smashed thing rushing down the road, the hair on her head flying, like the hands of very thin people, riding a roller coaster down and up once more.
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Joellyn Powers attends the University of Pittsburgh. She has work appearing in Metazen, DOGZPLOT, and Big Lucks: Quick Lucks. She blogs at especiallyfreeing.tumblr.com.