Puddle glows

Sherriff Jackson presses a fist to his forehead, violently revolving it across the loosening skin. The dips and flakes of wrinkles, taste of bile in his mouth. His fingers push at his temples, desperately trying to ease his aching head.

The room stares at him, a dirty frozen glare, each face a ratty end of string in a puddle glow. Yellow light seizing his eyes, pulling them, stretching them past his skull. Smith croaks again, her mouth quietly concealing her two blue front teeth, like she had chewed the wrong end of her pen. Her arms crawling with bent back feathers and scales, her face sallow and shadowed, shrunken behind the crooked silhouette of her wings, the left broken, scraggly and bony. The right, patchy and stained.

Jackson sees Smith, sees her the way she was fifteen years ago, fooling around in the supplies closet. He can't see her as this wreck, he can't. The doctor gives him a baleful stare from across the room, his eyes, unlike Jackson, withdrawn from the lights and smug, smug with smirks and smiles. Oh God, he loves having this above Jackson, he loves it like nothing left in his miserable life, loves it, it helps him go home to his wife and hit her with passion and reason, it fuels him when he slips it into the girl he's been eyeing, full one with no idea what she's doing, no idea how that got into her drink…she would never tell…

The matter, the matter, the Sherriff, he holds it in his hand, while he's reading other things, doing other reports…that he needs to file somewhere. But he's holding it like sand as he's watching his new secretary trying to fix the photocopier, bending over, no tights in winter, like Smith, like she was.

Excusing himself from the meeting, he scampers into the male bathroom. He ignores the indecency protruding from the end stall, the compulsive sounds. With shaking hands he extracts the blister pack. Cracking it under the sink, white tablets scatter about the floor; he takes out the blue capsules, and the pink caplets. He would guess some sort of strength, some sort of instruction behind them, but he finds the best way to take them is all at once.

After his throat closes upon the last contraction, he sets about pissing and shambling out again. He does not return to the meeting, instead he watches his dumb secretary from his office door. The little rectangle excludes her face from the view, but it's all he needs.

Once again, she finds him passed out on the floor, swimming in his own vomit. She says nothing.

But Smith says nothing.