Christie was full of baloney. She was bent over the plastic carton, rolling up slices, dipping them in honey mustard, and popping them in her mouth as though they were escargot—drippy, slimy, little snails.
She’d finished half the package already, which was not uncommon for her, especially during these chillier months. Cold cuts with a side of sauce was her go-to lunch, because it was easy, and because it was gluten free. At least she thought it was. The clerks at Weiland’s Market insisted the brand of mustard was safe. There was no way it would upset her stomach.
Christie remained reluctant though; everyone who worked there was always exasperated by her. Rolling their eyes. Sighing. Squawking behind her back like a flock of grackles. One day she would talk to the store manager—no, the district manager—and set things straight. One day. Not yet though, but sometime, sooner or later. Eventually. Maybe.
Her dowdy hoodie was stained with the drippings of ketchup and mayonnaise and ranch and BBQ sauces, and with her diet being as limited as it was, the stains reflected the flavor profile of her ever-shrinking palate. While others loved food—couldn’t get enough of the stuff—Christie dreaded eating. All the processing and chemicals and mercury and hoof and mouth disease and botulism, salmonella, E. coli, Mad Cow, listeria—microplastics! Or, those tricky tarantulas posted up like assassins in bunches of bananas. Best steer clear of the whole mess, she thought.
But she couldn’t. She needed food. Sustenance. Regrettably, despite her pleas otherwise, Christie was human after all.
In front of her, filling up the dining room table, were her stacks of self-help books. They had titles like, Get Out of Your Own Way, How Not to Be Afraid, The Confidence Gap, Astrology for Mindfulness and Transformation, How to Be Really Fucking Good at Manifesting Abundance, and You Care Too Much. There were at least a hundred of them by now. The piles towered over her as she sat, slurping up her jellied meat. Despite the stacks’ looming nature, the physical books and their contents had had little-to-no impact on Christie’s actual life, her day-to-day, for if a new book came along, any progress she’d made would be lost, any lesson learned forgotten like a cancelled TV show. It was always the newest fix, the latest improvement. Weight loss. Confidence building. Public speaking. Financial security. Self-actualization. Posture.
And such, she shopped for an identity like one might shop for dental floss. Each month started over anew as if the preceding months and years meant nothing at all. Instead of fully living her life, doing things she enjoyed or found meaningful, she looked outside of herself for self-discovery. Certainly, her true self, her authentic self, was out there somewhere, confined to the pages of a book, on an app, in a pill.
Wasn’t it?
After lunch, she rushed to shower and dress for her Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Though she’d had a bout of Adderall misuse over a decade ago, she no longer thought about or craved drugs at all. It had been a passing fad, a way to fit in with her stimulant-addled peers in nursing school.
Her psychotherapist, Dr. Sheila Lambert, however, insisted she attend NA, because, in her words: “You’re always going to be an addict, Christie. That’s the first lesson you have to learn: you’re never going to be cured of this. You’re never going to be just alright. When you accept that, we can get you on the right treatment plan.”
Christie took the words to heart, because Dr. Lambert was like a shaman to her, stolid, wise, and an actual MD. Though she’d never said it out loud, Christie thought of Dr. Lambert—Sheila—as a true friend. If she were being honest, she’d say Sheila was her best friend in the whole world. After all, she was the one who bestowed upon Christie the closest thing she had to an identity: patient and recovering addict. She also kept Christie on a heavy and constantly changing regimen of mood stabilizers. Depakote. Lamictal. Topamax. Seroquel. Zyprexa. They helped her sleep and kept her public crying jags to a minimum—only 2 or 3 a week, tops!
She hustled outside to her dead father’s car, a 2005 Buick LeSabre. An icicle broke off and fell from the awning, and Christie gasped and grabbed at her woolen cap even though the icicle had fallen more than three feet away.
A light skiff of snow had fallen in the parking lot as well, so she slowed herself and tiptoed to the car. She wiped the snow off the window with the back of her mitten and got in. As she waited for the car to warm up, Christie punched the address into her Garmin. She knew most people used their phones for navigation, but hers was filled with apps like Noom, Down Dog, Sleep Sounds, Smiling Mind, Positive Affirmations, Ten Percent Happier, Pep Talk, and dozens more. With her phone so bogged down, she no longer had the bandwidth to use her navigation. Oftentimes her phone dragged to a crawl and shut off entirely. The apps drained it of all power, rendering it an expensive brick sunk to the bottom of her pocket—yet another thing that weighed her down.
It was ridiculous she used the Garmin everywhere she went, even to places she’d been to many times before. It must have been the Abilify or the Neurontin or the Oxtellar—whatever the newest drug was called. She couldn’t keep her directions straight anymore. On most occasions, Christie had no idea where she was heading at all.
There was a gap inside her head now, something missing like a critical piece of brain tissue had been sucked out by a delicate vacuum while she slept.
Christie wasn’t dumb! She knew there were no secret, nocturnal brain operations being conducted, particularly by way of a diminutive Dyson, but it was the sort of thing that made you question things, y’know?
At the very least, it was worrying.
But the Garmin told her what to do, a cold, glitchy yet soothing feminine voice directing her to, “Turn left at next intersection” or “Avoid Summit due to collision.” Christie didn’t have to think, which she appreciated.
Thinking hurt.
One time she thought she heard the Garmin say, “Christie, kill yourself,” but it must have been the radio, some discombobulation of frequency, a frayed wire, a short. She turned the station to WNCI, and Adele’s warm, lilting voice filled the interior of the car. Christie felt the antagonism lift up from her body like the release of a long, repressed fart.
Kill myself, indeed, she thought. She chuckled to herself. Christie was living her best life!
Then the windshield fogged, and she was forced to roll her window down even though it was the dead of winter. In that moment, a blustering and glacial cold settled into Christie’s life, and it never seemed to have left.
The Garmin reminded her of Sheila, telling her what to do and more often than not, what not to do in life.
On a whim once, Christie blurted out to Sheila, “I think I’m an artist. I want to go back and get my MFA.”
Sheila had stared at her for a moment, tapping her pen against her pursed lips before finally saying, “No. I don’t think that would do. You are not in the right headspace to make serious life decisions. Moving, especially. It’s out of the question. You have so much more healing to do. Aren’t you committed to the process, Christie?”
So, Christie stayed put.
“You’ve reached your destination,” the Garmin said.
Christie pulled into the church’s parking lot and looked around. She’d been to NA meetings before but never in the Hilltop. This part of town was rundown, seedy—probably where most of the drugs in the city originated. Usually, she went to meetings in suburbs like Westerville or Upper Arlington where the majority of members were older, discrete pill-poppers. Vicodin. Xanax. Percocet. Valium. The classics. Most of the sessions revolved around how stressed the parents were taxiing their teenagers to tennis and rowing and lacrosse and polo practices while they all sat together in a semi-circle picking at the quiche someone brought from Weiland’s. Occasionally, they’d get around to their substance abuse, but by that time, the hour was mostly over anyway.
As the winter sky darkened, she watched a stray dog take a shit on the sidewalk. Then she checked to make sure all the doors were locked. She thought about not going in, taking the week off, but she knew how disappointed Sheila would be if she skipped a week. It would be further proof she wasn’t taking therapy seriously, not taking Sheila seriously. What if Sheila dropped her as a patient? What would she do then? This was the only NA session she could find this week, so it was either now or never. Calling Sheila, trying to find some reassurance was a non-starter—Sheila was out in California, Pismo Beach, with her husband on tour; he was a professional golfer. Christie didn’t want to wreck their trip.
The inside of the church was like that of any other, albeit danker and more dilapidated. Rows of wooden pews. A fiberglass crucifix tacked to the wall. No one greeted her at the door, so Christie found her way to the basement. Pages of notebook paper scrawled with arrows and the letters “NA” led her way down. This should’ve been comforting to Christie; she grew up inside a church, in fact, one very similar to this one. Her father had been a preacher, and they lived in the rectory next door. While the children her age learned Bible verses and church songs, she was pressed into service, stirring large pitchers of Kool-Aid, or preparing sheets of no-bakes and snickerdoodles. This would have been her mother’s duty had she not died when Christie was a toddler. By default, Christie spent her childhood helping her father with church duties, strangely so close to spiritual redemption—salvation adjacent—and yet, so far from ever achieving it. She wondered if things would’ve been different had she ever had Jesus in her life.
After all, it was consensus—nothing beats Jesus.
And yet, despite his profession, it was almost like her father had done everything in his power to keep her away from Jesus, keep her soul from being saved. Maybe he thought she didn’t deserve it. Maybe, for some reason, he thought she was irredeemable and always would be. Christie never bothered to ask him. She didn’t want to know.
“Welcome to Abundant Life Church,” a woman at the bottom said. Her lower half of teeth were missing. “We’ll be right in there in a minute. You smoke?”
Christie shook her head.
The woman shrugged and tramped up the stairs.
Christie ducked her head into the room. It was brightly lit by LED track lighting as if to reaffirm a church, at least this one, was no place for secrets. Under such a blistering glare, she could make out all the colors comprising the polymers of the room’s cheap and nauseating industrial carpeting. Regrettably, she thought back to an article she’d seen that linked LED lighting to a higher incidence of breast cancer. On top of her hoodie—her street-legal one—she placed both hands over her chest and entered the room.
The refreshments table offered up a slew of Little Debbie Snack Cakes, like Devil Cremes, Swiss Rolls, Honey Buns, Pecan Spinwheels, and Fudge Rounds. Christie moved away from it, slowly, as though she’d discovered a dead body. She found a spot for herself to flump in the back row of fold-out chairs, still shielding her breasts from the light above. Her pantomime of self-preservation was so perverse, the other members, worn out and world-weary, actively turned their backs on her.
Relieved, Christie let out a little sigh.
A bit later, before the meeting got started, everyone took their seats. The members chatted and laughed and elbowed one another like they were old friends. Christie watched them stuff their faces with those Little Debbies. Flaking crumbs landing on their overalls. Crystalline crusts forming in the corners of their mouths—what they surely believed was simple sugar. All she could think about were the xenohormones entering their bodies, changing them inside, twisting them up in ways no doctor could ever foresee. Or if they could see it, they certainly wouldn’t say a word; the damage would be consequentially seismic. She was an observer here with no way to warn them. For all Christie knew, they were brimming with tumors already, gestating inside them like kumquat-shaped eggs, all on the precipice of bursting.
“No, no, no!” Christie screamed. She pulled her hood over her face and yanked the drawstrings tightly until her head resembled a scrunched, gray mushroom. She peeked through the crevice of fabric in embarrassment.
The members turned to look in unison and shook their heads. It wasn’t to chide her, Christie understood, it was because they thought she was another opioid junkie on the brink, come to get clean—the likelihood unlikely. The likelihood abysmal.
The woman from the stairs was at the lectern, stuffing her cancer sticks into her pocket.
Christie wondered why she’d come here. There was addiction all around, everywhere she looked. The LED lights no longer seemed pertinent. She’d moved on already; the compulsions were coming at ever-faster clips. She was rapid cycling. Next, it would be the fumes from the carpet or the radon from the radioactive elements degrading mere inches beneath their feet.
One whiff. All dead. Like Jonestown.
She should have left after the screaming bit. She knew it, but she stayed anyway. She feared returning to the car, by now an iced-over and freezing sarcophagus.
The room broke out in applause, and she lifted her hood. A haggard, disheveled man had replaced the woman up front. Christie was having a hard time paying attention to him. He was saying something about getting clean, but he was struggling. He’d had a bad week. He’d been tempted. He’d almost fallen off. It was so hard to resist. He was weak.
All she could think about was her own weakness. Everything she did to break free from it seemed to hold her down further. She could never pull herself up. The morass of her own thoughts became overwhelming. She felt the familiar weight swell inside her sternum, and two heavy tears dripped down her face.
She bent over her lap and began to shake with emotion. She sobbed wetly and loudly into her folded arms.
Then she remembered. It wasn’t the Abilify or the Neurontin or the Oxtellar. It was the new drug Sheila had found, something more experimental, something that had promised great results, near total relief from her myriad of moods and conditions. The drug was called Fukital.
“Hey, you! In the back,” the talking man yelled.
Christie couldn’t look up. Her crying jags left her immobilized. She sat there, collapsed upon herself, shaking.
“I don’t know why you come down here, you uppity bitch. Sitting back there. Laughing at me! This ain’t no joke.”
She heard the man, could feel his anger. But there was nothing she could do but let the crying pass.
The man walked away from the lectern and started towards Christie.
“Take your ass back up Northside. Get out of here!”
She forced herself to look up. When his face was upon her, warped and pained, she stopped shaking. The spell dropped from her body like a wet towel.
The other members grabbed the man before he could touch her.
“She’s not laughing, Charlie. She’s here same as you. Calm down, man.”
“Get your ass out of here,” the man yelled. “Get the fuck out.”
Christie leapt from the chair and ran out the back, up the stairs, and through the front doors of the church. Once again, she was met with the familiar cold of winter and its darkness. Somehow, someway, it was even darker here in the Hilltop.
Outside on the church’s steps, Christie sat, her head hung between her legs—the day’s hours now settled inside her like a wound, a punch to the gut. She may have known it was coming, maybe not, but she lifted her face, and a thick torrent of vomit expelled from her mouth, striking the steps, splashing the perfect puffs of light snow, and surging down the sidewalk like a stream. The glistening pink chunks in the yellowish sludge, snot-like and steaming, indicated the baloney from earlier was the likely culprit; perhaps it had turned. Perhaps a thin layer of mold had formed on its surface, imperceptible to the human eye, and Christie had swallowed it all down without thinking otherwise. Believing she was safe from harm. Believing, stupidly, if she followed all the rules, listened to what she was told, she would be safe forever. Now she knew there was no such thing as safe.
Originally from Southeastern Ohio, S.H. Woodgeard (he/him) currently resides in Stillwater, Oklahoma. There, he is a PhD candidate at Oklahoma State University. His writing has appeared in Bruiser, Anti-Heroin Chic, Hobart, and others.