My girlfriend has been really interested in this one hippy doctor lately. She tells me the medicine he prescribed her works like a charm, and almost completely gets rid of her anxiety and panic attacks.
She has an entire shelf full of pill bottles, tinctures, and other various substances that supposedly help with her mental health. I’m all for experimenting, but her so called “doctor” seems a bit sketchy to me.
First of all, I’ve met him. I came with her to one of her appointments one time, and it was inside his house. This was already a red flag for me, because I immediately questioned his authenticity. For all I know, this could just be some random guy making money off of selling oblivious people drugs.
He was wearing an official-looking outfit, though. Everything about him seemed professional, besides the environment of course.
The thing that set me off about him was the way he talked about things. He never stuttered, everything he said sounded as if he was reading off of a script, and he smiled the whole time. He never stopped smiling. He gave me the same energy as a text-to-speech reader going over a dictionary.
Recently my girlfriend told me she was prescribed a brand new pill. She said it would make her feel better than ever. I didn’t like how unspecific she was, but I trusted her, even though I didn’t trust the hippie doctor.
Since she started taking the pill, she’s been acting weird. She hums to herself as she walks around—all the time, even though she’s never done it before—and she’s been quiet. Too quiet. All she does is smile, hum, and skip around the house as if she’s a toddler who barely knows how to speak. I tried to ask her about it, but she simply shrugged and continued smiling and pacing around the area.
The weirdest side effect I’ve observed is what’s happened to her face. It seems saggier, as if she’s aged. I brushed it off at first, but it’s been becoming more and more noticeable as the corners of her face melted downward until she looked like an older lady. She still has that same damned smile, too. That aspect didn’t change.
I didn’t want to ask her any more questions, because I wasn’t sure I would like how she replied. It must’ve been a side effect of the medication, and nothing more. Surely, I was worrying too much. She was happy, and that’s all that mattered.
“Dinner,” she called to me one night. I hesitated, then walked out into the dining room where she’d set out two identical dishes full of broccoli, mashed potatoes, and chicken breasts. The same dinner we’d had the past three days.
“Never gets old, huh?” I asked her, forcing a chuckle. I felt awkward. She wasn’t acting like herself. Her eye bags seemed deeper than ever, and even while eating, she was still smiling. She didn’t reply to me. She only ate bite after bite of soggy broccoli, instant mashed potatoes, and overcooked chicken. Her cooking was never this bad. It seemed to get worse every day.
“Would you like dessert?” She asked me, tilting her head as the corners of her mouth stretched up even farther. Her cheeks covered up the sides of her lips, sagging downward in an unnatural looking way. I swallowed the lump in my throat and nodded. She calmly walked into the kitchen.
I heard several small objects clatter on the counter. One by one, I heard them clink into a dish. Another clink. A utensil, falling into a bowl. This was the first night she’d asked me if I wanted dessert, but I figured she would plate us what we usually had—vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup. She did exactly that.
She finished her ice cream as I was halfway done with mine, shoving bites into her mouth as if it was soup on a cold day. She smiled the whole time. This wasn’t her. She was acting really goddamn weird.
I felt a hard chunk inside my mouth, and pulled it out to inspect it. It was a round blue pill. By now, I was angry and confused.
“What the fuck?”
She looked up at me with no expression. I glared at her, confused. She was still smiling, but her eye bags and cheeks seemed even more saggy than they were a few minutes before. She still said nothing—she simply took her dish to the sink and placed it inside.
“What is going on? Are you trying to drug me?” I asked, barely able to control the words coming out of my mouth. “You need to stop seeing that fucking doctor. He’s sketchy as hell. Where are the goddamn pills?”
As I was about to search for the mysterious blue pills, she grabbed my arm firmly—a grip stronger than I ever would’ve expected. I tried to pull away but couldn’t, and I didn’t want to hurt her, so I stood still, horrified.
I could see the pink part of her eyes, stretching downward all the way to her cheeks. Silently, she grabbed a bottle of pills out of her pocket, still holding my arm. She opened the lid with her mouth, then plugged my nose with her pinky and ring finger. Even the grip on my nose was stronger than I could fathom.
From the initial shock of my air supply being cut off, I struggled, opening my mouth and taking a panicked breath. I tried to pull her hand off of me, or drop to the ground, or something, but it felt like I was being held onto by a statue. Her fingers were sealed tightly around my nose, and the other two dumped the bottle of pills inside my mouth. One, two, three of them landed on the back of tongue.
I tried to spit them out, but she quickly leaned her face forward and kissed me, firmly. I couldn’t back up. She was too strong. I couldn’t breathe whatsoever. I swallowed the pills. She immediately backed up, releasing hold of my arm.
Bright red markings were left where she had grabbed me. She walked toward the hallway door. When she briefly turned around, her face was horrifying. It looked like someone had made a candle replica of her and set it on fire to drip hot wax down the sides.
She walked into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. I took the opportunity to run into our room and grab her phone off of the nightstand—which I thankfully knew the password to—and call the stupid devil of a hippy doctor and ask him what he’d done to my girlfriend.
“Hello.”
“What in the ever living fuck is inside of those blue pills? What’s wrong with you?”
“Oh. It’s you.”
“I don’t have time for smalltalk. I want to see you in person.”
“She told me to take her pain away. That is what happened, is it not? How is she doing, anyway?”
“She’s-“ I glanced over at the closed bathroom door. I stared at it for a good thirty seconds. Surprisingly, the doctor said nothing. I opened the door.
Where I expected to see my girlfriend, there was a skeleton on the floor.
Well, a skull. With human limbs. Her eyeballs were still intact, staring at the ceiling. Her face was completely gone. A mess of hair was bundled up near the base of her head. I couldn’t do anything besides stand there. For some reason, I felt nothing but bliss.
As I looked in the mirror, I realized I was going to share the same fate as her, because I could see the pinks of my eyes beginning to sag, and I was smiling. I couldn’t stop smiling. I was happy.
Somehow I’m comfortable knowing I won’t have to deal with this fleshy prison anymore.
The pills she gave me are messing with my head.
I think I’ll be fine :)