Not Prescribed
Angela Townsend
Not Prescribed
You have heard the seraphs’ secrets between cans of Fancy Feast and itchy washcloths reduced to $0.88. You have grasped serotonin and sacraments at the big-box store.
You have checked out blueberry yogurt and polyester pants in the same bag as liquid gold. You have consulted your ego for dosing instructions on humility. You have accepted that the pharmacy tech of short stature and the woman in white may discuss the poor young woman who seems to have a delinquent pancreas and a terrorist thyroid and some turbulence her toothy grin will not tell.
You have accepted this, but the beings between the bakery and the adult undergarments aisle do not treat you as poor or young. They do not treat you at all. They live downstream from the oracles in stethoscopes. They are not licensed to tell you what is wrong with you.
They are not inclined to act as though anything is wrong with you. They are simply Jayne with letters after her name and the tech of short stature. You are the ponytailed girl who works at the cat shelter and exists on the benevolence of insulin.
You are the victim of insulin inflation, your survival juice pole-vaulting in price. “You are nobody’s fool,” Jayne tells you. “We are smarter than they are.” She does not need to identify them, the ravening horde that tries to leap her counter. “We are in this together.”
Jayne makes phone calls all week, calling you between calls, calling on good sense and deep-discount decency and—“OK, they’ll see that we don’t play”—threat of legal action, flamboyant with images of a ponytailed girl’s untimely death. Jayne rides back from battle with saddlebags of insulin.
Jayne asks you which eye cream you use. “Your record says you’re thirty, but you have no bags under your eyes.” She scans your impulse purchase socks even though this is below her pay grade.
Jayne asks nothing about your antidepressant. The tech of short stature calls you “Ms. Sunshine.” He is the same color palette as your uncles. You picture him in plaid $6.88 pants on his bachelor couch, eating olives from the can. You wonder if he knows that ponytailed girls with good skin daydream of boys four inches their lesser.
You wonder if Walmart gave Jayne permission to hang van Gogh’s Sunflowers between the colonoscopy prep potion and the Sudafed that doesn’t want to become meth. You picture Jayne and the tech of short stature splitting a provolone sandwich and making up stories about patients.
You wander these aisles after work. You are not ready to go home, and the cat shelter can’t pay you enough to wander Macy’s. You suppress probabilities of retinopathy or treatment-resistant singleness. You ask displays of magnolia lotion if you are permitted to work at a cat shelter forever, even if it makes you happy. You silence your insulin pump, whose sirens have a hypomanic sense of occasion.
You buy colored pencils and a “just because” card for your mother, and you check out at the pharmacy even though your vials are full. The tech of short stature must be under his fig tree. Buster is working the register. Buster has star stickers on his name tag and an eye that meanders. He focuses carefully. He charges you twice. He apologizes and chortles. “I love these pencils.”
You tell Buster he is a blessing, and he answers, “I am!”
Jayne laughs somewhere under the counter. “He is.” She rises and puts her hand on his shoulder. He is twenty years her senior.
The insurance company has put it on their calendar to forget that you have diabetes every new moon, but you are inoculated against this one worry. Jayne does what Jayne does, and you get to save cats another day. You tell Jayne what you do for a living. The bags under her eyes vanish while you are looking.
“Animals are essential. You are doing God’s work.”
You contemplate telling her that you were supposed to land in a different shelter. You wonder if she has ever heard of your preposterous degree, a “Master of Divinity,” 90 credits of gasping and galloping and falling to your knees back where you first began. You don’t know how you ended up in the cat sanctuary. You don’t know why you are happy so far from the script.
You just say, “So are you.”
On Christmas Eve, an ice storm keeps you from family. You have heard that Walmart is open, so you buy $0.88 angels and distribute them to workers. The man at the deli cries without restraint. A bakery woman runs to tell the other bakery woman, so you give them both two. You are about to offer your last angel to a girl folding leggings when the manager appears. His hands are full of confiscated angels. What is the meaning of this? This is not acceptable. No one can offer “gifts or bribes” to employees. You drive home with angels without destinations.
You call your family and squint at their olive faces on the four-inch screen. You wonder if dessert tastes better without an insulin pump at the table, silent guilt frosting their gingerbread panes. You light your white plastic Christmas tree and write a letter to the CEO of Walmart.
You praise Jayne with the letters after her name and the tech of short stature, lamenting that you have never learned his name. You tell the CEO that these beings are not simply the pinnacle of pharmaceutical prowess and professionalism but the height of humanity upon a brokenhearted earth. You spare no adverbs. You mention Buster. You summon the full strength of Christmas.
Jayne writes you a letter. Buster has drawn Santa Claus on the envelope. Elliot—Elliot—is fond of you. “I will never forget this,” Jayne writes. “You have seen what we are trying to do here.”
You wonder if lesser pharmacists would grow restless between the detergent and the Ding-Dongs. You wiggle your toes on the level ground. You wonder.
—
Angela Townsend is the development director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary. She graduated from Princeton Seminary and Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Paris Lit Up, The Penn Review, The Razor, and Westchester Review, among other publications. She is a Best Spiritual Literature nominee.
