Rx

“I am so frickin’ bored. Nothing to do today. I guess I’ll sit around and medicate,” sang Nathan Toney as his heavy body sprawled across the living room couch. Getting off that couch was a feat of strength akin to power-lifting a small Japanese car. His eyes were glazed over like a frosted donut. The multi-colored afghan blanket did little to cover his flabby torso.

The coffee table in front him was covered in pornographic magazines and cigarette ashes. The center of this table represented his only two choices in this world: a steak knife to end his misery or a bottle of Floydicon to numb him out. Nathan gazed at the scars on his wrists with a single tear in his eye. He wanted to go through with it. He wanted any excuse he could to exit this world forever and free himself of the unnecessary pain. But the bottle of magic pills was right there in front of him.

“Eh, what the hell…I’m too lazy for this shit anyways…” said Nathan flatly as he opened the bottle and popped one of the large white tablets. Another five hour nap was on the horizon. What kind of weird ass dream would he have this time? Unicorns and rainbows? Teeth falling out? Being naked in school? But then again, who said anything about a dream?

Nathan’s eyes shot wide open and pulsated as he watched the rain outside come to a complete standstill. The drops of water just floated there and changed colors at random whether it was clear to green, green to purple, or purple to blood red. “What the fuck is this?” asked Nathan in a hushed voice. The lights flickered in his tiny apartment before completely blacking out and leaving him in the shadows. “Oh no…not this shit again…not again!”

“Yes, Mr. Toney, we’re doing this again!” belted an ophidian voice. Nathan held his sausage fingers over his eyes and slowly uncovered them to reveal a woman in a business suit with a cobra’s head and scaly green skin. The chubby depression patient shivered and cowered further into the couch while pulling the afghan under his double chin. “It was a simple offer,” the snake woman said. “You could have had a promotion. You could have been the boss’s boss. All you had to do was one small little favor for me.” That favor was clear the minute the snake boss licked her fangs.

Nathan trembled and stammered as he struggled to say, “You knew I had a family. I can’t just do that to them. I can’t go sleeping around with whoever I want!”

“What family? This family?!” shouted a scorpion woman in a nightgown with two crying daughters clinging to her legs as tightly as they could. Nathan pulled the afghan over his whole head, but the scorpion’s tail ripped it away and poked him in the bare chest. “I knew I was right to divorce you, you son of a bitch! How could you ever consider taking that whore’s offer?!” She shed bloody tears and wiped them away with her pincer. “We didn’t need the money that badly! We needed a father and a husband!”

“Man, fuck you little bitches!” shouted Nathan as he tossed the blanket aside and shot up to his feet. “I gave you all nothing but hard work and this is how you repay me?! By taking it all away and making me live in this filthy piece of shit apartment?! You’re all poison to me! Fuck you bitches! Fuck you all!”

The two crying daughters morphed into wasps and pointed their sword-like stingers at Nathan’s face, but the disgraced father wouldn’t be deterred. “We didn’t do anything!” they said in synchronized demonic voices. “We wanted you to come home with us! We never wanted this divorce to happen! We miss you! Come home with us!”

Nathan’s raging face softened into solemnity when he hugged the two wasp children and said, “I can’t come back anytime I want. Your mom changed the locks. She has an order against me. I tried to fight her in court, but she wouldn’t let me win.” The wasps poked him in the gut with their stingers and sent their father sprawling on the couch screaming in pain. “Son of a bitch!” he yelled while clutching his green bloody wound.

“So this is it, huh?” said an elderly toad woman with red slime dripping from her amphibian skin and gnashed flies between her teeth. “You’re just going to give up on your family like this? As your mother, I can’t allow that, Nathan. I raised you to be a real man and a real man takes care of his family! A real man fights for what he believes in! But if you don’t believe in your own wife and children anymore…” With one flick of her poison tongue, she captured the wasp children and devoured them while drooling a river of thick goop.

“No!” shouted Nathan. “You can’t do that! You can’t take them away from me!”

The scorpion wife, cobra boss, and toad mother spoke in unified demon voices, “We can do whatever we want to you, Nathan. You gave us permission when you walked out on us. You gave us permission when you gave up the fight. All you had to do was see a psychiatrist about your…little problem! But you couldn’t do it, could you? You didn’t have the guts to do it then and you won’t do it now!”

“Little problem…” whispered Nathan with growing fury in his voice. “Little problem?!” He pointed to his brain and roared, “You call this a little problem?! Newsflash: I’ve been living with this shit for nearly all of my fucking life and all you three bitches did was make it worse! You all did this to me! I don’t owe any responsibilities to you pieces of shit anymore!”

“Do something about it!” said the three creatures. With every repetition of that phrase, their monstrous auras grew brighter and their voices grew louder. Nathan covered his ears and crouched down to the floor, yelling for them to shut up, but they never did. They tormented him further and began to form a circle around him. They danced and sang their demonic tune while Nathan’s eyeballs were glued to the steak knife on the coffee table.

“I know what I have to do…you want me to do something about it…you’re damn right I will!” Nathan scrambled for the knife and held the jagged blade to his throat while the horrifying ladies taunted and teased him some more. He made one small incision and a tiny droplet of blood hit the carpeted floor. He made another cut and smeared even more blood on the floor.

The blade made a full on slash and the monsters around Nathan were dropping dead one by one. Their bones snapped and their own slimy blood mixed with his. Nathan struggled for oxygen, but all that would come up in his throat was his own life juices. His stomach grew queasy at the thought of his death coming so soon and he barfed up what little oxygen he had left. All that was left of Nathan Toney and his demons was a mixture of biological sludge that made chemical plant explosions seem mundane. The goopy red rain fell once more and washed them all away in the storm.

A lightning bolt flashed across the sky and awakened Nathan Toney from his drug-induced haze. He pulled his face out of the toilet and coughed profusely until he could breathe fresh oxygen once again. He gazed around with bloodshot eyes and saw that his apartment remained in the same messy state as when he first took the Floydicon. He placed his fingers to his throat and saw that a nasty scar had developed there, but it wasn’t bleeding heavily like it was in his high.

After a while of shaking heavily, Nathan steadied his body long enough to pull himself to his feet using the rim of the toilet. He limped his way out to the living room and spotted the bottle of Floydicon resting conveniently next to the steak knife. With an expression of boiling fury etched on his jowly face, Nathan marched over to the coffee table, grabbed the medication, and stomped back to the bathroom to flush the pills down the toilet.

“What kind of dip-shit takes these kinds of pills anyways?” Nathan vengefully whispered. “What kind of doctor prescribes this shit to begin with?!” He eyeballed the label on the bottle and saw that the medication was prescribed to him by Tri-Circle Enterprises, the company he used to work for. “Figures…it fucking figures!”

He discarded the bottle in the trash and marched back over to the coffee table to grab the steak knife. Instead of holding it to his throat or his wrists, he held it like a samurai warrior and gnashed his teeth together like a rabies-infected wolf. “I’m taking my family back one way or another,” Nathan vowed. “If I have to kill every last one of those motherfuckers…so be it! No more lawyers! No more judges! No more courtroom bullshit! Ass-kicking is what’s called for!”

“But first…I need to get out of these god-awful clothes…” He spent the last few days in pajama pants and a 3XL white T-shirt. The clothes had seen pizza stains, cigarette ashes, and liquor spills of the worst kind. They smelled as though he’d been shit on by a horse in the middle of a burning junkyard. He changed into fresh jeans and a red polo shirt with black combat boots on his feet. His boss always told him to dress for the job he wanted. With a steak knife tucked firmly in his back pocket, his new job was corporate assassin. He could have done this the legal way, but it didn’t take a tripped out Floydicon user to know the law was one big conspiracy against the underdogs anyways.