Katie Oh Says…

The town was a patchwork—dirt roads gridded its landscape, two-way stops, a single stoplight—like the quilts that the town’s residents would buy and sell at the church’s craft fair. This town was a place that had risen and fallen within five years’ time with the industry of the area. All that remained were a few thousand people, living beyond their means, who sat on their front porches and stared out at the horizon. The main drag was a half-mile long, little businesses and pizza shops. Smith’s Drugs was located at the most busy corner of the town: the only intersection with a stoplight. The stoplight didn’t even have a protected left turn.
The outside of Smith’s was cracked and peeling, but it was the place where everyone came to get their pills anyway. Smith’s was stuck in the 70’s, with its yellowed wood paneling and grass-colored tiled floor. The lights hadn’t been replaced since the disco days, and would flicker on and off periodically. The store reeked of smoke, despite the local government having ruled against smoking in businesses years ago. The windows were perma-tinted yellow, giving the lonely road outside a sepia tint, like the small towns in all the movies.

The cashier at Smith’s Drugs hated the small towns, especially this one. She was leaned over her counter that afternoon, moving her stuck-out hips slowly from side-to-side along with the rhythm of her brain, filling out the day’s inventory sheets. A car passed by the window outside, the occupants, the cashier decided, headed for mediocrity. She cracked her gum. She had a year to go until she would get her high school diploma and then she would be free.
The cashier sneezed. The air circulation system in the store was shot and it clicked and whined and banged, spewing out a thin layer of dust that coated everything. She felt like she was developing allergies from her short four shifts a week. The cashier was taking a break from her inventory, doing her second round of dusting that afternoon, with a dirty old cloth, rubbing the faces of the product, the product that rarely sold as it was, and was unlikely to move even if they gave it away.
She returned to her inventory sheet, making a note that one of the aspirin packages was missing its inventory sticker. She wrote ‘Chicago’ on a piece of scrap paper mostly-concealed underneath the inventory sheet. The scrap paper read “Escape.” at the top. She doodled little music notes around Chicago, and little paint palettes. She might be able to make it there. Find herself a little efficiency apartment in some funky building; buy some painting supplies and maybe a recorder. Anyone could learn to play a recorder.

In the back, the pharmacist re-counted the contents of a small bottle of Zoloft. The pharmacist had gone to school for what felt like a millennium, and now he was back in his old hometown, counting out one of the days’ few prescription fills. He couldn’t complain too much: it was easy work. Count pills. Know what medications did what. Know what medications worked better than others. Order more product. Deal with sales representatives from pharmaceutical companies.
The sales reps were the best part of his days. They’d drive from the nearest big city all the way out to the quiet town, looking aghast when their shiny new cars got dusty. They would enter the store and would scurry to the back to find the pharmacist, pitch the new product, maybe buy a candy bar from the front of the store for bonus points. They would be gone within ten minutes, and not a sigh later, their carefully-assembled pamphlet about the new and exciting drug would be in the trash can.
The pharmacist hated new drugs. New drugs were typically old drugs that had a new placebo ingredient put in them and had a detail change right before the patent ran out. New drugs were a way for companies to avoid generics being made of their products. The pharmacist saw a lot of elderly people who had to choose between their pills or their bills, and oftentimes, food won over pharma. The CEOs who controlled the drug companies were stressing about a different choice: Beemer or Benz?

The cashier straightened the candy at the front of the store. She saw a kid steal a handful earlier. She didn’t care. “Fuck capitalism” was her new motto. Her manager bought the candy at a bulk store and marked it up by 400%. Her manager also paid her under minimum wage because she was just sixteen. The cashier let people steal the difference in product.
She considered New York, scrawled it under Chicago. New York was more of a traditional city for big dreams than Chicago. She drew a disproportional Empire State Building, tried to make it part of the ‘N.’ New York was probably the king of running yourself into the ground to try to get what you want. She liked that idea. Really, she thought, as the pharmacist behind the back counter glared at her as though she wasn’t doing any work, she had experience in it already.