Fresh Eggs

Fresh Eggs

I thumbed open another egg carton, and saw a broken egg. Curving around my cart the impatient shoppers waited for me to find a carton with all good eggs so I could move down the milk aisle.

They couldn't see me intentionally breaking an egg in each new carton by squeezing the round Styrofoam when I picked the carton up. I was breaking the law. I was criminal.

They couldn't hear the thoughts in my head.  My hands were shaking with cathartic power to break each egg while in my mind I was shouting, another bad egg! Another bad egg! Eventually when yolk was running up my wrist, a woman told me I was picking the cartons up incorrectly and breaking the eggs. That's why I was getting bad cartons. Under her command, I picked up another carton carefully, without breaking an egg. The others were shocked. Clean eggs.

I stupidly thanked her and went down the milk aisle.

I was going to leave without buying my groceries. The grocery store was a place where I went to calm down and it always made me feel poor. Being poor wasn't even my problem. My problem was the medication I was taking and how it made me feel.

Another bad egg!

I was a second class citizen because I was forced to take pills that altered my personality. I'd been on them my entire adult life. My opinion was regarded as being unimportant by the treatment professionals who wanted me to take the pills. I swallowed the medication every morning but I hallucinated, anyway. I would have liked to tell my doctor the truth but the truth caused him to reconsider my dosage--always improving the prognosis by ramping up the milligrams.

Or did he improve my prognosis? The medication had never helped with voices. I knew why I heard them: I was targeted by real criminals and being used as an example. They parked their cars up the street from my house and called into the air:

Another bad egg! --intentionally breaking one every time.

I'd rather have lived with the symptoms of poor mental health than live there.

Walking home, I thought all of this. Who could I ask for help? The criminals had authority so they appear to be cops. Like the rumors of CIA intervention in foreign governments, I imagined the men and women who monitored me went rogue. They cracked under the pressure: like Phillip K. Dick said, they were helpless from being totally destroyed by drugs.

They thumbed across my white shell, and broke it to get to the insides.

Another bad egg! --yolk running down their faces.