Better Living (standard:Psychological fiction, 1853 words)
Author: Robert Fale	Added: Jan 19 2010	Views/Reads: 3612/2308	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
After leaving a difficult man for an ordinary life, a woman finds life too ordinary to bear.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story


‘You have depression, simply and complexly.' 

‘Can depression keep me awake like this? Can it make my mind think
things I don't want it to think?' 

‘Depression does what it likes. It has no true rhythm. We might say it
does sometimes, but it doesn‘t.' 

Grail had visited a psychiatrist without saying anything to her boring
family. Some few things were secret from them anymore. It was seldom 
that any one thing was important enough. 

‘How can I get over this quickly?' 

‘Quickly? Oh, I'm afraid that's not possible.' 

‘I just need sleep. I can't keep thinking about him like this. He was
such a good man. So caring and beautiful. I can't be remembering him 
this way.' 

‘If you loved him, why did you leave?' 

Grail gave and awkward smile. ‘He changed,' (simply, matter-of-factly)
‘we changed him.' Her smile turned into a grimace, and she thought, 
“You changed him. It was people like you”. But grail didn't hate the 
psychiatrist for being what she was. Grail didn't hate anyone for long. 


‘I want you to come back twice a week. Can you do that?' 

‘Impossible.' Grail began shaking at the thought of being abnormal in a
nuclear world. ‘That's impossible. I can't...I just need some pills to 
sleep...just sleep.' 

The psychiatrist knew Grail would not fold, so he conceded to
compromise. One session a fortnight and Grail would get some pills. 

The pills were to help Grail sleep, so she would take them. She had no
intention of returning to therapy. 

5 

Before taking her first sleeping pill she thought about Amel. It was the
first time he had taken one of his own pills. They were to help him 
with his depression, and would eventually break him down into what he 
became. She wondered why she hadn't stopped him from doing it. She 
should have supported him more. They should have worked it out 
together, without chemistry. 

‘There it is.' Amel held the pill in the mirror light of their small
apartment bathroom. ‘One blue pill, every night, and I'm cured.' 

‘You think they are really that effective?' She doubted Guinea-pig
chemistry very much. ‘They're new,' he said simply. ‘Best chemists in 
all the world made them. They're not an aid.' He gave a wide smile. 
‘They're an all-balls, no fucking around, cure.' 

He popped it into his mouth, and the moment he did so Grail doubted that
they could work. Cure depression? She had never heard of such a 
possibility. And now, suddenly, there it was? In his hand? A little 
blue pill with all that power? If they did not bring health they would 
bring bad health - it was almost always this way with chemistry she 
thought - and bad health meant anything the body could think of. The 
uncertainty of it terrified her. 

And yet she had said nothing. When the importance of his life hung
before her, being paramount to everything, she had let it slip away. 
Grail would always hate herself for that. But how could she know for 
sure? 

She knew that taking sleeping pills would be bad for her. And didn't
they cause depression anyway? Sleep was all she wanted, and she didn't 
care for anything else. So she took it. 

She was then haunted by another memory of Amel taking another pill on a
different night. She could see that something was changing within him 
and had said nothing. ‘I'm being cured,' he had said. ‘These things 
will be my miracle salvation.' So, to honour the memory she took 
another pill herself. ‘Miracle salvation,' she uttered, before sipping 
a glass of water, and sitting on the side of her bed, beside her 
sleeping, boring, nuclear husband. 

She saw another time, when Amel was tired and angry at something simple.
His patience was growing shorter by the day. She had been given 
warnings early on, and yet she did nothing. Grail hadn't stopped him 
from taking any of the pills, even when she was damn near sure they 
were changing him. So she took another pill, to honour her memory 
again. Soon Amel looked a wreck of a man. But he took that pill. His 
eyes were black, his skin was grey, and his movement was slow. Taking 
the pills was killing him, but she let him do it, time and time again. 
So she took another pill. 

That night, countless images came to her, all times he had taken those
pills, all opportunities to stop him, to make him better before they 
made him worse. And she took a pill to honour him, to exonerate 
herself, to make bad feelings, helpless feelings go away. In but few 
minutes she had almost finished the bottle before weakness made her 
drop it. Six little white stones of chalk collided and scattered across 
the wood floor. 

She thought about Amel one last time, then reminded herself that she had
to walk the dog and do the dishes. She then lost her ring, even though 
it had never left her finger, and frantically began looking. She heard 
the doorbell and knew that she had to answer to whoever was there. She 
became afraid because that person had come to find out if she had been 
good, and she had not done the dishes or walked the dog. What would 
they think about the nuclear girl who neglected her nuclear family? Who 
lost her ring and found her husband boring? She remembered a story she 
had been told as a child, and it made her cry. She thought about all 
the people she had forgotten about, those who went unremembered still. 
It was frustrating, so she pulled at her hair and then lost all 
balance. Laying on the floor she thought she had disturbed her husband. 
He arose once to shout at her, then arose again and again, and each 
time she cried. She became hungry, and wished she had eaten her supper. 
But there was something going around, and she and her family had caught 
it. Grail felt she should have been more responsible with the cleaning. 
Maybe they wouldn't have caught it if everything was cleaner? Maybe 
little grace wouldn't be crying? Maybe she would have eaten her supper? 
Maybe..? 

Then she calmed for a moment, knowing that whatever she was feeling,
whatever was happening to her now, was just a little something that had 
come around. It took her appetite and made her ill. She should have 
been caring for her family, cleaning, so that they wouldn't get sick. 
It was just a little something. Just something that had come around. 
Just a little something that was going around. 

Within the hour, Grail's boring husband found her dead. 

The End 


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