Periphery (First Draft) – Part One

“A new story that has nothing to do with the metal band of the same name.”

Hey! It’s been a long time since I “wrote something” wrote something, and by that I mean got back to my writing roots and wrote fiction. Like a short story, or snippets from a novel, or talking about how everything is fine and dandy and the world is doing OK and we aren’t hurtling towards catastrophe. True fiction! And, I’m sick and tired of spending my own bit of time writing each week on this stupid blog, so I figured I’d kill two feral pigs with one stone and spend the time that I’d normally blog with and write instead, and then post that here and see what folks think. It’s a great way for me to get back into practice of writing again, and produce new content for this blog.

Of course, this runs a handful of risks. It could suck. I might have gotten back to writing fiction and I’ll get to posting it and I’ll realize, “wow, this sucks. I must have always sucked.” Because my biggest fear in writing is that any meager success I had before is my lightning in a bottle that I will never catch again, and that my unfortunate hiatus from writing fiction has killed any talent I may have had. Or, worse, whatever I post will be boring! Since I’m posting first drafts in pieces, no less, this is going to, out of necessity, be a crapshoot. But since it’s low stakes and no one reads this anyway, I’ve got some space to shoot some crap. It’s got to be better than whatever bullshit I throw on here half the time.

That being said, I am open to feedback and constructive criticism! I am always looking for the most feedback on sentence-by-sentence craft and structure. How can I improve my prose to sound more natural? How can I spice up my writing to be more lyrical and interesting? How does everything sound together? And then, secondarily, I am looking for feedback on narrative flow and whatnot. Since this is a first draft, and an as-of-now unfinished piece, I’m less concerned with the “story” itself. That’s usually much easier to fix in later drafts.

So please let me know what you think on this story section that I wrote literally yesterday! And remember that this is a work of fiction. Even if it feels like it is heavily influenced by my life (and it is), that does not mean it is true in every aspect, does not mean it is a cry for help, does not mean that you are or will be automatically in the story in some way. This one isn’t a thinly veiled autobiography. It’s a fictional story drawing on deeply autobiographical elements, we’ll say. And also, this one is going places that are hopefully unexpected. If you can correctly predict the ending of this story, I’ll eat an object of your choosing. Maybe twice.

Anyway, here’s the beginning of a new story, which we can all look back on later as a weird time capsule to how this story develops down the road. You know, if it ever does.

“Periphery,” by Andy Sima (2022)

I shook the pill bottle, attempting to uncover the morning’s dosage from beneath the covering of a torn safety liner I had never bothered removing. Something rattled around inside, but it sounded too big to be any of the several medicines I was prescribed. The mystery cleared itself up when the crooked liner gave way and spat out a small plastic desiccant container instead of a pill. I shook the bottle again, but to no avail. I was out.

            “Shit,” I mumbled to myself as I got on the phone with my psychiatrist’s office.

            The phone rang on the other end as I leaned against the faux-granite countertop of my studio apartment’s bathroom. Putting the phone on speaker, I laid it town next to the sink. I picked at the buttons on my shirt as I waited, pressing them between my thumb and forefinger one at a time as I moved up and down my shirt, one two three one two three. I didn’t want to be late to class, but I really couldn’t put off a refill, either. Hopefully it was just early enough that I wouldn’t have to wait long.

            Finally, the line connected. My hand made a stuttering leap from my fidgeting to my phone as I focused all my attention to the receptionist’s voice. I pressed it against my face, oils smearing the screen.

            “Dr. Wilson’s office, how can I help you today?” said a pleasant male voice from the other end.

            “Hi, uh, I need a refill on some medication. I never got the order I put in last week, and I’m all out, so I kind of, uh, need it today,” I said.

            “Sure, can I get your name and date of birth?” the receptionist said, the sound of nails clacking into a keyboard on the other end. I gave him the information and paused. There was a bemused hmm after a moment of silence.

            “Sorry, sir, but your insurance company is blocking me from placing a refill. They won’t pay for it so soon after the last one.”

            “But I never got the last one,” I said, free hand counting out the buttons on my shirt again. I moved away from the bathroom counter and stood in the middle of the bathroom doorframe instead.

            “Could have been a mistake at the pharmacy, then. Your provider may be able to approve you a smaller refill to keep you covered until you can sort this all out. You should give them a call,” said the receptionist.

            “There’s nothing you can do in the meantime? Nothing Dr. Wilson can do?” I asked.

            “Well, I’ll put in the order for you and you can pay for it out of pocket at the pharmacy, but I can’t help with insurance at all.” There was the tapping of more fingernails at the keyboard, and a quick, unapologetic “Sorry.”

            “Gotcha. Well, thanks anyway,” I said. I walked from the bathroom threshold into the kitchen. At least what approximated a kitchen, since the entire apartment was one large rectangle with a malignant growth coming out of the wall that provided just enough privacy to be considered a bathroom.

            “Wish I could be of more help to you,” the receptionist said. “I’ll pass this along to Dr. Wilson and see if he can’t do anything else. Have a good one.” And he hung up, without allowing me a moment to add anything more to the conversation. I pulled back the phone from my cheek in disbelief, scowling into the reflective black screen.

            “Fucking A,” I said, stuffing my phone into the pocket of my jeans as I rummaged through the cabinets above the electric stove that never cooked much more than a grilled cheese sandwich and which yet seemed to be stained with a platoon’s worth of mess hall odds and ends. The loose hinge of the cabinet came undone and knocked me in the head again.

            “Fucking A,” I said again, dropping the box of Pop-Tarts I had grabbed. The silver packages spilled across the particleboard counter, one sliding into the crack behind the stove and ground-level cabinetry. I’d have to remember to grab that later. To help myself remember, I pinched my forearm just above my wrist and counted the buttons on my shirt three more times. Grab the Pop-tarts. Grab the Pop-Tarts. Grab the Pop-Tarts. I’m ok. I just need to get to class. I’m ok. People still like me.

            I ripped open a different packet of the pastries and pushed them up into my mouth as a I threw on my backpack from the chair at the table, where I had dropped it after classes yesterday. My books seemed heavier than usual. But it was Wednesday, after all, and that meant orbital mechanics lecture. That book was a heavy motherfucker, and I got my back muscles working out each Wednesday if nothing else.

            Locking the door behind me and running down the stairs to the ground floor, I scrolled through the contacts on my phone until finally reaching my mom’s number, who I really just should have called from favorites. But I didn’t trust the favorites feature, it kept rearranging the order of the names. I slapped the phone to my face, cheek sticking lightly to the glass.  Thankfully, my mother answered quickly.

            “Hey buddy, what’s up?” she asked in between puffs of air. She was, presumably, out for a run.

            “Hey, mom, could you call insurance for me?” I asked. “My psych meds never got refilled this week and I ran out today. My doctor says insurance won’t fill them, and I’ve got class all day today.”

            “Sure, bud, I’ll call after I finish up my run,” she said. “How are you doing, though? Do you have any extras?”

            “No, that’s why I really need them filled today. I don’t want to crash. I mean, they’re called mood stabilizers for a reason, you know?”

            “Yeah, I get that. I’ll call up insurance soon,” she said. I wondered where she was on her run. Maybe by the hill next to the pond back home, where I used to go stargazing as a kid. I ought to start running again myself.

I had walked across the main street separating my cut-rate apartment building from the rest of the campus, and had now surrounded myself by the imposing brick and marble structures of the university’s quadrangle. The enormous iron belltower at the far end of the green lawn crisscrossed a lattice of metal X’s up into the sky, mirroring the concrete crosswalks that paved the way between buildings and disciplines. The morning sun gleamed off the weather-worn, greened copper roofs of the older buildings on campus, and across the way, I could see the massive concrete dome of the observatory. That’s where I was headed. Right? That had to be where I was headed. It’s Wednesday, right? I counted my buttons to make sure. Right. It’s Wednesday. Yes. Was there something I was forgetting?

“Say, I feel like I’m forgetting something. Do you have a minute to chat?” I asked.

“I mean, I’m kind of in the middle of something, but…”

“It’ll only take a second. I promise.”

“Alright, ask away,” she puffed.

“Do you remember when you first thought about putting me on meds?” I asked.

She paused. Perhaps I had pushed it too far too soon. I knew I had. Right? “Well, Daniel, I mean, right around fourth grade or so. We started you on those meds for intrusive thoughts right after that. But I mean, we all always knew you were a little different, even at a really young age. Remember how you’d rub your fingers along the railings at our old apartment building and cry because you just couldn’t stop?”

“Yeah. I remember.”  

“And you’d count the stars every night, right up until you started on your meds. You’d count the same ones, you said, every time, until you got to one hundred, just to make sure they were all there. And one day there was that airplane, and you counted it by accident and had to start over, and you cried so hard, and your dad got so pissed, and you couldn’t sleep right for weeks, and… that was a long time ago. The meds have helped a lot” I felt the implicit question that had to be there. Right, Daniel?

I guess I had been silent for too long. “Is that what you’re forgetting?” she said. “You still there?”

No, that wasn’t it. There was something else I was forgetting. It was right at the edge of my perception, I thought. “Yeah, that’s it! Thank you! That was right around when I broke my telescope, right?”

“Yeah, your dad got pissed because you broke your telescope. I mean, if you ask me, it wasn’t your fault, the stand on the window he built was always rickety. It was gonna snap sooner or later. He was even more pissed he had to clean the lens glass out of his flower bed the next morning. But, you know, that hardly mattered by then.”

I was nearly at the physics building, and I needed to end the conversation before I got to class. No telling what the other students would think of me talking to my mom to get my own damn medication. It was embarrassing. I met someone’s eyes as I passed them, and then immediately glanced away. Surely they knew what I was talking about already. But that was ridiculous.

The entrance to the physics building was flanked on either side by imposing marble columns, the same kind that flanked the doors to every building on campus. Besides supporting the edifice of the building itself, they acted like a threshold to knowledge. The previous classes had just let out, and students cruised in and out between them, pods of classmates and friends ducking and whirling between lonesome souls in overweighted backpacks and tenured professors whose very presence seemed to exude a certain level of pompous self-assuredness. They reminded me of pods of dolphins, whirling in the water. I could have sworn I had just watched a documentary about dolphins the other day, and it had said-

“Daniel? You ok?” my mother said.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, just distracted. Hey, I’m at class now, call me back if you figure anything out with insurance.” I said.

“Will do! Love you, buddy.”

“Love you too, mom.” And I hung up the phone.

Class itself was uninteresting. The professor lectured on Lagrange points, charting courses that were both stationary and dynamic. The subject matter was drab enough to dry the marker ink on the whiteboard as soon as it left his pen. A student next to me had propped himself up on his book, eyes wilting as he absently took notes in a notebook. His antithesis, a stringy girl with oversized deep brown ponytails, scribbled every minutiae of the diagram from the board to her iPad, before madly flicking through to the next page of whatever notes app she was using.

I couldn’t muster the energy to even try taking notes. I was in astronomy for the formation of celestial bodies, not their movements. Though my advisor told me that was really one and the same until I got into at least master’s level research. I glanced over at the girl next to me, and eyed her note-taking process. It was exact, thorough, unthinking, the kind that reminded me of an assembly line robot putting pieces to a car. Each slide of the professor’s lecture had her own annotations added to it, often in some sort of shorthand I couldn’t begin to decipher. Now this was someone I wanted on my side come exams.

Something about her nagged at me, though. There was something I was forgetting. Was it her? Something about her? She did look familiar. I counted my buttons and picked at the scab on my wrist that had formed over my bloody pinch from earlier. So much for it helping me to remember. She doesn’t want to talk to you.

Perhaps I had seen her at last Wednesday’s club meeting. Those ponytails looked so familiar. They had to be distinct in my memory for a reason. At the end of class, as we stood up to leave, I caught her attention.

“Excuse me, were you at Action for Environment’s meeting last Wednesday? At the student lounge in the library?” I asked her.

She turned to me and cocked her head sideways. Her ponytails swung back and forth behind her head, pendulous. “Nope. Sounds fun. Is it cool?” Idiot. People don’t like you.

“Oh, I could have sworn I saw you there. Anyway, it’s great, we do all sorts of environmental activism things, we’re planning a big sit-in on the quadrangle later this month, you should come to the meeting tonight!” I said. “And I’m definitely not just inviting you because I want your orbital mechanics notes.”

She snorted, loud, and covered her mouth. “Hah! Cheeky. I’m the TA, actually. So no notes for you. But, hey, you invited me to your club. I’ll invite you to office hours.” Idiot!

“That would be great! When are they?”

She looked at her watch. “Ten minutes.”

We were both heading for the same door, ruffling past the cetacean students as they dove to leave the lecture. The lecture hall, with its creaky metal chairs and wooden folding desks, was a picture of a traditional romantic-period higher education, and no one wanted to be there.

“Dang, I’ve got class in ten minutes. Do you have any others?” I asked, stumbling as I kicked a loose shoe that someone had left in the hallway. It had thick, white rubber soles that had enough traction to keep it to the marble floor. I counted my buttons as I stumbled forward.

“I also have them on Thursday from four to five. See you there,” she said, and suddenly made a sharp, ninety-degree turn down a side hall, and I was left standing just below the marble columns of the front of the physics building, students passing to my left and to my right.

I watched her leave and realized that I had no idea where my next class was. That was something I was supposed to know, right? There was something else I was forgetting, too, but that had to wait. Even though I felt like if I just took thirty more seconds, I could see it clearly. But I was standing in the middle of the door like some sort of lunatic, which surely people thought I was, so I had to get moving to wherever it was I was headed to next.

I made my way back across the vegetative green heart of campus, sweetgum trees and massive oaks growing in between the latticework paths of concrete………

And that’s the end for now! Check back some time in [INSERT TIME FRAME HERE] to see part two of what will probably be a three-part story. Unless I get really motivated and crank it all out in the next couple of days.