Unprofessionals A Novel

an evening in winter an evening in winter It was the second month of living without a soul and I was getting used to the feeling. The obliteration of the self had begun two years beforeprobably it had begun years beforebut at the brink of being seriously over forty-nine, it was coming into fruition. I saw every mistake I'd made, also the flaws in my character as well as my bone structure, and the combination of the two was deadly, forcing me to drag around the empty shell of a human form like the lost shadows of Peter Pan and Wendy or of Casper the Ghost. I dragged this around with my new lack of self and missing soul each day. Unlike a number of movie stars, I lacked the will to add false cheekbones. Although there is one early stage of the face falling in that gives the face owner the appearance of having bone structure, I had acknowledged awhile before this newest episode of emptiness and nothingness that the stage of slight structure had already passed, leaving the decline to a face that looked like a soft, still-unformed pancake, nothing more. Sometimes passing in front of a mirror, before I'd learned to avoid the dastardly objects, I'd seen the beginning of the pancake effect, and a few times this made me laugh out loud. Not the mad laugh of a woman in an asylum, as in the movie Spellbound, but a laugh of disbelief, of incredulousness that this could be happening to me. What had I done to deserve it? I'd never smoked or drunk alcoholic beverages. I'd taken no drugs. I'd avoided the sun after I found out about it at age thirtytoo late. I tried to practice yoga and walked many miles every day. I'd been a vegetarian since birth, and then a vegan as soon as possible after that. It had to have been the bad thoughts. It must have been my low opinion of my mother's middle-aged face, my not having had the smallest inkling that this same facial decline might lie in store for meit must have been that for which I was being punished. Also the damage done by the years of forced milk drinking during childhood. That was only the outsideI'd read that damage to the innards begins after infancy. I pictured plaque deposits starting in first grade, when my mother paid milk money to the teacher so that the little cartons of the thick liquid would be delivered to the classroom, where the unsuspecting children would have to drink it. i'd had one good dayor was it just a good few minutesplus a grand finale that followed: the drive home from the discount drugstore with a bag of Xanax, a bag of chocolate, and, on the brighter side, a bag of Dr. Scholl's gel-and-foam innersoles. At the time I still had the high hopes of walking farther and farther each day. The Xanaxwhen I saw how nice and full the bottle wasI'd gone from thirty tablets at a clip, to sixty, to ninety, and was now hitting the jackpot with one hundred and twenty. But no congratulatory sticker was handed out or pasted to the bottle the way a sticker was affixed to the windshield of our Volvo when we reached one hundred thousand miles, though I thought I saw that the pharmacist was impressed when he handed me the bag of pills. Just the thought of the many peach-colored beauties tumbling about and clicking into each other in the newly orange colored bottle, this thought made me calmI didn't have to take a pill or even half of one. The same with the chocolate. I had no plan to ingest any, but just the thought of the big sack full of extra-small-size Hershey bars on sale after Halloween, the thought of the special chocolate-colored foil-wrapped little bars prevented withdrawal from the drug I'd read was in the mixturetheobromine. If only that were avaiHecht, Julie is the author of 'Unprofessionals A Novel', published 2003 under ISBN 9781400061747 and ISBN 1400061741.