Written for the Spooky Season Writing Challenge, Week 7.
Brandon used to tell me every day that I was crazy. That there was something wrong with me. “Go see a therapist,” he used to say. “Or better yet, a psychiatrist.” He wanted me to medicate the crazy away, to be calm, sweet, the perfect wife I had always failed to be.
But things didn’t work out the way he’d hoped when my psychiatrist first put me on hydutrin.
At Brandon’s behest, I saw almost every psychiatrist in town, shopping around for someone who wouldn’t turn me away and uselessly tell me there was nothing wrong with me. I was beginning to lose hope of ever getting a diagnosis, until Dr. Jekel finally agreed to diagnose me. Bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, generalized anxiety, depression. Once the labels had been affixed to me by a professional, Brandon was ecstatic. Here was the proof of what he’d been telling me all along: I was certifiably crazy.
Hydutrin was an experimental drug. I had never heard of it before, but Dr. Jekel assured me it would isolate the parts of me that were unhappy in my marriage, sealing them off somewhere they wouldn’t bother me anymore, allowing only the pleasant and happy parts to remain.
What else could I do? I believed Brandon when he told me that my “craziness” was the root of our marital strife, and I believed Dr. Jekel when he told me that hydutrin would make the “craziness” go away.
The drug was to be taken via injection at home, in a form similar to an epi-pen. I was instructed to take it once a week and to keep a diary of any side effects.
So when I got home with my prescription, an unmarked box striped in pale green and white, I hid myself away in the bathroom and picked up the plastic injector. It was the size and shape of a thick marker, the kind a kindergartener would use. A small chamber inside held a pale green liquid that seemed to almost glow.
Must be a trick of the light, I thought, uncapping the pen.
I pressed the injector against my skin.
Almost instantly after the first injection, I felt a wave of nausea crash over me. My bones ached as if they were being stretched and pulled. My heart raced, and an intense panic swept over me. I sat huddled in a corner on the bathroom floor, nearly hyperventilating, wondering if I’d been given the wrong prescription at the pharmacy.
But within a few minutes, the terrible feelings had passed, and I started to feel more alive and awake than I had in years. Decades, even. My muscles felt strong and lithe; my mind felt quick and alert. Underneath these feelings of renewed vigor, however, lurked something darker.
There was a knock at the door. Brandon’s voice.
“Hallie? You OK in there? What are you doing?”
A rage swelled within me, a wild, untamable rage I hadn’t allowed myself to feel in ages. I knew exactly what “what are you doing” meant when Brandon said it to me through a closed door. It meant, “Are you cheating on me?” Brandon had a habit of retreating to the bathroom to exchange messages with the women he thought I didn’t know about, and he assumed I did the same.
I leapt to my feet and yanked the door open. I blinked. Brandon was nearly six feet tall, and normally I had to stand on my toes to kiss him. But now, somehow, I towered over him. My head almost scraped against the top of the doorway.
Brandon looked up at me in horror and backed away, slowly at first, then broke into a wild, terrified scramble across furniture and out the door.
I decided then and there that I liked hydutrin very much.
For the next six days, I felt powerful. Incredible. Invincible.
I woke up on the seventh day as if from a week-long hangover. My bones ached, my head felt like it was being squeezed nearly to the point of popping, and my body felt weak and useless. Lifeless, even.
I needed more hydutrin.
The injection felt like a resurrection. For a few minutes, I had been dead, but now I was back. Alive. Strong. Unstoppable.
Brandon had moved out of the house at some point, though I’d stopped paying attention to him ages ago. I just noticed a distinct lack of yelling, accusations, and wet towels left in a pile on the bathroom floor.
The house breathed without him, as though it had been waiting for him to leave so it could finally exhale.
I walked around at night, no longer afraid of what might lurk in the shadows of poorly lit streets. Once, a man approached me at nearly 2 AM, but he took one look at my face and ran. Another time, a group of three men followed me home. Before hydutrin, I would have been terrified. But I just pushed them down, their heads knocking together like bowling pins, and continued on my way.
For four glorious weeks I lived my best life, a life I could never even have dreamed of before seeing Dr. Jekel.
Then my prescription ran out.
I woke up in pain, but by now I was accustomed to those seventh mornings. I hobbled into the bathroom, feeling at least twice my biological age, and opened the drawer that held my hydutrin pens.
To my horror, the box was empty.
Forcing my creaking, swollen joints into clothes and shoes, I managed to get myself decently ready to go out.
The pharmacy was three blocks away. I cursed myself for not having thought ahead and refilled my prescription earlier. I’d been too high on the elixir of invincibility and unlimited strength to think about mundane things like errands.
Three blocks felt like three hundred. I could feel the disgust and pity seeping from the eyes of people I passed on the street. My body felt too small, too weak to be mine. Each step sent shockwaves of pain radiating throughout my frail form.
I needed that hydutrin.
An eternity later, I reached the pharmacy. With trembling hands, I gave the pharmacist my prescription as I leaned against the counter, exhausted by the walk. My heart raced with a potent mix of anguish at my current form and anticipation of my imminent transformation.
I watched the pharmacist disappear into the rows of medications. The clock on the wall ticked as loud as thunderclaps. My aching hands itched to feel the hydutrin pen in them again. My skin tingled as if it could sense the jab that was coming. Soon. Soon.
The pharmacist finally returned, holding not the pale green and white box of hydutrin, but a smaller pink box.
“No, that’s not my prescription,” I wheezed. My legs felt on the verge of collapsing underneath me. I needed my hydutrin. Now.
The pharmacist looked at the box in her hands, then at the paper I had handed her, then at something on her computer screen.
“This is the correct one,” she said finally. “It looks like you were given an incorrect prescription the last time.”
Somewhere inside me, an impotent rage bubbled, then burst into a tiny puff of white smoke. Like a white flag of surrender to my current reality.
“Okay,” I croaked, tapping my card, taking the box, and hobbling into the bathroom to inject the stuff. Whatever it was, it had to be better than this.
The liquid inside was the same shade of pink as the aisle of “daily intimate wash” products I had just passed on my way into the bathroom. A generic version of hydutrin? I had no time to care. I could feel my body breaking down, crumbling around me.
I pressed the injector against my skin and waited for the nausea, for the pulling and stretching of bone.
Instead, I felt intensely dizzy, as if I were falling down Alice’s rabbit hole, falling and falling and falling.
When I woke up, I was splayed out on the floor of the one-person restroom, my face bathing in a puddle of my own drool. Someone was banging on the door.
I pulled myself to my feet and looked up at the mirror.
I was tiny. Barely the size of a child. In the mirror in front of me, I could only see the very top of my head.
I looked down at my hands. Miniscule. Like a doll’s hands.
I tried to scream, but no scream came out. Just a giggle.
Picking up the box of pink not-hydutrin, I wiped the drool from my face with a paper towel and opened the bathroom door.
Walking out of the pharmacy, I pulled my phone from my bag and dialed a familiar number. On the second ring, Brandon picked up.
I giggled again, without intending to. “Hi, honey,” I heard my voice say in a sickeningly sweet tone. “Can you come back home? I’m not crazy anymore.”
This week’s prompt was: “The Beast Within.”
You should go and read Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, if you haven’t already.
This is like the fun house mirror to my poem! We were obviously feeling some kind of way when we wrote this week 🫣
The narration is tight and believable, written with restrained hysteria that builds beautifully toward horror. The clinical details make the story feel grounded until the monstrous shift, then it slides effortlessly into body horror. The ending, with that innocent giggle and phone call, geh, Brilliantly disturbing and beautifully written. ✨🦋