by Jason Kahler
I knew the pills were wearing off because I cried during radio commercials for sports drinks and family vacations, and I named the bugs that smashed into the windshield as I made the turn toward Munising. Steve. Tom. Bill. Mack. Finn. Don. Bud. They needed little names for their little funerals at the little graveyards that welcomed visitors driving through the little towns along the two-lane highway cut into the peninsula on the way to Lake Superior. I imagined the liquid moths and fractured fireflies joining the processions of the deceased and the folks left behind to hold up the stone walls and cantilevered rooftops built around the crooked houses at the edges of the forest. I knew the pills were wearing off because I struggled to stay asleep. I knew the pills were wearing off because I struggled to stay awake. Sleep the noun. Sleep the verb. Language betrays truth like night. They never worked, anyway, those pills. The same songs trailed by the same thoughts, the same nail-biting, tooth-gnashing, hum-away hum-away throat clearing. Doctors don’t mention, when they write the script, how the pressure just above your nostrils, beneath your cheek, will close that eye and from your one good eye, left open by chemistry, you’ll drink the world in paisley. Whorls and whorls and whorls. The mania is delicious while the stove fire burns. The pills wear off in Munising. From an Ojibwe word meaning “at the island.” When everyone is an island, all you grasp is lake; each life ends at the shore.
Jason Kahler is a teacher, writer, and researcher from Southeast Michigan. His scholarship and creative work have appeared in or are forthcoming from Cosmic Horror Monthly, Connecticut River Review, The Columbia Journal, The Hong Kong Review, Seneca Review, College English, the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, the Stonecoast Review, The Rumen, and other publications.