HALF AN HOUR. That’s how long Sammy had been seated in the waiting room of Dr. Schiller’s West Side office. Her chair puffed dust as she shifted her weight. The sign on the door reminded No cell phone use. Bored as she was, she didn’t dare touch the periodicals. She could only imagine what a microscope would display: the virulent layer of phlegm, the microbial spray of countless sneezes. Instead, she looked for shapes in the water stains and reread the alarmist signage on the walls. Is this a Heart Attack? Why Mammograms Matter. Quit Smoking Today.
Sammy wished she could smoke, the desire still intense although it had been years since her last cigarette. She tried to recall how many. To answer, she added up Jack’s four years plus her pregnancy plus two years of attempted conception at which time all bad habits, down to her morning cup of coffee, had been set aside for the greater good.
Where was Jack?
She spotted him crouched near the wall, his turbulent energy channeled into an effort to capture something – Spider? Beetle? Please not cockroach – in a cup he’d taken from the sleeve of an empty water cooler.
Sammy had never had to wait this long before. The appointments usually took five minutes. Ten minutes max. She’d say “Hi, Dr. Schiller,” and he’d make sure she didn’t look stoned, and she’d be out the door before the ink had dried on her prescription slips. The waiting room was half full and only
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Marcie Roman's short stories have appeared in Driftwood, CALYX, upstreet, Split Lip, Black Fox, and The Gravity of the Thing, among others. Her debut novel, Journey to the Parallels (Fitzroy Books, 2022) was the winner of the Kraken Book Prize. She earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and is a fiction editor for The Baltimore Review. She lives with her family just outside of Chicago.