Flash! Fiction by Peter McMillan - HTML preview
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43
“Soma, capsules or tablets, on sale, $99 a pound.” I really saw this in a store—one of those high volume members-only discount stores. I was with a friend. An anti-depressant with a literary pedi-gree at bulk prices. Unbelievable! That was my first reaction.
“What’s with this? This is prescription medicine. How can they do this?”
“You still have to have a doctor’s prescription, but it’s open. Your doctor can prescribe as many pills as you want. We’re in a special economic zone, you know, so things are a little different.”
“Yeah, but are there really so many people who feel this kind of bot-tomless depression?”
“Hard to say. This was one of the first things that changed after the flood.”
“You mean they’re sedating people who’ve lost everything?”
“That was what some of us thought at first. But there was a devas-tating flood in China right about the same time, and though it didn’t get the coverage that we got, there were regular reports of sui-cides—not just a few … hundreds.”
“So, they were sedating people?”
“Like I said, that’s what we thought. But there was a side effect.”
“One Flew over the Cuckoo—”
“Hyperaggression!”