Marginal Mormons by Johnny Townsend

Author:Johnny Townsend [Townsend, Johnny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction
Publisher: Johnny Townsend
Published: 2023-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

Broken Wisdom Teeth

“Did you hear?” Luana leaned over conspiratorially. “Shari and Katrice got fired.”

“Why?” Miranda asked. “What happened?” Katrice was one of the few people who were nice to her. It wasn’t fair.

“That guy Aaron in room 103. He told the director they were smoking pot with him, and the director asked the girls to take a drug test, and they refused.”

“Why did they refuse?” Miranda knew that Katrice didn’t smoke pot. They’d discussed it when Miranda mentioned wanting pain medication one day.

“They were offended. Wouldn’t you be?”

“Yes, but I wouldn’t want to lose my job over it.”

Luana walked off to check on another patient, and Miranda finished entering some information in the computer. She rubbed her jaw, where her wisdom tooth was really hurting. Why in the world didn’t Katrice simply take the test? What a stupid way to be fired.

Walking home across a couple of miles of no-man’s-land after work, Miranda kept an eye open for any muggers. The Westbank of New Orleans was mixed, a decent neighborhood here, an awful one there. She never knew what shift she was going to be called in to cover, so sometimes she had to make the trek in blazing heat and other times in the dead of night. It was almost midnight when she reached her apartment today.

She put an ice cube at the base of her orchid and looked at the firm white bloom, sighing. Then she opened the fridge and took out a piece of bologna and some bread. She was down to 184 pounds now, well below her maximum weight of 203, which had horrified her to no end. She still had a lot to lose, and at the age of fifty, her metabolism sure wasn’t cooperating. But she only put mustard on the bread tonight, no mayonnaise. She was trying.

As she chewed, her jaw hurt. Damn that tooth.

Miranda was PRN at the nursing home. She didn’t have any dental insurance. You’d think she qualified for Medicaid, she fumed, since she was already on Disability because of the schizophrenia, but for some reason, they told her she couldn’t get it. If she was really as crazy as they said, she’d tie a string around her tooth and pull it out herself.

But she was on meds now and not crazy anymore. She looked at her orchid, and at the blank TV screen, and at her refrigerator.

It sure was boring not to be crazy.

She picked up a romance novel she’d been trying to get through for weeks now. On a White Horse. It was about a waitress in a cowboy town who meets a customer who really likes her. He pretends to be poor, and she resists falling in love, but eventually she gives in, and then he reveals who he really is. Miranda used to love these kinds of books, but now that she was no longer delusional, they simply didn’t have much appeal. She read four pages and put the book down again.

She wished she could have gotten some kind of group therapy, a chance to meet other people, to talk freely.

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