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as a new patient to fill a Viagra prescription. She had a terrible vision of a dark room in his house on Monroe Avenue, where he kept a girl no more than five years old tied to a chair and dressed in provocative clothes. She’d assumed from her vision that he was molesting a little girl and called the police with an anonymous tip that led nowhere. She even stole his address from his medical records and sat in her car one night across the street from his house, just in case she saw a child in need. It nearly drove her mad for a whole week, until she convinced the police anonymously that she was a neighbor and heard a fight and glass breaking. It turned out, the police said, that Mr. Bozeman was just babysitting his granddaughter. Why Maija saw what she had seen was beyond her. Regardless, a moment of misleading clairvoyance had been a blow to her self-esteem, not to mention her conscience, because she rarely acted upon the visions. If the images in her mind were becoming questionable, Maija feared the worst: that her sanity was finally giving way to the imagined future.
    Perhaps Eleanora’s demise would not come to pass, but still Maija felt the urgency to try to save her former friend from a potentially painful end. Maybe the Plavix would thin her blood enough to give her another season, but medicine was about as accurate as soothsaying. Everything is theory, she thought, and most medicine had a success rate similar to the placebo in trials. The pills considered actual medicine were guesses that made large corporations piles of cash. If you popped a pill, your world of troubles nearly vanished, along with your liver. Nothing was ever truly certain; this was the only fact that Maija truly believed.
    Maija watched Eleanora spin the display of plastic reading glasses. She was, as her surname suggested, avian in shape, with a face that drew to a slight point in the center and long fingers that mocked feathers. She seemed so young and didn’t appear sick.
    Maija typed Eleanora’s information into the computer and put the slip of paper in a plastic basket behind her. She glanced at a postcard that a chain pharmacy recently mailed to her offering relocation to their newest store and top salary for experienced technicians. She propped up the card next to her screen so she could read more about it while she worked. The store was in Orlando, Florida, and she’d always wanted to see a white-sand beach. Beside the postcard was her favorite photo of Paul, taken during Christmas a few years ago at the Jones Drugs company party. He’d had a few eggnogs and looked like he was having a great time, smiling, laughing. Someone had dared him to put the plush antlers atop of his turban, and he never was one to pass up a dare. It was the small things Maija kept in her station that distracted her from the reality of her day-to-day. Palm trees and plush antlers were powerful numbing agents, as powerful as cocaine eye drops.
    â€œHey, lady. I’m next.”
    A lumpy-looking man stood at the counter. He came in from time to time to fill his antipsychotic drug, and today he looked worse than usual. His prescription was lost among his banana-length fingers as he held it out to where Maija had been standing earlier. The line had grown during the mere moments her back had been turned. Of course, the phone began to ring as well—line one, line two, and then line five were all on hold while she accepted a glare from the man with the big hands. This pharmacy had only one pharmacist, Tom Tingle, a man who on some days resembled Santa Claus and on others a truck driver. A girl named Shandy, whom Tom called their intern though it had been more than ten years since she’d walked through the doors of any school, managed the register. The pharmacy also had a drive-through window, but, thankfully, few of their customers had discovered this additional convenience.
    Maija left the phone lines blinking and gave her physically