On Paper (2026)

Once upon a time in the city of Chicago, my parents didn’t have any money for Tylenol.

When her migraines showed up, my mom slipped Excedrin from her friends’ purses during lectures on legal precedent. My dad would lift more Excedrin from cabinets at residency. We didn’t have Walgreens money: they were students.

Back then, acetaminophen was the forbidden herb in the witch’s garden from Rapunzel. You had to scale a wall to score it.

When my mom was pregnant, the Chicago Tylenol murders had occurred so recently they hadn’t yet developed into memory, and the attendings at my dad’s school recommended prescribing high-dose ibuprofen anyway, unless you were on a different blood thinner.

So my mom ditched the Excedrin and popped Advil like Chem&Ms for nine months. Sometimes it helps with the edema.

When my mom was fifteen weeks in, my dad was gone in Kenya on another medical mission. My mom wore a lot of patterned elastic and Spandex to accommodate drastic change, and it looked hip at the time. Those days, I imagine doorknocker earrings catching light bending off skyscrapers while she speedwaddled, hauling stacks of briefs to unforgiving judges blocks away, frequently passing under “Flamingo’s” neon womb in Federal Plaza. She sweated a padded skirt suit into a different shade by 3pm.

They didn’t come from poverty, but we really had nothing. It made them fight more, and the migraines worsened. Everything dilated or constricted.

One starless night, after weeks of near-silence except for huffs of steam at an ironing table above the buzz of soap operas, my mom plucked the dormant phone from its cradle and dialed internationally.

It rang while she sloughed off her sister’s neoprene pumps and tweezed impacted Kleenex from between her toes.

It rang while she extracted a short accordion of dot-matrix printer paper, a capless Bic, and sewing shears from the bedside table.

It rang while she scribbled furiously on the paper, peering into its folds and poking around with the Bic.

It rang while she fastidiously excised hundreds of strips smaller than cookie fortunes…until the duvet had a ticker-tape coat that shuffled and slid around.

A voice eked out of the earpiece. “Helloo?” His default inflection: amplified vocal fry with a nasal singsong. Unintentionally sounding bothered.

“My love! How is the mission?”

“Hey, ah. Can I call ya back? I’m at lunch with some ah guys who are gonna take us on a charter boat out on Lake Victoria. Heard there’s good freshwater fishing out theh….Anyway ah love ya talk to ya layt—“ a click on his side.

My pregnant mother slammed the phone back onto the receiver and raked handfuls of fortune slips, claw-dropping them into gallon Ziplocs.

She dove across my father’s side of the bed, fishing a long-expired bottle of Tylenol from behind a stack of publications whose existence I could never sneeze hard enough to expel from my brain.

My mom dumped the Tylenol pills onto the duvet, between crossed legs. I hung suspended in her lap, not thinking anything at all. Paul Simon’s Graceland drowned out traffic noise in the corner. She laced her fingers through the eyes of the shears.

Fat Charlie the archangel

Sloped into the room

She snipped every capsule in half, pouring its sediment into a snack bag.

He says, well this will eat up a year of my life

And then there's all that weight to be lost

A fortune slip, rolled up so tightly you could pick your tooth with it. One small teardrop onto the surface of each new capsule. A small one won’t warp the casing. A swipe of the pinky will seal it back up. Back into the bottle with a soft clatter.

Finished, my mom recited a quick prayer over the new bottle of pills. “Catholic God, send me a child to fill life’s silence with music. Amen.”

She peeled the label from the bottle and shifted back into the depths of her nightstand, fishing out a blank label sticker. A black Sharpie.

SOCIAL CUES. She folded the label’s ends down neatly on the bottle.

First she hid the bottle back where it was, but the count remained the same for the first weeks after my father’s return from Kenya. She took things into her own hands.

My mom’s chicken drumsticks had something hidden in the bone at dinner. My dad didn’t notice when he gnawed them. One time she made kugelis: he raised his eyebrows at the dinner table and ululated at his internal monologue. Not out of the ordinary. Then he sunk his fork back into the kugelis. Must have been a bacon fleck.

She prepared weird comfort dishes his mom made, like cow knuckles. The acceleration in the menu’s tempo went unnoticed by my father, who’d pluck a cube of watermelon from his glass of homemade sangria and pop it into his mouth, dissolved words pilling on his tongue.

After a few weeks of consistent administration, my mom followed up on her patient’s progress at the dinner table. She’d made a big salad, my dad’s favorite. Hold the dressing.

“How’s it tasting?”

His jaw rolled under a bug-eyed gaze into space. “Mm. Good.”

The rattling of our Kit-Kat clock’s skeleton as it perpetually surveilled the room.

“Anything else?”

A car horn. Another car horn, tuned to “La Cucaracha.”

“Mm-mm. Nope.”

She stared at her unseasoned bowl of greens. Had his feet gotten hairier?

“Let me see your feet.”

More chewing. “Mmm?”

“Let me see. Your feet.”

“Oh.” He swung one up into her lap without looking, almost clipping me on accident.

“Watch it! Idiot.” She noticed a sheen to his skin. “You put on lotion?”

“Ya I got some Aquaphor from the St. Joe nurses, like a bunch if you want some. It’s up in the…” He toweled off with a cloth napkin. Eyebrow raise.

“Your skin is freezing. What the f—”

At that moment, my father turned into a beetle.

He no longer communicated unless survival required.

He stayed off to the side. In the basement. Damp corners. Toiling over a hidden project.

I think of this story from time to time, usually when I am cooking. I use the empty CUES bottle in the kitchen for my garam masala. I poked some holes in the lid.

The Kit-Kat clock surveils my apartment.

After dinner is when I routinely walk into my bathroom and step onto my moon-shaped rug. I look into the mirror, and I begin to take off my face.

It sticks, but I’m usually able to pry it off with some isopropyl alcohol. The little slips are itching the sides of my face at work. Nothing Mod Podge won’t fix.

I hang the mask next to the lunar illustration and the cutout of Laika. It will wait. My wings twitch.