It was Saturday. It was noon. She had been up an hour and, now coffeed and toasted, it was time to make the monsters go away. Angi went to the bathroom cupboard and, through blotted eyes, picked up the pill bottle, reached in and pulled out a small pink dot of Celexa. The tablet, containing mental medication stored in yellow plastic, slipped between her fingers and bounced on the kitchen counter. It dropped away from her hand and back into its container.

“It’s trying to tell me something,” Angi said. 

After three more tries at distribution, the hand to mouth delivery worked out. Once Angi portioned the medicine into her esophagus, however, it didn’t go down well, not even after returning to the kitchen to introduce it to a sip of black coffee. It could have been the two cups prior that damaged her throat and nerves, her hands’ agility also. She wandered back into the bedroom, thinking despair.

The night before had been restless with too many flashbacks and memories of a man she never wanted to see again in her life. They bounced through her brain as she was lying, eyes closed, beside a man she’d like to see for very much of her life. She tried with all her body to remain still. Her worst guilt came from the possibility of sharing emotional sickness with the sleeping one curled into her, the one who loved her but hadn’t yet said so.

Her restless brain went to the previous afternoon, when it was dim outside and threatening rain. Angi had been reading in a corner of the library when a stranger entered, one who reminded her of Gilbert Blithe from Anne of Green Gables.

Without being prompted, this stranger told Angi reading in the room stacked with books but sparse with people, “I’ve heard of you. I heard you’re crazy.”

She answered with darts in her eyes and returned to her book. He tried telling her that he meant it jokingly, but she didn’t look up again until he left. While he left, Angi thought of her midmorning solitude three hours before when she was spending time with her dollhouse.

The mice that lived in her dollhouse had been asleep inside and she felt lonely, so she approached and kneeled in front of their house to sing lullabies. Peering in at them was one of her favorite things. Though they were sleeping and she knew they were tired, her sad loneliness drove her voice louder and louder to wake them.

The five grey rodents scurried to the rug in their bedroom. All standing in a half circle, her little friends looked up at her, sniffing their tiny noses toward her sympathetically until she giggled with them. They sat that way together for twenty minutes while she sang. They waited patiently, listening and knowing they could return to slumber land soon.

Thinking back on the Gilbert Blithe fellow, Angi wondered if somehow he had caught her intimate moment with the mice that morning. If he hadn’t, she was clueless to why he would slap her in the face with insulting adjectives like ‘crazy’.

“I don’t appreciate spies,” Angi said aloud finally that noon hour in bed, just in case the stranger was still watching her and listening. Then she covered her mouth as the sleeping one began stirring, promptly pretending she had been asleep and talking that way.

I’m not crazy, she thought, falling back into dreams.