My Psychiatrist
by Ana B. Freeman
CW: mental illness, unethical medical professional
My psychiatrist tells me that Antifa raided the Capitol. The smell of her office is musty but a little sharp, a little sweet. She is grandmotherly: hand cream and cough drops. Her lips pucker like the skin around a scab.
She feeds me pills—from cracked fingers that I graze with my top teeth. Her gifts are yellow, blue, round, oblong. Zoloft and antipsychotics. Shakes, shivers. Nausea, head bludgeoning.
I take some home for later and swallow them with water, coffee, crybaby snot. Every other week I walk two miles in Texas summer to see her, deodorant on my inner thighs to prevent them from chafing. She doesn’t do Zoom.
Ana B. Freeman (she/they) is a graduate student in English at Texas State University. Her fiction has previously been published in Electric Literature.