14
That evening, Angela sat at her kitchen table with her two bottles of antibiotics. She opened the bottle of penicillin and saw the seven remaining pills sitting uselessly inside.
“We don’t use penicillin for skin infections.” Dr. Leonard’s words had been stuck in her head since she’d heard them.
She opened the bottle of trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and felt herself become hopeful in spite of her rapidly developing sense of dread. She plucked one of the pills out and placed it on her tongue. She swallowed it, screwing up her face at the bitter sensation that crept into her mouth from her throat. The new pills had an unpleasantly clean—and somehow familiar—taste.
She looked down at her feet and saw Ruby strutting around under the table, head bouncing back and forth rhythmically.
“Huh,” she said, suddenly struck by an idea.
She got up and walked over to the cabinet that contained the chicken feed. She took out the heavy bucket and was hit with the sterile smell of the feed. She put her face closer to the bucket and sniffed. There it was: the same bitterness that she’d smelled in the antibiotics.
Her brain accommodated the new information against her will. She didn’t want to make whatever realization was about to come, but she did: there were antibiotics in the chicken feed.
She put the bucket back into the cabinet and sat down at the kitchen table again, picking up the pill bottles, one in each hand.
She thought back to the old days, when she fed her chickens standard feed from the agriculture supply store. They were practically lethargic back then, and they didn’t eat nearly as much as they did now. Since she’d started feeding them the stuff from work, they seemed to have a certain vitality that they didn’t have before.
She put the pill bottles down and rested her face in her hands. This all felt very wrong, and she didn’t know why. She was struck by the idea that she had been cheating somehow, that her ability to raise chickens didn’t have anything to do with her.
She remembered Sheila’s concern, how she had found Angela’s living situation unsanitary, and somehow disrespectful to the chickens. Was Sheila right? Would they have gotten sick and died from living in such close proximity if they weren’t using performance enhancing drugs? She thought of Michael Phelps and furrowed her brows in concentration.
She fixed her attention back on her finger. It wasn’t getting better. Her mind raced with scenarios, most of which ended with her dying.
She was starting to freak out. But maybe she just didn’t know enough about this stuff, and she was making too big of a deal about it, and the penicillin wasn’t supposed to work, anyway. “We don’t use penicillin for skin infections.” The trimetho-whatever was going to work.
But the smell.
But the infection wasn’t that bad, really. Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. She had jumped the gun by going to see a doctor. What was she thinking? She was perfectly healthy; there was no reason to believe her body wasn’t capable of handling such a minor infection on its own.
She looked down at her finger again. The pimple had swollen up since she’d last seen the doctor and his overbearing student. She thought about what the doctor had said about cutting it open and felt a chill go down her spine.
There was a video she’d seen some years back of a doctor who specialized in popping pimples. It seemed easy enough, and the patients always seemed satisfied with the results. She imagined the relief she would feel if her pimple were drained.
She recalled a case of bumblefoot that one of her chickens had had a few years back: a little pimple on the chicken’s foot, much like her own. She’d called the vet to see if they could take care of it, but they told her that she would be better off draining it on her own. She remembered pinning the chicken down on a table, swaddling it with a towel like a baby, and squeezing the pus out of the chicken’s foot. The chicken had started acting better almost immediately.
She looked at her finger again, and before she knew it she was squeezing the pimple with the thumb and index finger of her left hand. She slowly pressed harder and harder, clenching her teeth through the pain, until finally she felt something burst. The chill that had gone down her spine now seemed to travel down the length of her finger. Her stomach lurched, and she closed her eyes tight.
She steeled herself to look at her finger again. The pimple looked like it had deflated, but no pus had drained out.
“Well, shit,” she said.
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