Depressed, he knew he was listening to too many talk shows on his cellphone. Standing in line, tuned in again while waiting for three prescriptions in Aisle 32 of his pharmacy, he stared at the bottles of vitamins and minerals, of potions and powders, stacked on the endless shelves. But listening to the advertisements for supplements through his earbuds, the things being hawked suddenly inspired and lit him up.
He realized that these marketers of supplements had figured out how to get around the fact that they wanted to sell stuff that people had no need of: it was simply a matter of novelty and persuasion, of pushing a cure without an illness masquerading as an illness in need of a cure. The vaguer the better…and probably more profitable.
And now he knew: he could develop the perfect pill to push on podcasts. It would be new and unprecedented, the only one to be swallowed after you are dead. Carefully engineered, it would claim to induce a montage of all the fantasies you never got to realize in your allotted years. Now you could live the dream for eternity. And no worries about taking it with or without water, before or after meals. No side effects. No warning labels. And he even had the right name and slogan:
“Afterlife” –
The real morning after pill. Yes: you can take it with you.
He smiled more broadly than he had in months, turned on his heels, and began to walk out of the store without his medications. As he passed the other customers standing in line, he furtively looked at them, the people he knew had once and maybe still read fairy tales, and he thought to himself, I’d like to tell them when we read that “they lived happily ever after,” we still need someone else to tell us what actually happened in the real “after” life. And believe it or not people, I’m your man. He smiled to himself, both inside and out. He had a project. He had a passion. He had a purpose. He was no longer depressed.
About the Author:
Joel Savishinsky is a retired anthropologist and gerontologist. His Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, won the Gerontological Society of America’s book prize. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and a Cirque Journal, Passager, and LIGHT Magazine award winner, his poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in Beyond Words, Devour: Art +Lit Canada, The New York Times, and Windfall. The Poetry Box published his collection Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging. He lives in Seattle, helping to raise five grandchildren, and considers himself a recovering academic and unrepentant activist. savishin@gmail.com
The Hemlock Journal 
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