text: The tv in the common room was playing a seemingly unending marathon of HGTV and Myrtle Atkins was beginning to feel depressed. Myrtle had been at the Cleese home for the elderly for going on ten years and in her opinion it was ten years too long. The home had about eighty residents and they ranged from those that needed round the clock care to those like Myrtle who simply had been living alone and whose family deemed her a risk to herself after a minor fall. Most of the residents at the moment had some stage of dementia and that made it hard for Myrtle to make friends. Can you imagine the stress of always having to make a great first impression? Myrtle sat in the arm chair wearing her usual peach bathrobe and soft fluffy matching pink slippers and she was thinking about reading a magazine. The room itself was populated by several of the residents that had the later stages of dementia, the nurses would usually herd them into the room after dinner in an attempt to get them to socialize but the tv proved to be a better attention grabber than trying to remember how to hold a conversation and so every single night they would sit there grunting, moaning, or crying as Myrtle sat and thought about all the things she wished would happen. Myrtle did have a friend in the home though, Agnes Wooster, a spry if not chipper woman two years younger than Myrtle. Agnes was one of the lucky ones, her family came to visit her often and would always show up with some home cooked food for the holidays, Myrtle was always invited and glad to attend these dinners. A lot of her family had moved out of state or were simply not the close knit family types. Agnes did not hold it against them, though she wished they would come at least a few times a year and break up the monotony that had taken hold of her life in the not so golden years. A familiar sound broke Myrtle out of her trance and she recognized the sound of the squeaky wheeled pill trolley. Myrtle had long held the belief that they tried to keep most of the inmates...sorry, residents in the common room because it made it easier to hand out the evening cups of various pills, blood thinners, vasodilators, anti depressants, and of course the high fiber medication that kept everyone regular. The nurse pushed the cart into the room and smiled at Myrtle handing her two small paper cups, one with the pills and one with water. The nurse quickly took the one with the pills back and gave her a different one. Myrtle noticed that each pill cup was numbered. "What's with the numbers?" Myrtle really didn't care but it was nice to talk to someone who wasn't engrossed in house flipping. "Different cups have different drugs, helps us not mix them up, the side effects could be really weird if you took the wrong ones." As punctuation to that explanation the nurse pushed the cart past Myrtle and started handing them out to the rest of the people in the room. Myrtle thought about that for the next hour and a half. Myrtle didn't really have any vices and always had kept a clean body figuring she'd live a nice long life and die in her sleep in her own damn home. That plan did not work out. Myrtle watched as the cart was wheeled away and then left at the check in counter. The nurse walked out the front door with a cigarette in his mouth. Myrtle stood and walked at a fast shuffle towards the cart, after checking that no one was around she reached into the containers of pills at the bottom of the cart and shoved a few random handfuls into her bathrobe pockets and then shuffled off down the hallway with a smile on her face. Myrtle knocked on the door to room 314 several times before Agnes woke up and answered the door. "What do you want Myrtle, do you have any idea what time it is?" "Just after seven thirty." "That late?" There was no hint of irony in Agnes' response. "May I come in?" Agnes sighed and obliged, opening the door wide and stepping aside and beckoning her friend to enter, even though Agnes would have much rather have gone back to sleep. Agnes had one of the bigger rooms with her own furniture and it was on an antique had carved redwood table that Myrtle emptied the stolen contents of her pockets. "What the hell have you done Myrtle Atkins?!" Myrtle smiled. "Doesn't it seem like a bit of naughty fun? I never did drugs when I was younger, did you?" Agnes huffed at the very idea and sat down in her olive green velvet evening chair and drew her robe tighter around herself as if to make a point about being closed off to the idea. "What are they going to do? Arrest us? What's the worst that could happen?" With that Myrtle used the side of her palm to divide the pile of pills in half and went off to get two glasses of water and noticed a tea kettle on the stove. "How long has this been here?" "Since about six. It's Irish breakfast blend." Myrtle poured two cups of tea and put two sugar cubes and a splash of milk in each and walked back to the coffee table and handed Agnes her tea. Agnes begrudgingly took her tea and watched with stern derision as Myrtle sat down across from her on an orange floral print love seat. Myrtle blew on her tea and let her friend stew for a few minutes. The tea cooled off and Myrtle could take more than tiny sips of it. To her this seemed as good a time as any to take a few pills and see what happens. Agnes watched as Myrtle took her handful and took them in three portions with a hearty gulp of Irish breakfast tea to wash it down. Agnes wanted to be livid, she did not want to condone this sort of thing from her best friend, but in spite of all of that she was curious, besides if Agnes was going to be here all night in another dimension, why not join her. It did seem like a good bit of naughty fun. Agnes took about half of her pile and took each pill separately initially trying to read each one but giving up when the print proved to be too small. The pair sat and finished their tea and waited for the next ten minutes and nothing happened. Agnes sighed and stood with great effort and walked over to her record player. "I think we just have to wait a bit, drugs take some time to kick in, don't they?" Myrtle said this more to the room itself than to Agnes specifically. "Well I'm not going to sit in silence and stare at your face waiting. I'm going to put a record on." Myrtle sat and poured herself another cup of tea and began to wonder if anything was going to happen at all. Soon enough the sounds of Sonny Rollin's saxophone was filling the room with righteous vigor and Agnes took her seat again, pulling a cross stitch project from the pocket on the side of her recliner. After the record had been flipped Agnes was the first one to notice that things had gone a bit weird. She couldn't properly say it because she couldn't find the words but one look at Myrtle confirmed that Myrtle's drugs had kicked in too. The empty space that filled the room between physical entities, the air in layman's terms had turned a slightly pinkish purple and time was rapidly slowing down. Myrtle felt as if it had taken her about twelve minutes to turn her head but wondered if that could possibly be correct. "The damn saxophone is knocking the walls down. Crap! Did I say that out loud?" Agnes covered her mouth after the outburst and looked down at the cross stitching project, the threads started wobbling on their own accord and she decided it was best to just put it away and work on it tomorrow. The roof melted away before Myrtle's eyes and she got a good look at the stars above and the vast cosmic openness of it all. Myrtle sighed contentedly and leaned back in the recliner and shot through space on a vintage 70's olive green La-Z-Boy. Agnes restarted the record, cranked the volume and polished off the last of the tea, dropping two sugar cubes into it and stirring for the entirety of side one of Saxophone Colossus. Myrtle shot past planets, constellations and comets at rapid speed and saw for once in her life the meaninglessness of it all. Myrtle Atkins, age seventy six finally felt free. Agnes was having a whale of a time as well, though her thoughts were much more down to earth and tied to the simpler pleasures of life. "Tea is really fucking good" was all she thought. As the saxophone reached it's height of frantic tempo the door was opened and three very annoyed nurses stood in the doorway of Agnes' room and they were not pleased with what they found. Apparently some of the residents in neighboring rooms had lodged some complaints of incoherent babbling, loud music and general delinquency. The Nurses confiscated the drugs and took Agnes and Myrtle to the office and reached an agreement, that they wouldn't do what they'd done again, and that the care home would not have to admit how terrible they were at storing narcotics. All in all this was not a terrible Tuesday for Myrtle Atkins. A couple of days later the woman across the hallway, Yukio Omada passed away just after lunch while having her afternoon nap and Myrtle watched from her room as her family came later that night to empty out all of Yukio's possessions. Myrtle had had a handful of conversations with Yukio, she was an interesting woman who came to the States as a young girl and lived through some hard times but made the most of it. Most of her possessions were thrown away, a few books were added to the communal book pile but would go unread like all the others due to the print being too small. Among the items tossed in the trash can down the hallway was a small figurine of a boy fishing in a pond and Myrtle had always liked it. After the family of Yukio Omada had left Myrtle walked as fast as she could down to the trash can and fished out the figurine, returning to her room and placing it neatly on her bed side table. For a while she sat there looking at it and studying it as if it held some secret to life that she desperately wanted to pry out of it. It gave up no secrets but the boy's serene smile at the enjoyment of such a simple activity gave Myrtle an idea. Myrtle put on her old peach bathrobe and made her way down to Agnes' room and knocked four times before Agnes answered. Agnes was a bit upset at Myrtle still, though she would never say it. Agnes was the kind of woman who had lived her life without ever having the authorities give her much notice, so being chewed out by the nursing staff for having a drug party stuck in her craw a bit. Still, ever the gracious host Agnes invited Myrtle into her room with a slight wave of her hand, Myrtle walked in and Agnes shut the door behind her.