Story code: ST-000720
Part 3: The Third Banner
Brenda shoved the man in the golf shirt backward. Hard. He stumbled into a spinning rack of sunglasses, the plastic display clattering against his weight. Brenda dropped directly beside the boy, sliding her bare hands under his skull to protect it from the scuffed linoleum. He was entirely rigid now, his jaw locked shut, a thin line of white foam collecting at the corner of his mouth. She rolled him roughly onto his side, bracing her knee against his back to hold him in the recovery position.
“He’s seizing!” the elderly woman shrieked, pressing her back against the glass doors.
Brenda needed the midazolam atomizer from her duffel. She checked the clock above the pharmacy counter-mark the seizure start time. 2:14 PM. She stood up, her boots squeaking on the tiles.
The man in the golf shirt held his phone up again like a plastic shield. “Don’t touch me!”
“Then move,” Brenda said. Her voice was dead flat, stripped of any adrenaline. He stepped aside, nearly tripping over his own feet.
She crossed the ten feet to the drop-off counter. Arthur had hung up the cordless phone. He stood directly behind her green canvas bag, his manicured hands planted flat on the glass top. The imminent arrival of the police had visibly emboldened him.
“Leave it,” Arthur commanded, his chest puffed out under his pristine white coat. “That bag is police evidence now. You are not practicing back-alley medicine in my pharmacy.”
Brenda reached out and grabbed the heavy canvas handles. Arthur immediately slapped his hand down over hers. His palm was damp and trembling slightly, but he pressed his weight into the counter.
“I said leave it,” Arthur hissed, his nasal voice tight with authority. “You come in here, disrupting a respectable business. I have elderly patients terrified. I have a community to protect from the filth that washes in off the interstate.”
Brenda stared at his hand resting over hers. She didn’t let go of the straps. She twisted her wrist, breaking his grip with a sharp, practiced torque that made him gasp and snatch his arm back. She yanked the bag forward, unzipping the side pouch to retrieve the pre-filled nasal atomizer.
“You have no idea what it takes to keep this place safe,” Arthur said, his voice rising, projecting for the audience of horrified onlookers. “I follow the law. I do things by the book. We support the real heroes in this town.” He gestured sharply to the cardboard soldier display and the plastic donation jar on the counter. “I am a patriot. I will not have you making us look like some inner-city methadone clinic.”
Brenda paused. Her hand closed tightly around the plastic barrel of the atomizer. The icy pressure at the base of her skull crystallized into absolute zero. She looked at the plastic donation jar filled with crumpled bills, then at Arthur’s perfectly parted silver hair, his flushed face, his manufactured outrage.
She reached across the drop-off window and grabbed Arthur by the lapels of his crisp white coat.
He let out a choked, undignified yelp as she yanked him forward. His chest slammed into the edge of the glass counter, knocking the cardboard soldier askew.
“Hey!” a customer yelled from the vitamin aisle.
“Look,” Brenda ordered. She shoved him sideways, angling his face forcefully toward the massive storefront windows. The afternoon sun glared off the glass, but the row of streetlamps outside was perfectly framed. “Look out the window.”
“Let go of me! This is assault! You’re assaulting me!”
“Look at the third pole down!” she roared. The sheer, violent volume of her voice froze the entire store. Even the seizing boy’s ragged breathing seemed to fall away.
Arthur stopped struggling, his eyes darting wildly toward the storefront window. Outside, the hot summer wind caught the heavy vinyl of the memorial banner hung on the third streetlamp. The gust flattened the material out, fully revealing the young, smiling face in the dress uniform, framed by golden laurels.
“That’s Corporal Thomas Vance,” Arthur stammered, his breath hitching as he stared at the banner. “He’s a Hometown Hero. We raise money for his memorial fund. We-”
“He’s my son,” Brenda said.
Arthur froze. The blood drained out of his face, leaving his skin the color of wet chalk. He looked from the smiling face on the banner to the hard, unyielding lines of Brenda’s jaw.
“No,” Arthur whispered, his eyes wide behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Mrs. Vance?”
“Six months ago,” Brenda said. Her grip tightened on his lapels until the cotton seams popped. Her voice dropped to a vicious, quiet hum that only he could hear. “February fourteenth. Four-thirty in the afternoon.”
Arthur’s mouth opened, but no air came out. He tried to pull back, but she held him pinned heavily against the glass.
“Prescription number eight-eight-zero-four-two-dash-B,” Brenda recited. The numbers flowed from her mouth with terrifying mechanical precision. They had been burned into the back of her eyelids for half a year. “Post-operative painkillers. Authorized by the VA. And you looked at my son, shivering at this exact counter, and you told him the system was down. You told him he looked like a liability.”
“I… I have policies,” Arthur choked out, his eyes darting frantically toward the front door. “The system… the system flags early refills…”
“You told him to go somewhere else,” Brenda said, leaning in closer. “You told him you wouldn’t risk your license for a junkie. So he walked out of your respectable establishment, went to a parking lot off Route 9, and bought what he thought was oxycodone to stop the withdrawal. It was fentanyl.”
Arthur’s hands began to shake violently. The indignant flush was completely gone. The patriotic defender of the community vanished, leaving only a terrified man in a white coat staring into the eyes of the mother he had destroyed.
“You adjust your little cardboard boots,” Brenda whispered. “You collect your dollar bills in his name. And you let him die.”
She shoved him back. Arthur stumbled, knocking over a display rack of promotional pens. They scattered across the linoleum with a sharp, plastic clatter. He caught himself on the edge of a filing cabinet, his chest heaving. He couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t look out the window. His gaze fell to the floor, right where the young veteran was seizing in the aisle.
In the distance, the first high-pitched wail of police sirens cut through the heavy summer heat.
Brenda didn’t look at Arthur again. She turned her back on the counter, the atomizer tight in her hand, and walked back toward the boy on the floor.