The white medicine cabinet hangs behind the tall laundry basket and the grey painted wooden chair. Even standing on the chair, on tiptoes, I can’t reach it. It’s like a magic box, filled with objects I long to explore. The bottom shelf is packed with bandages: rolled-up elastic fabric for twisted ankles, white gauze for bike crashes, band-aids for scratches. On the middle shelf, toothpaste-like tubes, iodine bottles, menthol sticks. The top shelf is nearly empty, just Mom’s headache pills.
When I’m fourteen, I replace my thick plastic glasses with contact lenses. I stare at my exposed eyes in the mirror. If not for the red blotchy pimples under my bangs, I’d be beautiful. Each morning, I place the lens case and solution on the bottom shelf of the medicine cabinet, my acne cream on the middle one. In the evenings, I clean and store my contacts, scrub my face. There are fewer bandages now, up top with Mom’s pills.
Later, I move to the city. I keep mostly cosmetics in my medicine cabinet. Sometimes I drive home to visit Mom, by herself now, always glad to see me. I should visit more. One day, head throbbing, I open her medicine cabinet. There’s iodine, band-aids, but mostly the shelves are jammed with bottles, dark stained glass, white plastic, tall, squat, orange and purple vitamin labels, black and white prescription labels. Pills, liquids. Behind the bottles are syringes, cotton balls.
I click the cabinet door closed, wonder how I’ve missed it, what I’m going to say. How long we’ve got.
Laila Miller writes about bougainvilleas and sea urchins and turnips, and sometimes about people who don’t get along. Her work can be found in Best Microfiction 2024, Flash Frontier, Cricket Magazine, and elsewhere. Originally from Canada, she lives in Perth, Western Australia with her husband and son.
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