Excerpt: Medication (working title)

Chapter 1: Unfeeling

On Monday, Sam woke up. He sat up, kissed his wife, Sam, on her cheek then rolled over and stood up. He yawned, stretched and got dressed. He ate breakfast, brushed his teeth, took his medication and walked to work. Sam worked at a bottling factory, and his job was to inspect the juice bottles and make sure that they were sealed correctly. That day the machine that placed the caps on was malfunctioning, and four thousand eight hundred twenty-nine unsealed bottles were sent out. One thousand three hundred people would die, most of them children, but Sam was oblivious to this fact, just as he was oblivious to the half open bottles going by in front of him. He was happy; he had taken his medication, and that was all that mattered.
At lunch, Sam went to the factory cafeteria and ate barely cooked burgers with the rest of the Sams. He washed it down with a glass of water and two pills. After lunch he went back to work, or rather went back to standing still and staring as thousands of bottles drifted by in front of him. When work was finished, Sam walked back home. He opened the door and found his wife sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the fridge. An empty frying pan was sitting on a red-hot burner, and a frozen filet of fish sat on the counter beside it. Sam walked in, kissed Sam on the cheek, then stared at the burner for a few seconds before finally turning it off. For supper the two Sams ate half frozen fish on dirty plates with plastic knives and forks. After supper both Sams took their medication. Finally, after an hour of staring blankly at a book, Sam took a shower and went to bed. The rest of the week was almost identical to this. Wake up, medication, work, lunch, medication, work, dinner, medication. Rinse and repeat.
On Friday, Sam witnessed a suicide. He was walking home from work when he heard a wordless scream from somewhere above him. He stopped and stared, open-mouthed as a body fell from the skyscraper and hit the ground five feet in front of him. An uneven halo of blood circled the body. Sam looked down at his body and saw a red splatter across his already dirty clothes and a piece of bone hanging from his sleeve. He picked up the bone, looked it over and let it drop to the ground. Then he walked over the body and continued on his way home. That night they ate raw chicken, and Sam took his last pill. For a moment he thought about how strange this was. He always went to the pharmacy on Sunday and picked up his medication. But at last he decided that there was no point in thinking too hard about it and took the pill, and nothing mattered anymore.