Systolic

I went to my local Wal-Mart Pharmacy on Tuesday. Beautiful weather outside, off work for the day, dinner and wine were already waiting for me at home, and my prescription was—blessedly—waiting for me when I got to the counter.

Conditions were perfect.

I decided to check my blood pressure with that white apparatus that sits in a dingy corner of nearly every pharmacy. After inserting my arm into the cuff and taking a few cleansing breaths, I depressed the green button.

The cuff started to inflate, a light went off, and I was ready to see a nice, controlled BP reading… when I heard “YOUGONNAGETYOURBLOODPRESSURETAKEN???” Loud, startling, grainy, the voice blared behind me. I glanced up and noticed an elderly fellow standing behind me. Assuming the question was directed at a woman nearby.

I settled in my seat again. Then right next to my ear, I heard “YOUGONNAGETYOURBLOODPRESSURETAKEN.” I jumped and turned quickly. The steely eyed, loose-cheeked gentleman bent over me awaiting an answer.

Vein in my temple pulsing just a bit, I nodded, then turned back to wait for my results hoping that my calm had not been too disturbed… when I heard, louder, and close enough to my ear for me to sense the movement of his lips: “ITSUREISTAKIN’ALONGTIMEISN’TIT.”

I jumped again. My heart truly racing, all I could think was that this was a private—um, publicly private—moment. Couth!!! I was in search of couth, when he leaned past me to rap the display of the machine and demanded that the results come faster. It took all I had not to howl in frustration. “Who does that?” I asked myself mentally.

When my reading came back, it was sky flippin’ high. The old man cackled something near incomprehensible about my heart and walked away. Behind him, out of the back of his neatly pressed seersucker Dockers walking shorts, flipped a skinny red tail.

Or maybe not… but it certainly would have been fitting.

As a kid, much of my walk to school was solitary. Every day, before I met up with my friends, I became a spy, or a ninja, or even a refugee ice skater from the USSR (it was the 80s people) slipping from one hiding place to another, escaping imagined capture... My imagination has always been in hyper drive and even the most mundane situations become dramas I need to be write and share. And that’s how my stories are born.

Grayson Reyes-Cole
www.graysonreyescole.com
Author of Bright Star
Available October 20, 2008 on Lyrical Press