Brandon Cole Phillips - 1 -

Confabulation

A brief novel by Brandon Cole PhillipsWritten for the 2010 3-Day Novel ContestCopyright 2010 - Some rights reserved.Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial- No Derivative Works 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

Brandon Cole Phillips - 2 -

It takes an unimaginable amount of effort to saw through the leg of a solid oak dinner chair. I had tried the hacksaw. The teeth – too jagged. The metal tines kept gettingcaught up in the little knots of soft wood that had been preserved so long behind thelacquered surface.In the garage I had a set of clay-carving utensils. One – a toothed blade with a sturdyrubber handle – seemed to do the trick for only a little while. I had warped the aluminumthrough a combination of friction and my own inability to move my limbs in a straightline twice in sequence.Fuck. I hadn’t yet done the math on the beams.A standard pine two-by-four can support sixteen pounds per square inch. A-beamsrun vertically would increase the stability three-fold. Usable surface area: thirteen inches.Thirteen by sixteen by three. Six hundred twenty-four. Nearly three and a half timesmore than would be necessary. Thank Sarah and her vegan bullshit for that.

Plonk-a-donk-bonk-bonk!

Chair leg off – check.Ativan standard dosage seemed to vary between six and ten milligrams daily. It wasgoing to take much more than that. I knew I should have filled that prescription. Damnit,and I had the minivan all after-fucking-noon the day prior.

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If you need help with your mental health call us! Call us now! If you’re on drugsand impaired or feel like you have bugs in your hair then call us! Call us now! We’realways here for you, Doctor Chomsky knows what to do, just call us! Call us now!

My God, I hated that commercial. Every damned interstitial break it played at doublevolume. Who phones a psychiatrist advertised on the boob tube? Not enough I wasinundated day-in and day-out by ads for lunatic lawyers with low media budgets.Worker’s comp, debt settlement, car wrecks, disability. I have no use for litigiousness,much less for the scumbags who try for ‘pain and suffering’. Never had I been quick enough to snap a look at that ridiculous ad. I would assumethere would be a cartoonish mope of an actor portraying the classic preconception of ‘doctor’ – replete with shiny head-mirror and unusually lengthy stethoscope. Maybe atongue-in-cheek graphic of a lunatic in a padded room would display next to the toll freenumber.I cared not – the theme song was detestable. It was offensive. It was a calloused joketargeted at the foreheads of the unwitting and desperate by some repugnant dick with aPhD.This is why bombs go off at abortion clinics.You may protest – ‘But Frank, that’s because the fundamentalists are using terroristtactics to try to scare doctors out of performing such abhorrent acts in the name of medicine!’