"Ants in One's Pants"

"I'm feeling a little uncomfortable," said Joannie.

"Don't worry," said the man in the white lab coat with his back to Joannie. "This will only take a few minutes."

"Could you be more precise?" Joannie asked, with an emphasis on precise that hinted of her two semesters in Oxford 20 years prior and a lifetime devoted to increasing her ability to account more accurately for life's variables, from the careful planning that reduced her wake-up-to-office time by 20 minutes to the meticulous pruning of her diet to those foods that allowed her body to extract maximal nutrients and minimal waste such that the time she wasted on the toilet was down to three minutes and 37 seconds each week.

The man in the white lab coat, who she knew only as "Simpson," said nothing, but turned around and tightened the thick leather straps that held her wrists, and she articulated a clipped grunt. From her prone position on the steel table, she lifted her chin adjusted her eyeballs downward to get a better look at the man, Simpson. She couldn't see much: thick dark hair, dark eyes, two-day stubble, white lab coat, head down, always down as he reviewed the checklist on his clipboard, pausing here and there to check the computer monitor with the red and blue graphs and simulated dials.

"I mean," Joannie said helpfully, "I would like to know when this will be..." She paused, seeing the right word, and then decided upon... "...finished."

"We're ready," Simpson said in the low, throaty growl that substituted for a proper speaking voice.

"When you say, 'we'," Joannie said, voice cracking slightly, "does that include me? Because I'm sure that I'm not ready."

Simpson again said nothing, and Joannie sighed and resumed counting the visible squares created by the cross-hatched bars that held the white speckled, factory-issue drop ceiling. She was at 48 when she felt the needle prick the skin on the underside of her left forearm and at 64 when her body stiffened and tensed, her back arched and teeth ground so hard that she could feel the sharp edges of the flecks of hardened calcium newly trapped under her tongue. Her fortunately smooth nails dug into the palms of her hands. Her skin screamed, as if Simpson had attached millions of tiny fish hooks to every inch of her skin, and then, all at once, each tiny fisherman pulled, and reeled, and pulled.

"I'm feeling very uncomfortable," Joannie said.

"Don't worry," Simpson said. "A few more minutes."

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