Brave Pills (Originally Posted To The Midnight Paper subreddit.)

This is a warning. You see, something happened with my friend a few days ago. I don’t want to get into too much personal shit of his. To make a long story short, he and his wife are divorced. He’s been depressed because he’s supposed to see his kids on the weekend but with quarantine, he hasn’t been able to other than over the phone or through Skype.

Anyway, we happen to live close by. He asked me if I wanted to come over. I could tell he was feeling down, namely due to the slurred way he was talking. Both of us have been pretty good about washing our hands and stuff so I figured it would be okay to visit him. Now, I don’t want to give the false impression that Carl is an alcoholic.

However, when he gets in a down mood, he can hit the bottle pretty damn hard. I rang his doorbell. The smell of whiskey hit me when he opened the door. Carl was standing in gym shorts and a plain white shirt with stains I did not desire to know the origins of. He gave me a drunken smile.

“Devon,” he laughed. “Come on in. Sorry about the smell.”

“It’s alright,” I said, trying to keep my nose from wrinkling at the smell but not being too successful.

Carl’s tone suddenly became less cheery.