Free Strange Sisters by Fletcher Flora

barrier, and even though she understood that he knew she was lying, she experienced a renewal of the feeling of cleverness that she had known in Angus Brunn's apartment last night. A sense of triumph disproportionate and briefly exhilarating.
    The druggist returned shortly from the rear and handed her a small cardboard box. She noticed that the box had no label to identify either its contents or its source.
    "I'm taking a chance doing this, miss," he said. "I could get into a Jot of trouble."
    She accepted this as an oblique request for a bonus in compensation for the risk, though it was almost certainly a risk he took frequently and considered negligible. Nevertheless, establishing the lie of her desire to avoid a doctor's fee, she gave him a ten dollar bill and turned without waiting for any gesture on his part to make change.
    'Thank you very much," she said, and she walked up past the fountain and out across the park with the cast-iron man to the street on the other side. She retraced her way along the street past the drug store she had entered earlier, walking much more slowly now, and so back to her apartment. In the apartment, she sat down on the edge of the bed and opened the box. The tablets inside were green, the coating hard and bright Green dragons, they were called. She had never taken barbiturates herself, even though sleepless nights had become common in her life, but she had encountered addicts and had picked up some of their slang terminology. She counted the tablets and discovered that there was an even dozen.
    She wondered how many she should take. Two, perhaps? Being in possession of the coveted soporifics, she had now a morbid fear of taking too much, of sleeping beyond her appointment. Possibly one would be sufficient. Yes, she would take no chances. She would take only one, and if that were not enough, she would just have to stay awake and deal as best she could with corrosive time. Getting up, she went into the bathroom and washed a tablet down her throat with tepid tap water, leaving the remaining eleven on a shelf in the medicine cabinet. Back in the bedroom, she got her alarm clock and set the alarm for four o'clock, checking the setting twice to be certain that she'd made no error. Then she placed the clock on a bedside table not more than two feet from where her head would lie and stretched out on the bed and closed her eyes.
    In the darkness behind her lids, the floating fear that she had kept diffused by physical activity halted and gathered and stared at her with yellow eyes. She lay quietly, forcing herself to keep her lids lowered, and after a long time the gathered fear loosened again and moved, washing through her sluggishly. How long would the tablet take? How long before the green dragon took her into its arms? Or would it, perhaps, not be effective at all?
    His hair, his hair, the color of his hair, they're taking him to prison for the color of his hair. But no! Not his. Hers. They would come, and they would get her, and they would take her away. They would take her to prison for the color of her hair. It was very essential to keep the gender straight, though keeping the gender straight was sometimes quite a problem. One had to try, however, one had always to try, and if the attempt came out bad, came out murder, that was unfortunate but really quite incidental, for it was only the color of the hair that mattered, and everything else, even murder, was only a ramification, a damned, damned consequence of the color of the hair.
    But she had, for a moment, forgotten something, and she almost laughed aloud in the darkness behind her lids when she remembered again what she had, for a moment, forgotten. She had very foolishly forgotten Jacqueline, and that was the reason she almost laughed aloud in hysterical relief, because Jacqueline didn't object to the color of her hair at air and would never permit them to come and get her because of it. Jacqueline was very wise, and she would know