The tiny white circle on the floor stared up at Michon Kellman, and he stared right back. It had confronted him when he had rounded the corner of the hallway to his office, keeping his eyes to the floor so none of the other professors could see how red his eyes had been. The little disembodied eye blinked, happy and pupil-less in the light, a little voice seeming to transmit from it to Michon’s brain.

“Pick me up,” said the tiny pill. “Pick me up. I could be aspirin or I could be a breath mint. I could be one of Professor Liddie’s liver pills that he always prattles on about, or I could be what you want me to be…”

Michon felt weak in the knees. His salt and pepper brows knit together in the center of his forehead as he considered leaning down, grabbing the tiny pill and popping it quickly into his mouth. Then maybe he would stop the shaking he had been suffering since last night or make the nausea at least fade for a little while. He pulled a trembling hand out of his suit coat and slowly began to bend down. He was almost crouched to his goal when he saw some motion before him.

A student, a girl of twenty, was looking at him oddly as she walked up the hall. Michon snapped back up and felt himself go faint from the fast motion. The girl was still looking at him, and she nodded in slight greeting. Michon leaned against the wall and let her pass, too terrified to nod back. He was sure she knew. He felt nauseous again.

Michon pitched himself into the nearest men’s room and slammed his face between the cool plastic boundaries of the seat. As he felt the first bits of his toast and French press coffee pass through his lips, he couldn’t help thinking that none of this would have happened if he hadn’t gotten a divorce.

Michon was an educated man, and somewhere inside, a little voice was already contesting that thought. His inner critic always sounded like his ex-wife Hanna. Her voice was so clear it almost echoed off the porcelain.

“It wasn’t our divorce that started your addiction,” Hanna said in her deep, condescending tone. “It was your mid-life crisis marriage, if anything.”

Michon whispered a weak: “No.” It wasn’t his new marriage either. It wasn’t the fact that Hanna had been well into menopause by the time of their divorce. It wasn’t the fact that he and his new wife Alicia had never really discussed children, or the fact that when Alicia could become pregnant when he was fifty-five.

Hanna clucked her tongue. “Are you going to blame Ryan? Have you sunk so low as to blame an eight-year old boy?”

Michon coughed up another mouthful of his food into the toilet water. Droplets splashed back on his face and he scrambled for a bit of toilet paper to wipe them off with. He was disgusted at his thoughts, but unable to help them in a way. The addiction never really would have happened if it weren’t for his son.

The night he first started using was directly because of Ryan. Michon remembered sitting down with his tea to correct some papers while Alicia helped Ryan study at the other end of their long dining room table.

“How do we spell carton?” Alicia said pushing a few blond strands back behind her ear.

Ryan looked at the blank space in his school workbook, his thick eyebrows pushing together. He then looked at his mother, his eye pleading for her to provide the answer. Michon glanced at his son quickly over a poorly written term paper and held his breath.

“Ryan,” Alicia said in an expectant tone.

Ryan sighed. “C… a… r… t… i… n?”

Michon sighed. His took his red pen and circled a spelling error on the first page.

“No, Ryan,” Alicia said. “Try again.”

From across the table Michon could already see the traces of crimson rising in his son’s cheeks, the walls of inattention behind his eyes.

“No.” Ryan said. “I don’t wanna.” He crossed his arms in front of him much like Hanna did when topics were closed for conversation. Alicia tried to coax him lovingly but he was already rolling in his tantrum. “No, Mom! No!”

“Ryan, calm down,” she tried to say. “We’ll just try again, it’s alright.”

Ryan got up from the table with enough force to push the chair back a few feet. “No! I hate you and your stupid words!”

He raced from the room and Alicia stood but didn’t leave. She looked at her silent husband who was hiding behind a red littered 8x11 sheet.

“Micha, are you going to help me?”

Michon looked up as if he were surprised that there had been an incident. “I need to correct these papers. You know how tired I’ve been, I’m very behind.”

Alicia looked at where her son had been. She then looked at Michon.

“Well, fine, then. I hope some day you find the time to devote some energy to me and Ryan instead of your damn papers.”

She left the room. The yelling continued in another part of the house. Michon picked up his papers and shuffled to the upstairs bathroom. He was suddenly suffering a splitting headache.

Michon Kellman looked old and tired to himself. His body, which had once seemed to stout and strong, was becoming a thin wall barely able to keep out the pressure of his own life. Michon opened the cabinet and reached for his migraine prescription. Without even looking he opened the bottle, dumped out a small amount of tiny white tablets and swallowed them. He tossed them back into the cabinet and reached for the water glass. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the word “Ritalin” on the bottle he had just replaced. He picked it up and carefully read the name “Kellman, Ryan.” on the label.

He looked back from the bottle to his reflection, utterly shocked at his own action. Michon was not the type to call an ambulance for feared overdose. He barely even believed the things worked, judging on Ryan’s behavior at home. He decided if he felt sick, he would call someone, but that didn’t mean he should embarrass himself if nothing was wrong. He replaced the bottle in the cabinet. The bottle’s hundreds of tine white eyes watched him close the door. Michon didn’t feel sick. He felt strangely hyper.

He finished all his papers that night.

And the nights after that he finished them in time enough to teach his son how to play chess, at least for fifteen minutes. The next night he skipped because he realized that he was taking too many too fast, that Alicia would figure it out. He drank lots of coffee instead, but it ended up making him more irritable than anything. He decided, if he was careful, he could ration it out throughout the day. He was teaching his classes with more enthusiasm. He spent time with Ryan and Alicia. The little white pills with their milligram label smiles made him faster, made the days longer.

The only real problem was in acquiring them. He began to get up in the morning and help Ryan get ready for school. He would often “forget” to give him his daily dose. When times were difficult he would split a pill to help get through a whole day, leaving a tiny white half moon for the evening hours. Aside from those dry times the plan seemed to work until Alicia had to spoil it the night before.

She entered the bedroom in one of her long silky nightgowns and sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I think Ryan is flushing his pills,” she said solemnly.

Michon’s head began to ring. “What?”

“His teacher called and said his behavior was declining again. I told her that we had both been spending more time with him and his studies, and he was on the meds before school, but she suggested…”

Michon cut her off. “I really don’t think she knows what goes on in our house.”

“But he’s missing pills, Micha, quite a few. I know you give them to him in the morning but you can’t always watch him take it. I’ll just have to watch him do it every morning.”

She got up from the bed and went into the bathroom. She returned with the small orange bottle and placed it inside her jewelry box. The tiny whites inside looked at Michon, pleading to be rescued. She locked it with a tiny key and placed it in her underwear drawer.

Michon looked at her, horrified.

“What are you going to do now?” He heard Hanna whisper into his ear.

He tried to dry heave up the rest of his breakfast. Seeing it was futile he went to the sink and splashed some cold water on his face. He could take the withdrawal, he had to. Alicia was counting those pills like mad and there was no way his addiction was worse than buying generic Ritalin of a co-ed dealer. He was sipping some of the water from his hands when another professor came in the room.

His name was Rohnert, a contemporary of Michon, in age and field of study. He was one of the only other professors Michon really enjoyed talking to.

“Kellman!” Rohnert said, setting down his briefcase and beginning to wash his hands. “My god man, you look like hell.”

Rohnert glanced back at the unflushed toilet and wrinkled his nose. “Was that you? Are you sick?”

Michon laughed a little and dabbed his face with paper towel. “What if I told you I was going through withdrawal from not taking my kid’s Ritalin?”

Rohnert pouted his lip out a little and wiped his hands on his coat. He opened his briefcase and found a little sliver case. He opened it up and placed a tiny blue pill on the edge of the sink.

“Oxycontin,” he said with a little smirk. “We all need some kind of pick me up, right?”

He walked out to leave Michon alone, staring at this strange new blue. It looked at him, but it didn’t talk. Michon Kellman heard his ex wife tell him to take it, to stop trying to do this all on his own. He shook his head and turned to flush the toilet. In his first class that day he almost threw up on his desk.

Wendell Jackson was feeling shaky and nauseous. The last thing he wanted to do was go upstairs and clean up some toilet that was overflowing with some guy’s puke. He wiped his forehead and nodded at his boss and pushed the bucket ahead of himself.

He didn’t know how such a mess could have happened on a floor with so many offices and so few classrooms. He inspected the revolting mess on the floor and leaned on the sink, just in case he needed to puke himself. Then he saw the tiny blue speck on the edge of the sink. The eye stared at Wendell Jackson, and Wendell Jackson stared right back.

“Pick me up,” said the tiny pill. “I could be what you want me to be…”