Ashley stared at the pill, watching it circle, dipping, rising. Would it disintegrate before it fell?

“Don’t make me draw my weapon.”

Ashley turned away from the sink. The man in the Patrol uniform stood in the doorway of the women’s restroom, one hand on the pistol at his hip, the other at his belt, thumb reaching up to scratch at his belly. He was twenty-five or so, brutish. He was big with a combination of height, fat, and muscle that would have intimidated her if she didn’t already know how little ‘big’ mattered.

“I can’t let you have that.”

She had to check to see what the man was referring to. The bottle of pills with the prescription? No. The glass bottle with the wire that flipped around to lock the rubber cork in the neck. The outside had black rubber bands around it, making it easier to grip and hold.

“That’s a weapon, if you had a mind to use it as one.”

Ashley was nettled. She gave the officer her best cold smile. “I’m a weapon, if I wanted to be one.”

“Not funny.”

“No,” Ashley replied, holding the smile.

He took the hand off his weapon to point, as if he somehow believed it was more threatening. “Lose the bottle.”

Ashley backhanded the bottle, sending it off the edge of the sink, into a plastic bucket with a toilet brush that lay beneath. It rattled violently within its new confines, threatening to tip the bucket over.

“That wasn’t necessary,” the officer said. A woman standing in the hallway behind him said something, and he held up a finger, saying something back that Ashley didn’t care to hear.

I don’t like people who try to throw their weight around, Ashley thought. It wasn’t the wrong piece of music, the wrong phrase, and it wasn’t a thought crossing her mind, but it was a similar sort of thing.

It was as if an invisible hand was flipping a coin. Heads, good to go. Statement made.

Tails, she would say something like what she had intended, except it would be wrong in a way that only seemed clear to her in the aftermath. There would be another invisible coin flip after that, to see if she could stop herself there.

The invisible coin flipped over through the air, as her head moved and agitation made the movement stiff, her neck and jaw tense.

The pill in the sink was gone. She’d missed its descent. The pills were supposed to help with these things, with the flipping of coins, but it was only a negative thing now, altering the coin’s trajectory in a bad way.

She heard Kenzie out in the hallway, talking someone’s ear off, and she smiled.