Jellybeaners

In the hills of eastern Tennessee, the new strip mine isn’t in the ground. It’s in the medicine cabinet.

Jellybeaners is set in a town running on layoffs, disability checks, and whatever cash people can scrape together. For many, that cash comes from pills. Oxy, hydros, benzos—handed over in orange bottles, split on kitchen tables, traded in parking lots and pawn shops. Around here they have nicknames, but “jellybeaners” is the one that sticks.

The pills move through the county in plain sight. Pain clinics open in old strip malls with buzzing lights, plastic chairs, and a waiting room full of people wearing the same tired look. Doctors learn how far they can push a prescription before anyone in a suit shows up. Pharmacists scan the same last names week after week and quit pretending they don’t recognize them. County officials talk about “law and order” while money from the pill trade helps keep their campaigns and pet projects afloat.

Off the books, everyone knows the side business. Young men running back roads with glove boxes full of bottles. Women who started with a script after a wreck or surgery and now sell half of every refill to pay for the next. Grandkids who “hold” their grandparents’ pills and turn them into gas money and rent.

In the middle are the people trying to keep the town from coming apart. Nurses who watch the same patients cycle through the ER until their veins collapse. Teachers who can spot the kids raising themselves. Pastors who thunder against pills on Sunday, then spend the week taking quiet calls from church members who can’t stop. Grandparents who thought they were done with little kids and homework and now find themselves back in the school pickup line because there’s no one else left.

As the money gets better and options shrink, the town’s private deals start to fail. A small-time dealer reaches too far. A clinic keeps pushing scripts long after everybody knows it’s dirty. A stop on a back road goes bad. An overdose in a church parking lot, a body in a cheap motel, a raid at the wrong house—each one pulls another thread loose.

Jellybeaners follows the people caught in this web: those moving the pills, those trying to stop them, and those just trying to make it through another winter without losing their homes, their children, or themselves. No one walks away clean.

Against empty factories, boarded-up storefronts, and ridgelines that remember better days, Jellybeaners listens to how people talk when the doors are closed. It’s a story about a town being slowly eaten by prescription drugs—and the stubborn hope that something worth saving is still alive underneath the damage.

Publisher - Alarice Multimedia, LLC.

Language - English

Perfect Bound

Contributors

By author

Gene Scott

Published Date - 2025-12-01

ISBN - 9798899340017

Dimensions - 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm

Page Count - 268