Silence

the psych ward

Silence.

The walls are white. The floors are white. The ticking clocks are white. The bathrooms are white. The ceiling is white. The bed sheets are white. The nurses’ clothes are white. The furniture is white. Her gown is white. Her hair is red. Her heart is black.

The world is dark. Her mind is broken, or swamped rather with the weight of simple life. Time flows endlessly like sand under her feet. She wanted an end, but all there is here is time and silence. She wanders through the shadows of the cruelly well-lit hallways. She knows the routine. Follow the ugly lady in the white. Go into the room, wait until the door clicks shut, the lady hands her the yellow pill and the white pill. She takes the pills then takes off her ugly psych ward gown, white with little barely visible baby blue diamonds. The lady searches her then lets her wash herself as if there were reason at all to be clean. Her insides must have been charcoal.

When can I wash my insides? She thought.

She puts on a new gown from the shelf and walks to the cafeteria slowly, ignoring the tauntingly sweet voice of the ugly lady in white as the next girl saunters in and the door clicks shut. She sits at a table alone. This is the part she likes. She is interested in people; she always has been. She talked to them once but here she just observes in silence: Jenny, Sara, Prihanna, Jack, CJ, Elliot. They're laughing about something. How are they laughing? How are they living? Could you even call this a life? She sees the hauntingly beautiful girl, Ashley. She stares at her. There is a scar on her left cheek

that wasn't there yesterday. They have never spoken, but she worries. She wants to stare into those eyes. Those hurt, intense dark blue eyes that make her feel drowned 15 feet deep into a whirlpool gasping for breath, choking into silence. She imagines holding Ashley's hand and kissing her chapped white lips and running her fingers through her dyed black hair. She imagines them discussing what happened to Ashley's cheek as she washes the cut clean. She would tell the time on the cute Dora watch that Ashley wears on her tiny left wrist. She imagines lying next to her on a blue (not white) down

comforter with the yellow and orange brush strokes of the morning sun veiling their intertwining bodies. They smile at each other in her mind because they escaped the ugly white ladies together. They ran. They ran free: No more bruises, no more cuts, no more blackness, no more pills, no more doctors, no more stomach tubes, no more ugly white clothes ladies and no more silence. They embrace in glory. Their scars aren't just gone; it's as if they never existed.

Then Ashley touches her thigh and she feels it grow. She draws in a sharp breath realizing how beautiful Ashley is and at the same time how awful she is herself. Ashley's fingers cross her stomach and she feels it bulge. Ashley grabs her arm and she feels the extra skin hanging over her fingers. Ashley's hands go around her neck and she feels her body swell and she is brought away from her imagination into the ugly white cafeteria. Oh Ashley. She's lovely. They sit feet away yet they never meet. She stares, mesmerized, at that cut on Ashley's left cheek and deafened by the force field of silence between them. A bite of toast and a slice of apple manage their way into her mouth. She gags. She slips away without the ugly white clothes lady noticing that she hasn't eaten enough or written in her food log or taken her second pill of the day, the pink round one. She throws up in the ugly white communal bathroom and walks slowly back to her room to sit in the center of her hard, white bed.

Her arms wrap twice around her empty stomach cavity (hug) and her frail hands meet for a secret handshake behind her back. Poof, there' s nothing there. She's sharper than she imagined. The exclamation point of her elbow digs into her ribs which she counts slowly and methodically through the ugly white gown. That's how she knows she is still getting away with it. That’s how she knows she hasn't gained weight. They're all right there, her ribs, and she can count them.

She doesn't think she's crazy. There is nothing wrong with enjoying the feeling of sticking a thumb through the space in between the ribs and rolling it around or laying on the hard floor to feel her hip bones sharp against it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to be lovely.

She looks up and a younger woman wearing white is standing in her doorway interrupting the counting of her ribs. This troubles her. She needs to finish the count. She looks down letting her still damp auburn hair cover her eyes and starts the count again.

 1. 2. 3.

”You've got to eat your lunch today, or you'll move back to level one again. You were doing so well last week, sweet pea.”

4. 5.6.7. Ashley looked at her last week and smiled. Of course she had done well.

She looks up and the woman steps back. Her eyes hold something darker than the woman expected in such a young girl. Her mouth is slightly ajar, her breathing is heavy, and suddenly she begins to shake. Her fingers run through her hair grabbing it and pulling hard and she screams and the arms of the ugly white gown with baby blue diamonds float towards her elbows and you see the gruesome scars on her creamy pale forearms. But that's normal here.

"What a shame", she can hear her mother saying with that annoying look of pity on her perfect little face. "Her hair is so pretty and now she's ripped some of it out.” Her mother isn’t doing anything about it' she's just standing there in the comer of the white room shaking her pretty blonde head while her daughter screams the pain into the empty white space, the sound sprinkling like ghostly flecks of ground up crystal, miniscule sharp shards to irritate any eyes in close proximity.

No tears are formed- There is no liquid silence left inside of her, only blackness: Black gooey tar so thick that nothing can get through it, no words, and no sentiments. Her inside is a mess of organs slopping over the sides of her rigid bone structure. Her heart is frozen, iced over for months like the ones preserved for middle school science class dissections. Tear it apart, she thinks, rip the stupid thing out of me' It doesn't work right anyways. The young lady in white comes back with several white minions and she feels the white darkness enclosing her. She screams because it hurts. She screams because they think she's crazy. She screams because she sees Ashley walking out the front door because she's distracted the white ladies. She sees Ashley escaping without her! She sees her falling into another person's arms, someone lovelier than herself. So she stops screaming and she runs towards the door as fast as her bony legs can take her. A white minion catches her in the hallway in front of a full length mirror, grabbing her and holding her still.

Her thighs are huge, her stomach is sloppy. The ugly white gown with baby blue diamonds can't even cover it. Her reflection disgusts every atom of her emaciated body. Her hair is tangled. Her skin is so pale it's nearly transparent. She stops abruptly and stares at her ugly body. Not good enough. Never good enough. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to be lovely. There’s her mother standing in the corner, wearing white, shaking her stupid blonde head. There is lovely, lovely Ashley escaping without her straight through the front doors. She sees the ugly purple bags under her eyes. Forcing herself to meet what's directly above them in the mirror, she sees eyes that aren’t her own. They hazel spheres are so crazed that the pupils have taken over like silent demons. The blackness from her gooey insides rose up and infiltrated the color out of her them and replaced it with silence. It isn't her. It's sickness, it's hunger. Pandora's Box has unlocked freely behind her eyes. Happiness and love fly away, disease and evil rise up into her head like a dark eyed Raven on a windowsill. She sees nothing but ugliness and the white minions closing in behind her and her mother shaking her stupid blonde head and Ashley walking straight out the front door.

She winds up for a punch and with a screech punches the mirror. For an eternal moment she marvels at the beauty of the thousand shards of glass. She catches sight of the darkness where her eyes used to be in one of the large pieces of mirror and she collapses to the ground closing her eyes to block out the white. She doesn't feel the shards dig into her skin. She doesn’t see the women holding her fall to the ground beside her. She hears only Silence. She sees only White.

The walls are white. The floors are white. The ticking clocks are white. The bathrooms are white. The ceiling is white. The bed sheets are white. The nurses' clothes are white. The furniture is white. Her gown is white. Her hair is red. Her heart is black.

Silence.

Reviews

[B-poet]

Very gripping and riveting at the same time. I love how you've written this story. It sets up a great proverbial ending. Great work. You're a star in the making. :)

[Dana Alsamsam]

thank you so much for reading and for your kind words!!

[sparkle]

wow .. keeeeep it up !! :)

[hurdur]

These are great. You have a future in this. Keep cranking your works out.

[Dana Alsamsam]

thanks James, that means a lot to me.