No point in having a separate blog for short stories, is there? This is something I wrote for a creative writing course while I was in Belgium. It’s more off-the-wall than what I often write and a bit of a mix things stylistically (since for the purpose of learning and trying new stuff, I was encouraged to… well, try new stuff, haha) but I still like it. And I did spend some time working on it, so why not just put it here. So here we go…

Old lives end and new ones begin all the time all around this weird little rock that we inhabit. I’m not talking about the more venerable of us dying and babies being born: I’m talking about those moments when someone decides she’s had it, grips the emergency brake and without a second thought pulls it, with every intention of jumping off the train while the rest of us are still trying to figure out what just happened.

The day her new life began was when Ems decided it was time to get the hell out of Dodge.

The ward was housed in a pre-war building amidst a forest somewhere on the outskirts of some less than memorable urban sprawl, not important at the moment which one. Ems just wrote the location as “with love from Godforsakenston, Whocaresistan” in each postcard she made in art therapy. More broken minds around her spent their time doodling stickmen and stickwomen in compromising sexual positions.

Nobody had come to visit her or even written back, though. She suspected all the cards had been intercepted: with her treatment plan, outside communication was moderated. “You are… a difficult case”, one doctor had weighed in the beginning. “With your mental history and behavior patterns, we… cannot in good faith release you until you’ve shown considerable improvement. In summary, we do, however, perceive you able to this form of improvement in the coming term – or terms – of treatment.”

Or as one of the nurses put it: “Welcome to involuntary care, you weirdo.”

Ems made attempts to slip her postcards into stacks of outgoing mail in the hope they’d make it outside that way. Once she’d stuck a card in her underwear to smuggle it but couldn’t go through with it. I mean, she could’ve succeeded! You might not enjoy getting mail from a loved one in the loony bin anyway; you’d enjoy it twice as little if you knew how it had begun its journey. “Hi mom; you’ll never guess what it took to get this one to you!”

Ultimately, Ems’ decision to remove herself from the ward’s headcount was based on a conclusion she made on the first day: “I’m probably the sanest one in this zoo, staff included.” She’d been pacing the common room in her hospital robes that slung from the shoulders like an antihero cape and hiding the tremble of her hands in her long sleeves. Not yet knowing the pecking order, she tried to crack wise with her voice cracking to some of the nurses: “So, who do you have to kill around here to get a smoke?”

“Me.” It was the chief nurse, a woman of fifty whose face looked like that of a rhino and sculpted with an axe by someone with no talent to axework or face sculpting. True to form, she turned her thick hide towards Ems and nailed her feet on the floor ready to defy any competition against her reign in the jungle.

“Sorry?” Ems tried on a smile that would never be returned.

“Don’t waste your breath apologizing. It’s me you have to kill around here to get a smoke.” She took a packet of cigarettes from her pocket, lit one and inhaled the grey winds of cancer.

Ems swallowed hard. Well… might as well try to make conversation. “Um, could you spare me one?”

Grey tufts of smoke climbed out of the nurse’s nose; she looked ready to stampede. “I could.” She abused her lungs again with a velvet stab from the four-inch Marlboro, making no effort to offer Ems one.

She frowned but tried to maintain a tone of diplomacy. “Is that a subtle hint that I can’t sm –”

“No.” She sneered. “No, it is not subtle and it is not a hint. It is a direct way of saying that there is one way of getting a smoke around here.” There was no encouragement in her laughter. “And that is to kill me and pry these”, she shook the pack of Marlboro, “from my cold, dead fingers. Besides, smoking is strictly forbidden on the ward.” She punctuated this by blowing smoke rings to Ems’ face.

While this was enough to put to bed any doubts about whether or not she needed to get out of the asylum in order to stay sane, the last straw was Christmas. Not the season (we were still in August), but the guy.

Dr. Christmas was Ems’ treating physician, a snake in the skins of a man. His frame of 6´5´´ and 130 lbs. was like toothpicks dressed in a doctor’s coat, he was to joy what raisins were to grapes: to seek his sympathy was to piss into the wind. Christmas slid in his white coat and grey scales through the corridors, occasionally fishing a jar of pills from his pocket and flicking a few of them onto his forked tongue.

During one weekly session, Ems spied a look at the jar as the doctor toyed with it. “Prozac”, she blurted. The neuroreceptors in charge of avoiding awkward conversations were never the strongest part of her grey matter. Ems completed her observations: “80 milligrams. Er… strong.”

“Yeeesssss”, the good doctor hissed. “That’s what it sssaaays.” Blinking the scale-covered squints he had where humans have eyes, Christmas popped the jar open and thrust it to Ems. “Would you like one?”

“Oh.” Ems held out her hand. “Oh. I got two.”

“Isss quite alright”, he informed her. “Have two, then.” Merry Christmas, Ems mused and downed the pills.

They tumbled and clashed on her tongue like marble boulders cast into a stream. One second. Two. Three. A defiant wave emerging from the sea before it was touched – and duly spoiled – by man. The crispness which lingers in a September forest before dawn, when the dew still rests strong on the grass and the pine needles sleep their green slumber. Four seconds. Five. A January breeze that wakes you up as you stand on the street corner waiting for the bus… And then six and seven – still in Hell, not Heaven.

Her breath felt fresh, her self-control on the brink of collapse. She’d just been given fucking mints. “Sir?”

“Yeeessss?”

“These are fucking mints, doctor. FUCKING. MINTS.”

Regret in his voice over the fact that they were fucking mints: “Indeeeeed.”  He peered at her behind his glasses. “A poignant observation but ssstiiiill… mind your language.” You’re a file, young lady. A case number. Garbage. Not even particularly good garbage. Unrecyclable.

I’ll show you. I’ll fucking show all of you animals. At that moment, Ems 1.0 decided it was reboot time.

 

*****

 

The garden of the mental ward was picture perfect at 7 am. The nip in the air was pleasant: autumn leaves rested in peace on the fresh-cut grass, guarded by oaks built like rugby players. To Ems, the scene reeked of English vigor and brought to mind a tea commercial. She felt like wringing the neck of a Jack Russell puppy when doing her morning walk with two other minds far more broken than hers, Dr. Christmas and a pair of corpulent nurse gorillas in tow. “She ssshows improvement”, Christmas hissed to the gorillas.

Ems considered the switch she’d made in the breakfast room and its risks. But it was too late to back down.

“…could beeeee that she’s eligible for more open forms of treatment in, sssay, threeeeee months…”

Ems was fed uppers, her walking buddies downers. Uppers make you active, downers suppress you.

“…with what we have ssseeeen… nuuuuurse, what are they….?”

A sudden switch in medication can have effects. Kind of like when someone offers you a mint.

 

*****

 

When Ems’ uppers kicked in, patient A first began to twitch while a high-pitched giggle bubbled out of patient B’s throat. As the nurses extended their hairy paws towards A (at this point, Ems had already started running toward the trees), he became wildfire and pounced on them: Gorilla 1 got the elbow to his chin, Gorilla 2 to the stomach. B exploded in laughter at this sight. Still, glancing back before disappearing beyond the trees, Ems reaped most enjoyment from seeing the raging A smash the nose of Dr. Christmas with B prancing around the now semi-conscious nurses, singing demented children’s rhymes. “Mints, you bastard!” she howled. Victory was the first summer strawberry on her tongue.

Her limbs found new purpose as she reached the wall separating the mental institute from The Real World. Step. Step. Step: root of the oak tree leaning against the wall. Step upwards. Grab. Push up from Hell and towards Heaven: the middle branches. Reach. Grab. Lunge: top of the wall that was choking in ivy. Step. Sliiiide. Thump: prison yard turned to countryside road, lights went on in a dim room behind her eyes.

Ems didn’t see how Christmas slithered on the grass in a drunken zic-zac, sniffing crimson snot from his broken nose. She didn’t see A and B wrestling in a tangle of shrieks, laughter and pajamas, next to the uniformed gorillas still trying to find their feet. She now only saw the road, her hospital robes swinging around her like a pastel green cloud of cotton and stigma as she soared on. Her limbs pumped up and down like relentless pistons; right then she was the fastest mental patient in the world. Pigeons cawed and scrambled out of her way, the morning sun gave her knowing winks behind the forest silhouette.

The road was for her and for her alone. Strands of hair and wisps of pollen stuck to her face glued by sweat. Her ward pajamas turned dark around the neck and armpits. She didn’t care. Her lungs informed her that they couldn’t keep up this pace – and kept it nonetheless. Ems remembered what her boyfriend had said on the day they’d taken her away: “There’s just two kinds of people: crazy people and then those who’ve got something wrong with their heads. Don’t worry, Ems: you’re just plain crazy.”

The emergency brake had been pulled, she had jumped and was in midair. New lives begin all the time.

Ems 2.0 had arrived.