by Martha Woods
“There're bite wounds on the body,” the woman added.
“I didn’t kill my mother!” She thrashed her head around.
“Ri-I-I-I-I-ght,” the woman laughed. “Now you want to tell us what actually happened?”
Her body was screaming like it was being stretched apart. “That thing!”
“A thing?” the man laughed.
“It came in from the window,” she groaned.
“Alright. Let’s go.” The medic came behind her and started wheeling her out of the house.
She couldn’t see anything except the midnight black sky and the medic’s face staring down at her. “I didn’t do it.” She managed to make her voice calm.
“It won’t matter,” he whispered to her.
Sara thought she would go to heaven. Instead she felt she was in hell, being tortured by her own body.
“Sara Bishop.” The female’s cold voice came from behind her when they stopped at the back of the ambulance. “You are under arrest for the murder of Bridgett Bishop. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.” The woman’s face came into view.
The pain was too much to bear. It was writhing through her, turning her insides apart. “Why not jail?” She could barely speak.
“You’re going to undergo a psych eval to see if you’re fit to stand trial first.”
Chapter 4
The entire time she was laying, chained to a gurney in the ambulance, Sara kept her eyes shut and bit down on her tongue while the antidote twisted through her. She didn’t notice when they stopped, it was only when the air changed from cold to freezing and the sharp fluorescent lights started digging underneath her eyelids.
The male voices were telling her to stand and the cold scraping of the cuffs painfully rubbed against her wrists as they grabbed her off the gurney. When she got to her feet, her knees gave out, and they had to keep hold of her as they pulled her through a succession of rooms.
First, there was a bathroom where she caught a glimpse of her face. Half of her body had been caked in blackened dried blood that had congealed inside her hair, standing it up on one end. They took her to another room where they forced her to take her clothes off and hosed her down. The water felt like it was tearing her skin off and she was starting to feel her stomach churn.
A cold-eyed blond nurse ushered her into a small square room with a bed and metal toilet after forcing her to change into a pair of thin blue scrubs. “The pills are going to come up, and you’re going to need this.” She handed Sara a paper cup filled with pills. “There’s muscle relaxers in here as well as tranquilizers.
“I’m going to die.” She sat down on the bed with her arms wrapped around her chests. “It’s too much.”
“Well, you’re not going to feel right for a while. It could take a few months to get your head right, but the pain resides after a day or two.”
The woman knelt down to face her.
“What?”
She met Sara’s eyes. “You’re fucked. You’re going to go to prison, and they’re never going to let you out. You might as well accept that now; otherwise, it’s going to get a lot worse.” She stood up.
“I’d never kill her,” shouted Sara.
“You don’t know yourself as well as you think you do.” She handed Sara a cup of water. “Drink the whole thing and take the pills or we’re going to tie you down and give you a shot.”
Sara did just that and laid down on the hard bed. It was a metal frame with a high school gym mat for a mattress, it felt so terrible that when she laid down on it, her back screamed and her entrails threatened to split open her stomach.
The pills slowly crept their way in, infusing her blood and easing the tension. The cramping pain never stopped, though. It stuck with her like her grief, which exploded when what was left of the OxyContin came up. She couldn’t sleep. She knew what would happen if she did. Her mind would torment her with images of her mother and the terrible injustice she was facing.
What did the woman mean when she said that she didn’t know herself as well as she thought? Was there some madness creeping up inside her? Did she hallucinate the monster flying out the window? Maybe she entered a psychiatric state and killed her mother. It made sense. Monsters like that didn’t exist.
It was impossible.
As the hours crept by and Sara sat on the edge of the bed, the guilt started creeping in. She couldn’t trust her own mind, not when she saw things like that creature, staring at her like a snake ready to open its jaws and devour her. Something had made her tear her mother’s throat out.
The police would know. They’d detect pieces of tissue inside her mouth. They’d probably find saliva rimming the wound, and there would, of course, be dental records that could match her teeth to the shape of the bite.
Why did she do that? Was she losing her mind? She had to be. There were times when she’d do nothing but pace around looking for things to clean around the house, desperate to pass the time till her mother got home. Perhaps her mother’s schedule had built up subconscious resentment that caused her to explode. Maybe the nurse was right. She didn’t know herself like she thought she did.
* * *
She’d never forgive herself for doing it. She felt dirty in her own skin like she could tear it off just to get rid of the pain of what she’d done. It overshadowed the cramps, still writhing around in her body. It kept her staring at the wall, contorted like a pretzel. She didn’t want to move. She didn’t deserve to, and the dread kept her from doing so. It would force her to accept the reality of her own existence. She killed her mother. She wasn’t supposed to exist.
She stayed like that, hour after hour, allowing the sickening sight of her mother’s black, gaping wounds burn itself into the back of her mind. She kept that image there as a form of penance, reaffirming her self-hatred, reminding her of what she’d done. The worse it felt, the better. She deserved every single ounce of pain and a thousand times more.
She built a mental pool of scorching hellfire around herself, consisting of guilt and self-hatred. She wouldn’t allow herself to grieve. Instead, she dove into that pool and did everything she could to torture herself. She killed her mother. She deserved worse than death-no solace, no rest, just torture.
As the hours went by, the tears came and left. Her heart broke a thousand times, and memories of her and her mother crept in.
The string of events passed her by, one by one, each a milestone, marking the maddeningly slow passage of time spent waiting. Soon, the silence became another form of torture. Her mind screamed as she realized she was in a cell, barely small enough for her to pace around and the only thing that could keep her company was her own thoughts. They began to run out, and her mind grew blank as she waited for something, anything to happen.
Nothing did. Every time she heard a noise, the slamming of a door or keys clanking, she jumped up to see who it was, but nobody came. She didn’t know what time it was, whether the night had passed or not. There was no way of knowing how long she’d been there. It could’ve been hours. It could’ve been days.
After an infinite amount of time, a hatch opened up on the door, and a thick hand pushed through a tray of porridge and milk.
“Hey,” she shot up off the bed. “What is going on?” There was no answer, so she took the tray and tried to bend down so she could see through the opening. As soon she took her food, it snapped shut, and she threw the bowl across the room. There was a paper cup of filled with several pills.
She huddled on the bed and tried to close her eyes. The voices started shortly after that. She heard her mother walking in through the front door while she was bending down and pulling out a roasted chicken from the oven. When she turned around, she saw her mother’s neck gaping open, spraying blood all over the carpe
t.
Other visions were of her in the woods all alone, searching through the brush until she found her mother, pale with maggots eating at her corpse.
Every image cemented her guilt and reaffirmed that she had killed her mother. That certainty grew into a serpent, stronger than the cramps. It had left her eyes raw from crying and her mind dull. It got so bad that she started rocking back and forth. Every time her tailbone rubbed against the mat, a spark lit and spread throughout her body and as she rocked faster and faster, those sparks grew into a blaze of energy that engulfed her body and sent her thrashing and writhing with foam spewing out of her mouth until she blacked out and woke up on the floor.
There was a tray sitting on the door hatch. It was a sandwich wrapped in a thin plastic bag. When she opened it, there was a thick piece of bologna and a slimy piece of cheese crushed in between two slices of thick bread. It went down the drain, but the pills looked tempting. There were two little blues, those would be the tranquilizers and a pink. That was the muscle relaxer. It would ease the rest of the pain, and the drugs would help with her cramps. She grabbed a tiny water bottle sitting next to the sandwich and opened it to take the pills, shivering from whatever caused her to black out.
She put the bottle to her lips. Don’t take those.
She found herself compelled to run over and throw them in the toilet, and fell down on her knees, losing what little was left in her stomach. She was starting to hear voices. She’d been questioning her sanity this whole time. Now, she knew for certain that she was crazy.
Chapter 5
She blacked out several more times that day, each time hearing a voice inside her head. Sometimes it told her she would be okay. Other times it told her to stop. It would stop her from dwelling on her guilt and thoughts of her own insanity, but schizophrenics are always certain that they aren’t crazy. Once she screamed back at it saying, “I killed her!” She immediately fell to the ground with phantom arms, warm and loving, wrapped around her.
Not true. Not true. Love. Love. Escape.
Sara didn’t believe that she was innocent, or that she was sane, or even that such a thing as love existed, not without her mother but she did need to leave--desperately.
Over the next few hours, the voices turned into phantoms, swirling around the room, pacing around her head in an unholy procession. The masked demons, stared at her, imbuing her with anger. She was angry for losing her mother and furious at the way she was being treated, like an animal locked in a cage.
They reassured her. That seemed to be their primary purpose. Through them she found relief. It got a little bit easier, sitting there, locked up like an animal. Sara couldn’t have killed her. There was no way she could do that. Sara loved her mother more than anyone else in her entire life.
She threw her pills away and began eating her simple dinner of beans and hot dogs, taking what strength she could while they spoke to her, reassuring her, imbuing her with a divine energy that grew, moment by moment tingling against her skin, cleansing the depression. Those phantoms showed her a way.
They were real. The voices were real, and she had power.
Tense your muscles.
She was sitting on her bed in the middle of a dark swirl of black fog.
Just your finger.
She did what they said now and reached out her index finger, tensing it as hard as she could, watching the spark of blue fire flit around the tip.
Use your light.
The force of the door flying open brought Sara back to reality as two gorillas, each with blond buzz cuts and meaty red faces walked in. “On your knees on the bed and face the wall.” The larger one huddled around her, waddling back and forth on his feet intimidatingly. “Hands on the wall.” He barked.
She placed them on the wall.
“Spread them apart.” He knocked her in the kidneys with a nightstick.
“Ow! Mothe--
He slammed her in the face. “Turn around and spread your fucking hands,” he barked.
The blow shot her head back, tensed her arm, sending electricity traveling down her spine. They couldn’t hit her. They had no right.
Fucking pigs.
They felt her up, grabbed her hands and chained them behind her back with a chain in between them and a leash connected to it so they could drag her along like a dog. Sara was being treated like a moving piece of meat, meant solely to comply and scream. She’d never been so humiliated in her entire life.
The last straw was a set of shackles that dug into her ankles, rubbing against the bone. They used the leash to throw her onto the ground and knock her head against the concrete, nearly splitting her skull open. Then they ripped her up to a standing position and kicked her in the butt saying, “Move bitch.”
She thought of maintaining a strict policy of noncompliance, but if she dragged her feet, they would just beat her and put her out. So she let them drag her while the shackles moved back and forth, her muscles tensing as they barked orders, telling her to turn left, then right down the hall until they reached a steel-reinforced black door and opened it up.
Inside was a long, white metal tube with a gurney placed inside and a two-way mirror. “What is that thing?”
She turned her head and got knocked right in the temple.
“Shut up, bitch and get the fuck up there.”
They invaded her sanctuary, threatened her with life in prison. Then they locked her up and beat her. They had violated her in every single way, and now they were forcing her to allow them to see inside her head. That’s what this thing did. It was a PET scan, and they weren’t looking for injuries. They were checking her brain for signs of abnormalities.
She was pouring out buckets of sweat, trying to go as slow as possible as they pulled the leash and dragged her backward towards the machine. She couldn’t allow it. When they pulled her up on the gurney, one of the guards spanked her hard, and nearly crashed into the mirror behind her from the blast of blue fire that erupted out of her hand.
It sent the Guard careening backward and drove a psychic wind through the air that, when she stood up, whipped her hair behind her. All she had to do was look down and her handcuffs and shackles turned to slowly fading ash. The guard still standing glanced at her, then turned around to go. He disappeared in a hate fueled blast.
The flames danced around her like the wings of angels, giving her an unholy glow. When she turned her gaze towards the guard laying under the two-way mirror, she took her time, taking in his screams while she slow roasted him. Then he went still, and she used the full force of her fire to turn him into a pile of ash.
Once the man was gone, the fire burned out and Sara collapsed.
Chapter 6
Sara smelled French toast and a pungent black cloud of coffee hanging in the air. She woke up smiling and sat up, shocked when she opened her eyes to see that she was laying in her grandmother’s guest bedroom.
Hadn’t she just blacked out after fighting those two guards in the hospital? What about her murder charges? Her Mother’s funeral? So many loose ends. How could she possibly be on the opposite side of the country when it seemed like she was still in the northwest a few seconds ago.
What was that fire?
Sara didn’t even bother to change out of the white shift she found herself wearing. Instead, she raced down the stairs, through her grandmother’s old Victorian home. “Grandma!” She hopped down the last step into the kitchen where her grandmother was setting down a plate of food for her. “What the f--
“Watch your language.” Even though the woman was ancient, she was sharp as a whip, and she looked like she was still in her fifties.
“What happened?” Sara crossed her arms across her chest.
“You don’t remember anything?” She poured herself a steaming pot of tea.
“Oh, I remember plenty.” She sat down and threw a piece of egg in her mouth, washing it down with a gulp of coffee. “I remember setting two hospital guards on fire with my mind. I remember strange voi
ces showing me how to do it. I also remember being chained up and forced into a hospital after being accused of my mother’s murder. What I don’t remember is traveling from the west coast to the east coast.”
Sara's grandmother sighed and pulled her enormously long gray hair back to her shoulder before sitting down across from Sara. “I brought you here the night it happened. The police called me and told me you needed a place to stay so I had you flown out. They escorted you into my care. When you got here,” she laughed, “you were so delusional.”
“Oh, come on,” she shot up out of her chair. “The last thing I need is to be lied to. Do you have any idea what I’ve been through?” She leaned forward to confront the woman who was completely undaunted. “I’ve been chained up, locked in a cell, drugged and hearing voices for the past 24 hours. Now I think, after what just happened, you owe me a bit more than that heaping pile of bullshit.”
Her grandmother reached over to a porcelain container full of creamer at the center of the table and spooned a small amount into her coffee. She stirred it around, staring at the liquid while she did. Then she tasted it and set the glass down. By the time she went to grab another spoonful, Sara had all but lost her patience.
“You’re not going to tell me a single thing are you?” She stared down at her grandmother as the woman poured the next spoonful in and swirled it around. “Well, are you?”
“Just eat your food.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Of course you are,” she laughed jovially. “You’re probably so tired you’re about to fall over, and you don’t even know it.”
Sara sat silently with her arms crossed and her chair pushed away from the table. She met her grandmother’s eyes. “This little bullshit charade will get you nowhere with me.”
“Watch your fucking mouth.” Sara's grandmother seemed to grow ten feet.
Sara grabbed a piece of dry French toast and stomped up to the guest room. The second she got inside, she tried to summon the blue fire. She tensed her whole body. Her head shook, and her lips trembled, but there was no fire, no voices.
