I can feel my mom holding my hand. The ring my father had slid onto her finger the day of their wedding is cold against the skin of my palm, and I can feel her hand tighten as a man in a white coat enters my room. The door screeches shut, and he pulls a stool over to the side of my bed in one swift motion. I move my head to the left, take a look at the clock tick tocking away at my time left in this room with my mother and the man on the stool. I can hear the two people at my bedside speaking, but I’m paying them no attention. The clock is my only focus. It’s time. I feel my mother’s hand loosen and release my own. The man then ushers my mother out the door and calls to a nurse to bring his supplies. I hear a cart begin rolling down the hallway towards the heavy oak door to my hospital room.
It was a small hospital, barely larger than a decent sized house, but it was the town’s only place to send the sick unless they wanted to travel to one of the larger neighboring towns. My parents hadn’t wanted to travel. They felt it would bring too much attention to the family and my “issues”. After I turned thirteen, I just felt unlike myself sometimes. My parents constantly told me how much I’d changed, and the world suddenly wasn’t the same fun and exciting place it used to be. I lost interest in my hobbies. I cried at the drop of a pin, and my parents seemed completely and utterly tired of me. That’s why I’m here.
_
My parents sat me down on the sofa of our grand living room. Sitting across from me, my mother looked nervous. Her hands were intertwined in her lap, and she was rubbing her thumb on the fingers of her other hand. My father, on the contrary, looked stern. His eyebrows were furrowed, and his eyes were sharp like daggers, staring me down and observing me like some sort of foreign object.
My mother opened her mouth to speak, but my father immediately shushed her, “I’ll do the talking Margaret”. She shut her mouth quickly and looked down at her hands. There was a slight expression of frustration on her face, but more than anything she just looked meek and defeated.
“Evelyn”, my father began, “you’ve changed. You’re dramatic, irritable, constantly nervous, and truthfully, you’re beginning to cause far too many problems in this household”. He looked me dead in the eyes and continued, “Your mother and I have come to a decision about your behavior”…
“We’re simply worried Ev”, she used my nickname. They almost never did that. Something was definitely wrong.
“We’ve talked to several experts about your behavior, and we’re certain you’re experiencing hysteria or some other sort of feminine mental health. I thought that would be normal, if they were female driven issues, but when the experts spoke to your mother, she denied having any such problem in her youth. For this reason, we’ve decided to place you in the care of the local hospital. Maybe they can figure out what’s wrong with you”. I was dumbfounded. They were sending me to the loony bin? Thoughts, fears, anger rolled around in my mind so fast I couldn’t catch hold of any of them, but on the outside I showed no emotion. It’s unwise to ask questions when father has made a decision. This would be final, and I would be taken to the hospital to fix my feminine woes, whatever that meant.
It turns out, what that meant was a month of torture. I had been exposed to electroshock therapy periodically throughout my first weeks. However, the doctor determined that it was having no effect on my behavior. He was sitting in my room, white coat billowing out behind him as he sat down on his stool. My parents were sitting across from me at the end of my bed, and the doctor had taken the position to the left of my head. This was an unfavorable position for me, but nobody in the room cared what I thought. My father had his usual stern look, and my mother looked defeated, her default appearance at this point, as the doctor explained that more extreme measures would need to be taken in order to fix me. “I recommend a lobotomy. This procedure would allow me to alter the function of her brain, directly removing the issue. She would be completely normal, or back to normal I should say”.
“So, this will fix her? Then we can go home and live a normal family life again?”, my father had a new look on his face. It was hopeful. He really wanted to fix me, make me a different person, and I would do whatever it took to regain my fathers favor.
“Did you hear that Ev”, she’d been using that name a lot more lately, “you could come home”.
“That’s exactly what the procedure will do for you. Evelyn will be right as rain, and you all can go back to your lives”. My mother looked hopeful, but there seemed to be some skepticism in her face as he explained the procedure to my parents. My father, losing his hopeful look, now just looked bored.
“We trust you. Just fix her”, and with that, my father grabbed my mother’s hand, led her to the side of the bed to kiss me on the forehead and tell me she loved me, then left without a word. My father always was a man of few words. He must have been confident about the procedure, but something about the skeptical look on my mother’s face had worried me.
Whether I was worried or not, the procedure was scheduled the next day, and I had nothing to do but lie in wait.
_
The sounds of metal clanking yanked me out of my memories. The doctor was on his stool, observing his tools. I couldn’t see what lay on the tray. As I leaned up to take a peek, I felt a nurse I hadn’t known was there grab my arm and yank me back down. I could hear a velcro kind of sound, and all of a sudden my arms were being strapped to the bed. I watched as the nurse quickly moved from one arm to the other, making sure I couldn’t lean up. Next, she tied down my feet. I started to feel scared. I could see her moving towards my head, and a final velcro rip sounded as she strapped down my head. I could do nothing but look up at the ceiling. The paint was white, and one lone light bulb hung down above my bed. It was swinging slightly, almost imperceptibly. It was almost hypnotic. The tiny back and forth motion, left, right, left, right…
“Damnit. You forgot my pick. Go get it. Now”, and the nurse who had moments before trapped me in my cotton prison could be heard rushing off and out the door. I could hear the footsteps running down the hall. They were quieter, quieter, quieter. Then they were louder, louder, louder, until the nurse emerged through the doorway and placed a long stick thing on the cart. The doctor turned to me. “Good afternoon Evelyn”, he smiled at me. Not a sincere smile, it was only the kind you’d give to someone you didn’t much care to talk to, but you knew you had to be polite. “Today is the big day. It’s time to begin with the procedure”, while I was distracted, the nurse began wrapping something around my head. I wanted my mom, but the man had already made them leave. Could they hear me? Before I can scream, something slapped onto my face, covering my mouth and nose. It wasn’t much later that everything went black.
_
I woke up with a headache. Every inch of my forehead was throbbing. I slowly opened my eyes, expecting the light of the room to worsen my pain. When I opened them a crack, no light assaulted my eyes, so I opened them all the way and took in the dark room before me. The light that had been above my bed was now cracked and broken. It emitted no light into the room. I slowly tried to move my head, expecting to be stuck with the strap across my head, but I was able to move my head freely. I turned to look at the window; it was completely dark outside. When had the procedure ended? Where were my parents? I sat up, a little too quickly, and dizziness overwhelmed me. Upon closer inspection, the curtains were tattered and torn, and there were rips and tears in the screen. The chairs my parents had sat in just yesterday were laying on the floor as if thrown down or knocked over. The same went for the Doctor’s stool. It was even missing a leg. The wallpaper was peeling in places, and it looked like the place hadn’t been cleaned in months. How did this happen?
I swung my legs over the side of the bed, making sure to do it slowly. This was when I realized I was no longer wearing my hospital gown. This was my best Sunday dress. I wasn’t wearing this yesterday. Did they dress me when they were done? My hair fell around my shoulders in matted waves as I leaned further up, and I grasped at the tresses for comfort. They felt course, dirty, matted. What was going on here? I stood up, ignoring the pain in my head from doing so, and ran out of the room, hardly noticing that the strong oak door that had once stood at it’s entrance was no longer there on it’s hinges. “Mom! Dad!”, I was running like wild down the hall, calling for my parents, but receiving no answer. “Moom! Dad!”. I approached the door; the hallway had been a blur, but from what I noticed, this place looked deserted, and all I wanted was to go home. I threw my hand out to grab a hold of the doorknob and swung it open wildly. I could see the long steps down to safety below, and I barreled towards the opening…
_
I slowly opened my eyes, and was shocked to find myself back in my deserted hospital room, the same broken light above my head. I sat up, already knowing I wasn’t strapped to the bed, and my head hurt less this time than it did the last, although there was still some throbbing pain in the front of my head. I was in the same clothes, and my hair felt the same, and the room looked the same, and everything seemed to be the same. I swung my legs over the bed just like before, and hopped down off of it. I slowly approached the doorway, which I now truly noticed was battered and missing the big oak door that had stood there only yesterday in my memory. I didn’t run this time, but I called out for my parents, “Mom! Dad!”. I picked up the pace a little, and headed for the exit as I had before. The hallway looked even worse at this pace. The wallpaper was peeling here too, and everything looked dingy and covered in dirt. I approached the door, reached for the knob, and slowly opened the door, which was covered in dirt and filth. The knob felt almost greasy in my hand, and I let go of it as soon as I could. I took a few steps forward, “Mom…Dad…”.
_
I woke back up in my bed. Distressed at the thought of the door at the front of the house, at my inability to leave through it, I decided to explore the other rooms of the house looking for an escape. I hopped off of my bed and headed towards the doorway that led out to the hall. I barely poked my head out of the frame, taking a peek to my left, and then to my right. I decided to head to the left, as there were only bedrooms to my right.
I entered the first door on my left after exiting my room, which led into a small empty room. The only thing here was a door. It was slightly ajar, and I could feel a coldness coming from it. I thought that that must mean it leads outside, so I gripped the edge of the door and swung it fully open. I took a step, crossing the threshold of the door, and descended the creaking stairs that led into an abyss below.
It was an immediate thing, this feeling of dread that entered the body and soul as you entered the room. I saw no light, but there were windows half buried in the earth that let enough light in to see. The floors were concrete, and a giant drain sat in the middle of the floor; the metal a rusty red color. The walls were bare, the windows curtainless, and the atmosphere cold and unwelcoming.
I didn’t feel good here. There was a presence, and feeling, that weighed down your body, making it feel heavy and sluggish. I could almost feel something behind me, the presence was so strong. A whoosh of air blew a strand of hair into my face, and I froze in my tracks. Was someone down here? Suddenly, a bony, skeletal hand gripped my arm hard, and whipped me around. The face I found before me was horrifying. Pale gray skin, decaying teeth, foul breath, thin and emaciated body, and worst of all, long picks, almost like ice picks, sticking out of the sockets above his yellow bloodshot eyes. “Welcome Ev”, the creature’s voice was merely a croak, and it sounded like gravel was tearing it’s way through it’s throat. “What are you doing down here?”, the picks protruded from its eyes, and all I could think about was how similar they looked to the pick I saw in the Doctor’s hands before everything went black. I wrenched my arm from its grasp, and ran to the stairs, never looking back at the horror I had just come face to face with. “Where are you going Ev?”, it cackled, and chills ran down my spine. I started up the steps, but halfway up I tripped. I was crying, tears were clouding my vision, and all I could do was crawl the rest of the way up. It was as if in my terror I had forgotten how to stand.
_
I shot up in my bed. Panting, I looked around my room. Same cream white walls, familiar pink comforter draped over my legs, the cold air from the fan in my room blowing around my silky black curtains. I brought my hand up to my face, and I could feel the familiar curve of my cheek, the small bump where my nose had broken years and years before, the thickness of my eyebrows, and the squareness of my jaw. I slowly pulled the comforter up to my neck, enveloping myself in it’s warmth.
The dream had been horrible. I could still feel the throbbing headache of the girl from my dream, Evelyn. What was that about? I had never had such a real and vivid dream before, and I had never ever remembered my dreams well enough to still feel the phantom pains left over from them. I tried to lay back down and close my eyes. I listened to the low hum of my fan, the soft sound of crickets outside my window, and I fell asleep once again.