Relapse
Flash Fiction by Cheryl Snell
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They say I sat in the middle of the floor pouring water on my head, but I say they are liars. They say I stole from my mother and threatened my brother. They say I tried to get a passport to go to Rome to get married, but I hate marriage. It makes women prisoners. This hospital is a jail, too, but the wardens keep it a secret. They say we can leave anytime, but the door is only painted on the wall like a mural. There is no real exit. There’re only strange angles and deceptive surfaces, like the long table of mirrored glass in the middle of this room they’ve brought me to. It has corners that could cut someone. I reach out my hand to test an edge for sharpness, but it’s not sharp. I see my mother and brother at the table. Where is my sister? There she is in the corner, laughing at me, her shoulders going up and down like wings. She’s the angel, I’m the devil. My mother asks, “Are you feeling better, dear?” She strokes my hair. A fistful of blonde comes away in her hand, and she stares at it. “Why did you tell on me?” I turn from my mother to scream at my brother. Hands clamp down my flailing arms immediately. They’ll say I lunged at him. “No, I didn’t,” I whisper. “We had to get you into treatment before the rest of your brain burned up.”
My head is hot. He is the one setting it on fire. “You should go back to your own condo so I can come home to look after Mom.” I grab her hand. There’ll be no separating us. But Mother is interrupting. She needs to be quiet. “No dear,” she says. “You should stay in the hospital and get well.” I gasp. She has stolen my breath. I toss her hand away and run out of the room. I rush headlong down the halls on the slippery linoleum marked by red and green arrows. Wide-eyed people shush me as I go. A woman is wailing, but that can’t be me. I am silent, and I run, my brother, rooting for me to trip, sprawling backward into the foreign territory outside Holiday Inn, bills floating like feathers out of my purse and my suitcase of colored pencils opening in the next locked ward, this place where I have led myself, believing that someone will come, half-hoping they will not, not before I swallow pills that have lost their fight. Going still beneath my skin, sirens dopplering in the distance, lights burn in my sister’s house beckoning me to come back, but my legs fall away from under me.
Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and the novels of her Bombay Trilogy. Her latest title is a series called Intricate Things in their Fringed Peripheries. Most recently, her writing has appeared in Gone Lawn, Ilanot Review, Cafe Irreal, Pure Slush, Literary Yard, and New World Writing. View more of her work at cheryl.snell.