Mind’s Open Doors

Anything but a knock on the door. Hena was at the brink of life and death. Any moment she was ready to leave the earthly existence.

For months she had lived with pain. War had stripped away everything familiar, and illness had taken over. Yet now, as her consciousness drifted through a strange and silent darkness, the pain seemed to be drifting away. That was miracle unfolding out of nowhere. Somewhere deep inside, the frightened child had awoken and realized that everything what it actually seemed. There were dark forces at work.

She struggled to remember how she had arrived there.Many

fragments of memories returned to her mind, of and on.

Sirens.

Dust.

Screams.

A hospital trembling beneath enemy fire.

An Iranian barrage of ballistic missiles had struck Israel. One of the missiles had torn through the hospital where Hena lay recovering from injuries sustained earlier in the war. The explosion had shattered walls and windows, filling the corridors with smoke and debris.

People rushed toward bomb shelters.

Doctors shouted over the alarms.

Stretchers rolled through smoke-filled hallways.

But Hena could not move.

Her fractured arms and legs were secured in casts. Helplessly, she watched nurses drag patients toward exits while others disappeared beneath clouds of dust.

“Please,” she whispered to a man standing nearby.

The man looked at her and raised his hands in despair.

There was nothing he could do.

Then another explosion shook the building.

The ceiling crumbled.

The floor collapsed beneath her and Hena began to slip away into nothingness.

The screams grew distant.

The rubble faded.

The pain dissolved.

Everything melted into a twilight where nothing felt entirely real.

Perhaps she was dying.

Perhaps she already had!

Months of sickness and suffering had transformed her body. Now she felt herself drifting beyond names and memories, beyond fear and grief.

Then she heard a knock out of nowhere.

A knock?!

Again , she heard a sharp knock upon a door.

“It isn’t my door.” she thought to herself.

It’s a different door.

But the sound echoed through the darkness.

The door opened slightly.

And everything vanished.

When awareness returned, Hena remembered only bits of incident.

Flashes of memories appeared as follows: An ambulance emerging through smoke.

A man in white holding a syringe.

Someone shouting, “Move! Move!”

The taste of dust in her mouth.

Then there was blankness.

Endless blankness!

When she finally awoke, she found herself somewhere else.

A long corridor stretched before her. Paint peeled from the walls in faded strips. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. The building smelled of bleach, damp concrete, and stale air.

At the far end of the hallway hung a sign:

Northern District Psychiatric Annex.

Confused, Hena followed two attendants through a series of locked doors.

“This isn’t my place,” she said.

Neither attendant replied.

A man behind a desk glanced briefly at her file.

He said: “Bed 14.” That was all. No questions. No explanation. No concern. The heavy door locked behind them.

The ward was unnervingly quiet.

It did not howl like the madhouses of old Harlem. Rather , it whispered.

Orderlies moved silently through the halls. Their smiles never reached their eyes.

Women sat scattered throughout the ward.

Some rocked invisible infants.

Some spoke to empty corners.

Some stared at walls for hours.

That was what disturbed Hena most. There were no children.

Yet many of the women behaved as though their children were still beside them.

One woman hummed endlessly. Another cradled empty air. A third whispered lullabies throughout the night.

Days passed and turned into weeks.

Whenever Hena tried to explain about the bombing, the hospital, and the war, the nurses responded didn’t listen to her . They came in and mechanically completed their note taking duties in the same manner.

They wrote the following next to Hena’s name.

Delusional.

Noncompliant.

Increase the dosage.

The more she protested, the more medication she received.

Eventually, she stopped speaking.

Silence, she discovered, was safer.

And silence allowed her to watch.

She began studying patterns.

Shift changes. Medication rounds. Meal deliveries. Guard rotations. Most importantly, she noticed a time gap that would lead to her liberty.Every morning at 3:00 AM, one guard ended his shift before the next arrived.

Ten minutes. Ten unguarded minutes. The entire institution balanced upon that forgotten space in time. And while she watched, she noticed something else.

Children occasionally appeared inside the facility.

Not many.

Just enough.

They arrived frightened.

They left quietly but they never returned. Their beds remained empty. Their names disappeared from records.No one ever spoke of them again.

That same night Hena noticed something else.

One night a bruised girl slipped a folded note through a ventilation towards Hena.

Tuesday.

White truck.

No windows.

The boy who hummed stopped humming whenever the truck arrived.

That was the signal. Slowly, the truth emerged. This was not a hospital. It was a sorting room disguised as one. The heavily medicated disappeared one way. The quiet ones disappeared another. The lost paid a price for surviving. And children vanished altogether.

Then , one fine morning amidst the pouring rain something miraculous happened. At exactly 3:00 AM, the familiar routine followed. One guard signed out. His replacement had not yet arrived. The remaining guards were distracted and weren’t around.

The hallway stood empty. Hena took that opportunity to escape. She moved out, tiptoeing through the corridors.

The bruised girl followed her.

The humming boy also came along.

There were no words spoken. They moved out without any hesitation. Their only purpose was to somehow escape the facility.

Together they slipped toward the kitchen. Weeks earlier, Hena had discovered a severed alarm wire hidden beside a fire exit. She had a chalked an escape plan and communicated it to her friends. Soon as they stepped into the kitchen , Hena used her hair pins to close the alarm circuit.

When themetal of her hair pin touched the copper wire , the circuit closed.

Instantly the building alarms fired up. With that all the lights flashed. Commotion and chaos

Spread through the building. All doors burst open. Orderlies shouted and everyone moved towards the front entrance.

Meanwhile, some patients awoke in confusion. The Clipboards near their beds hit the floor. Guards ran in every direction.

The white truck idling behind the building suddenly became irrelevant.Everyone rushed toward the chaos. No one looked toward the kitchen.

Three children and a woman slipped through the service exit and escaped into the rain-soaked darkness.

Cold air struck Hena’s face.

For the first time in months, the world felt real.

Beyond the facility there was an abandoned farmland. Rows of olive trees marked its periphery. Within minutes, Hena and her friends disappeared into the darkness. Farther beyond lay low hills and patches of woodland.

All three moved quickly. They didn’t want to attract any attention towards themselves. So they cautiously moved.

The rain concealed their tracks.

The darkness concealed their fear.

By dawn they had crossed the fields and reached the shelter behind the hills. That’s when they halted to pause and look back.

The institution stood far away now, a pale shape against the horizon.

No alarms could reach them anymore.

No locked doors.

No injections.

No lies.

Only open skies.

Three days later they found refuge at a small church run by a relief worker.

Inside, an elderly woman named Ruth folded blankets beside a wood stove.

She asked no questions.

She simply welcomed them inside.

That night, while the children slept, Hena gave Ruth a list of names.

Names of children who had disappeared.

Names of women who had never escaped.

Names that deserved to be remembered.

Ruth wrote down every one.

Months later, the facility was quietly shut down unexpectedly. One morning Ruth sent Hena and her friends to a homeless shelter, telling them that they were being sent off on a field trip.

Meanwhile, Ruth disappeared and fled into vagary.

Officials called it a budgetary closure. No investigation followed. No explanations were offered. No one accounted for the missing children. No one answered Hena’s questions.

But by then Hena had learned something important. Miracles c’d live between deceptive truths. Courage is the bridge.

Ruth was ruthless. She was part of a cannibalistic cult group, murdering children for their blood.

For Hena —The way out was never the door. It was the space between what she saw and what she was made to believe. Appearances were deceptive in her situation but she walked it off bravely. That’s was indeed a miracle!

Today Hena runs a fancy restaurant somewhere in southern Texas.