The Asylum

Solitary.

Odd word.

Tasted lonely. Like the last grape in a forgotten bowl.

The white room was white. The white clothes were white. The white coats were white.

It was a blizzard of sanity painted on the walls of imprisonment.

Her feet were cold.

Eve had to squint in the brightness of the room, noticing that she’d been dressed in something that resembled a hospital gown. Her dark hair was unwashed and had begun to stick together in locks. Searching the place with her eyes she found only a small square of black in the middle of the wall. Her own gaunt face staring back at her in the reflection of the small window of the only door in and out of the room.

The door opened.

“Time to go,” is what they said.

“Get out,” is what she heard.

A girl shouting obscenities at anyone who moved, was forcefully pushed into her cell. The vulnerable fabric of her mind was frayed at the edges and moths of the past and present had eaten their way through the carefully woven material; chewing through memories, biting logic, devouring all forms of reason.

That girl had nothing but a few spindly strands of perception. A few threads of truth tying together her thoughts. Eve still had her while sheet intact; seamlessly sewn and stitched.

Why was she here? The answer came before the question was even fully formed.

Because they want her here.

The Asylum was the landfill of humanity. Anything that was deemed useless or dangerous or even mildly inconvenient ended up here.

Eve was no different.

She opened and closed the heart shaped locket that never left her neck. It was the only thing they had allowed her to take inside. The memory of her mother fastening it to her with trembling fingers was seared into the abyss of her brain.

“Take this and never forget. No matter what they do.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, relishing the absence of white. Her thumb ran over the smooth gold surface of the locket’s interior; three words engraved on one side:

Resist the temptation.

She had mulled over these words a thousand times, rolling them across her tongue and in her mind. Resist the temptation of what?

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Lunch.

Eve swallowed the pills.

Day thirty seven.

Her first test was today. No longer malnourished and paper thin, Eve was told she would be tested.

“Tested on what?”

“No questions,” a faceless man in a white coat said.

But she had questions.

As she walked around the leisure room, eyes averted and heads tilted away from her gaze. In the cafeteria she sat alone wondering what exactly these tests were supposed to be.

She still swallowed the pills.

“Good luck,” the only other girl her age whispered as she walked past.

The testing room was downstairs. Eve had never been downstairs and she was glad that she hadn’t. It did not agree with her.

“Put this,” a woman with deep red lipstick and horribly crooked teeth spoke and handed her a strap, “on your head. Close your eyes.”

Eve did.

Immediately she was home. Her father was crouched over the garden, planting seeds for the spring. Her mother, smiling delicately in the kitchen, poured black tea over two sugar cubes.

THIS IS NOT THE TRUTH

A sharp electronic voice pierced her mind. The static buzzed in her head like a plague of locusts.

The image changed and her father was shoveling dirt into a whole much too deep for a flower seed. Her mother stirred the teacup, slipping rat poison in as she did.

THEY WERE MURDERERS

THEY DESERVED TO DIE

“No!” Eve tried to scream but all that came out was air.

Her eyes shot open and she blinked several times, adjusting to the light.

“That will be all for today.”

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Dinner.

Today was Eve’s sixty-fifth day of testing. Her eyes were sore and pounding headaches had begun to make themselves known in the night. The last few tests had been brutal, and her eyesight was now much worse than it had been a few weeks ago.

“Put these on,” the same woman with the same lipstick and the same crooked teeth said while handing her something that resembled a helmet.

Eve did not want to.

She thought about saying no.

She put it on anyway.

The session was as bad as the others, blood ran in trickles from the corners of her eyes. The headache was as if a mallet was tenderising her membrane.

They returned her to her room where she lay contemplating it all.

How easy would it be to leave. Truly leave, no more pain, no more suffering, no more memories.

Without thinking Eve grabbed the chair from the corner throwing it madly against the mirror that sat high above. A rain of glass washed over her and she gripped one large shard.

End it.

Solitary.

Eve was yet again a grape.

The bandages around her hands and legs were weeping blood where the glass had cut into her skin. They were also tied securely with leather straps to the bed posts. With dirty fingernails she scratched at the timber bed frame, savouring the stinging stabs of miniscule toothpicks sinking their wooden teeth into the tender flesh between the finger and nail.

It reminded her of the locket.

Resist the temptation.

Eve now understood what it had meant. It was just much more difficult than she expected.

Resist the temptation.

Live.