“. . . thy kingdom come, thy will be done . . .” she was curled in a bony ball on the bed, the room was warm – was it always this warm? - the blanket soft – but sometimes suffocating, itchy – and she could hear soft music playing somewhere – Mozart? No, somebody was whispering . . . I felt a funeral in my brain, and mourners to and fro . . .
“Rise and shine, Beth, I’m setting your orange juice on the nightstand.” A round lady in a bright purple cardigan was arranging a glass on the table.
The girl on the bed raised her head an inch – she could feel that her hair was matted – and smiled just in case the woman was more than a mirage.
“I’ll be back to get you in ten minutes for the group meeting.” The lady was smiling, but the girl could see pity in her eyes as she backed toward the door. The girl didn’t blink.
All the horses were in their stalls that morning, all cows at the fence, all the pigs at the trough, each animal lined up flawlessly. She felt sweet contentment in their alignment, a satisfaction she knew she should savor. She tried to remember the next line to her prayer, the one that she said every morning, but the words had slipped away . . .
When the slight disturbance came, as it usually did, it was so slight she barely took note: she kept her eyes forward at the animals in their places, she reveled in her ability to remain stoic . . . treading, treading . . . A rumble of thunder in the distance tickled the very back of her eardrum, but she swallowed any doubt and continued to watch the animals, who were still aligned and contained behind their fences.
“On Earth as it is in Heaven . . .” there it was, now what was the next line . . .
The horses’ stomping grew louder, the cows’ sputtering more frequent, but she tried not to let it overwhelm her. She dug her nails into the palms of her hands, still aware of the bed underneath her.
The intensity of the stomping and the sputtering was growing – that was undeniable – so she closed her eyes, she blocked it out, she breathed evenly, she waited for the nurse’s return.
Peace for a moment, sweet peace like drifting off to sleep in her mother’s warm embrace as a child, sipping hot cocoa in front of the fire at Christmas, a cool stream of water drizzling over her forehead.
And then something, something so small it was almost indeterminable, indeterminable yet alarmingly significant, broke loose in her mind . . . and space began to toll . . .
She tried to hold on, she grasped for that embrace, for the last words of that prayer, but this disaster was one where holding on would do no good. By the time she opened her eyes things had broken loose: the cows were leaping wildly over the pigs, the orange juice running down the walls, and the horses’ eyes rolling, bloody, feral . . . and dropped down and down – and hit a world at every plunge . . .
She saw the stampede, the dust swirling, but she couldn’t hear a thing, she couldn’t make sense of it all, and then someone was grabbing her arms, pulling her up so she wasn’t quite cascading toward the madness, just overlooking it, a polite spectator, and there she was again in her tiny room in the ward, the nurse standing there with that same pitiful smile.
Wrecked
Solitary
Here.
