The Asylum - 1

    I'll tell you what happened to me. 

    I used to be a nurse at the Collingsworth Mental Hospital, though back then it was the Collingsworth Asylum. Named after its founder, who was the close friend of the Reverend Tucker, who founded our town -- did you know that? Of course you did. Everyone knows that story. You'll have to forgive an old woman's rambling. 

    Twenty years I worked there, wiping spit off chins, spoon feeding the ones who'd grown feeble, or had too much excitement and needed sedatives... even the poor souls with those awful lobotomy scars. What? Oh, yes. Those sorts of things were common back then; it was a different time. Not much was known about what made people do the things they did, or how to make someone 'right' again, so if therapy or pills couldn't fix you, they'd shock the 'wrong' out of you, and if that didn't work, well... the only thing they could do was poke around in your head until you couldn't do anything on your own anymore. 

  That part of the hospital -- the other girls and I secretly called it the Garden (because it was full of vegetables, hardy har har) -- wasn't dangerous at all. Those of them who could move around were harmless. Oh, sometimes we'd get a patient who'd tuck his medicine in his cheek and we'd have to sedate him, but nothing much worse than that. I wanted to help people, but I wasn't willing to risk my life. I don't know how the nurses in the Dungeon (the basement, where the criminally insane were kept) handled it -- I certainly couldn't have. 

  

  Twenty years is a long time. You get to know people, and invest in them. They become your friends, and you want more than anything for them to be okay, and they want someone to care about them, and remember them. Like that girl they brought in that time, what was her name? Abigail! Yes. She hadn't been there more than a few days, mostly unconscious. The poor thing was an absolute mess, and I was given the task of bathing her once she was awake. She was such a beautiful girl, graceful and slim, like a ballerina, but her hair was wild and dark, and she was covered head to toe in blood. Turned out she'd snapped and killed her mama's boyfriend after he tried laying hands on her, but not before he beat her near half to death, the poor dear. 

  I took to her right away, being as she was so small and frail. Such a perfect little thing. I'd check on her every so often, just to straighten her hair while she slept, water her plants, that sort of thing. Call me an old biddy, but I think pretty things should be kept pretty. Besides, she had no one. No visitors, no calls. I thought someone ought to show her kindness, especially since she probably hadn't seen any in a while. 

  Once she was awake and fully aware, though, that was a different story altogether... But before that, would you excuse an old lady for a moment? That tea is delicious, but it goes right through me. 

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- © Jackson Cambridge, 2015.