The Writings of Crystal Frost

But he wondered why their eyes were violet. Just like the Forgotten Children in the Chronics Ward. Maybe the nurses were vengeful ghosts, who lost their sanity long ago, their only release in treating Dr. Splinter’s most unstable patients with as much cruelty as they were treated with, never remembering how happy they were when they were children, before the mental illness struck them and they had to be in this ill-stricken place. He could see one nurse as her heels clicked and cackled when she approached his cell, gazing at him with as much concern as a serial murderer gazing upon the torturing of his victims as her blood flowed out of her, her breasts looking as plastic as a Barbie doll’s, as she turned the key in the lock and said to him, with all of her superficiality, with all her venomous viciousness, “Let’s go, Mr. Seabrooks. It’s time for your medicine, as prescribed by Dr. Robotnik. You still have your feet attached and not in restraints, follow me to the medicine room.”

The medicine room. Not the electroshock therapy room, as they would call it. A room where they would prescribe Mr. Seabrooks his medication, whether he wanted it, or not. And he just had the painful and fear-throbbing (as his heart began to throb in his chest as much as his head) realization that he couldn’t escape from the throes of the oddly colored pills this time. The nurses still haven’t let him out of his restraints, and there was no where to run, as the door at the end of the bright hallway was locked and required a special key to open. The patients grinned widely with a full set of rotted, almost completely black and nicotine-stained teeth. They chanted in unison with their screechy voices, the ones who were without restraints clapped and swung themselves against the cell’s bars, screaming and singing, “Mr. Seabrooks, it’s time for your medicine! Mr. Seabrooks, it’s time for your medicine! Your medicine! You’re getting the taste of your own medicine!” And they laughed and snickered and snackered, and the cells began to be so loud that Sonic wished he could cover his ears, as his eyes and teeth were clenched like the patient’s red fists against the bars, and he thought he could even see the nurses smirking, their violet eyes beaming, as he had no choice but to follow them as the clamor became louder, his ears were hurting even more and were throbbing as much as his head and heart were, as the patients cackled maniacally, bouncing in their cells, one with his hand out of the bars stretching for him, taunting him. “You’re going to get it, Mr. Seabrooks! You’re going to get it! You’re going to get a taste of your own medicine!” And he noticed that his last name, Mr. Seabrooks, was now said with a spittle of hate, their voices black and full of misery and melancholy and loathing, and he began to hate his last name, wishing that his father was named a different name than something as hated and despised as Seabrooks.

And of course he was going to get that bittersweet taste of his own medicine.

And so was this kid that Nack eyed in the middle of the street, getting the bittersweet taste of his knife, and he would get the bittersweet taste of his money. More to buy the yellow pills that gave him peace, the sweet leaf that made him forget of the pain that cotton and dye provided.

He thought for a moment he also had violet eyes, the same set of eyes that the little girl he saw nearby the hillbilly swing set on a trailer court as he rode down the street, but his eyes were blue, like his father’s, like that asshole prick who wanted to send him to work at this time, working for around eight hours a day for meager pay. Fuck that, he said to himself. I will make a life for myself by stealing and being high on the bittersweet pills and the leaf that one of my so-called friends is smoking in his trailer home right now…He was simply salivating for that taste of bud, the taste of relief and tranquility overcoming him like a sweet wave at the beaches he always looked at in pictures. He wondered if someday he could go to California. After all, he could smoke the stuff if he had proof that he had a “terminal” illness. He did indeed have a terminal illness. It was called “evil”. He knew his sins would make him die one day. He realized that all the things he was doing to these other kids, these other teachers, his father, were all bad things he shouldn’t have done in the first place, but he enjoyed it, he got that taste of shock and pleas of mercy and money when he initiated these actions, and he didn’t care at all that these people were hurting. He only cared for what he felt, and that was the taste of the thrill ride, the ride towards Hell, the ride that he knew would take him further and further from an actual animal to the primordial ooze and back into a single cell organism that only eats the others and cares nothing for it.

“Hey kid, what are you doing out here? Did you know that it’s getting late? Did you know that you could get…hurt?” he said, with a smirk showing off his one fang on the side of his face, glinting in the streetlights, along with the shine of his golden eyes like bright honey.

“Fuck off, asshole.”

“Now now, let’s not get hasty here. You certainly don’t want your mother or father to worry about you, hmm?”

He took out a blade that was as long as his overgrown fang, serrated at the end like small teeth, with a hilt made of ivory. He was proud of this knife he got at the black market for only ten dollars. It was worth every penny. And worth every penny out of the people he would threaten and stab with this beautiful, handcrafted sword he thought possibly came from the 1800’s, a time he simply didn’t know existed, as he never read his history books they gave him at the beginning of school at all.

And as he rode his bike in the sepia air, the stench of dye and cotton still hanging onto him (even if he was wearing a polyester shirt just to avoid even thinking of cotton being stuck on his body), he thought he could see bright violet eyes in the distance. He thought maybe it was simply someone playing with the lights or someone installed two purple bulbs on their front porch like rednecks in Texas are known to do thinking they scared burglars and thieves and cousins entirely drowned in meth to steal their Civil War antiques (and not be able to tell the difference between a Confederate flag made in the Civil War era or one made in the 2000’s, unaware of how it made Nack look to these people who own these things less as a human being but as idiots that just formed right out of the primordial ooze), but as he rode further, he thought he could see two irises peeking, belonging to a little girl with white pale fragile hands with a pale fragile dress ornate with blue much like precious china, as her eyes seek him, and whispered as breathlessly as possible, “It’s time to take your medicine.”

It’s time to take your medicine, Mr. Seabrooks…

He could see the violet eyes gaze at him again, waiting and watching for him to wake up, to take his own medicine again, the shock of lightning that was supposed to realign his brain, but only made it die away. They felt like stabs in his head, as it continued to throb as if the knife was still attached that seemed to be so small in this little yellow-stained world he was in, wanting to hold his head with the quills that were dirty and smelled faintly of piss, but he was inside a straitjacket, one made of leather that nearly crushed his lungs and made it a struggle to breathe, his entire body feeling restrained and locked away. His feet were still free, but they couldn’t make the pain in his head go away. But he could walk around the cell he was in, observe the ward, and maybe even beg the nurses to let him be free of his restraints, as he got his shock therapy, he should be allowed back in the Acute Ward, they could simply lead him back to the black door at the edge of the sun-streaked hallway and he would be ripe and ready to go with his bipolar managed and he would never have to have another electroshock therapy again. Wasn’t that right, Sonic Thaddeus Seabrooks? Wasn’t it right that he would be out of here in no time?

If only life was like that, little hedgehog. If only.

He felt powerless as he sat in the cell with the lone window that was stroked by the sun. He could still hear the patients yelling and moaning and flailing and dancing about in their cells, with slobber and snot in their faces and beards and with blood on their hands and wrists and some also in restraints, shrieking, “Let me out! Let me out of this hell! Let me out! Let me out!” while shaking their heads as if they would roll off like a fragile china doll handled by a cruel child. The pungent smell came back to him, the smell of shit and blood and the janitors attempting to clean it all with their Lysol and bleach, and he wished he could pinch his nose, he wished he could move his hands and scratch an itch on his body, he wished he could breathe, and he wished that he didn’t have to stay here any longer than he had to, because the patients weren’t completely insane: it was hell inside here. They were sane enough to understand that.

All he could do was rock back and forth to not bore himself. He could also talk and sing, but he couldn’t hear himself in all the cacophony. He wondered how being in these straitjackets made anyone saner: you couldn’t do anything but be insane in them, by rocking constantly as if he was traumatized and singing songs just to keep himself company and not alone in this yellow painted pit that was rusting and peeling away, while there were blood and shit smears on the pads. But he knew the janitor couldn’t keep up with this. Especially if there were so many patients admitted in this hospital, and most of them seemed to be in the Disturbed Ward, and many of them were very disturbed, because Dr. Splinter constantly subjected them to this torture, constantly fed them drugs that made them crazier, gave them the needles pricked full of Thorazine that made them drool and relax their bodies so much that they didn’t care if they pissed themselves.

He wished he could reach the window, placed up so high in the padded and pillowed sky, that told of dreams and promises of a world that was much better than here, that was free and intoxicating in the smells of flowers and the wet autumn leaves and the vivid colors that his eyes could only briefly catch as he glanced at it, the clouds overcast and the world’s cold and bitterness that made you feel more alive than the cold and bitterness in the hospital’s vents. But it was warm and hot in here, to match Satan’s lair itself. He could see the nurses walking in and out of the shock therapy room, with each patient being wheeled out as awful as the last. They sang songs incoherently stringed together, they mumbled and screamed and constantly told the nurses that they were whores and bitches, with their faces forever unmoving, a pale powdered white sheen of porcelain, their fingers and nails sharp and colored of candy cane red, their lips puckered and their breasts bouncing and swaying and their heels clacking and their eyes the bluest shade of violet. He knew these weren’t regular nurses, as the staff very rarely looked as provocative and were as cold as they were, never caring of the conditions of their patients and only cruelly observing them from a distance, their eyes like sharp stabbing needles, that told him that they thought of their patients as nothing but wild animals that needed to be trained for a circus with tamers, the lobotomies and shockwaves and the pills and Thorazine, and nothing more.

His father, the one who cared about him, the one who gave an effort in raising him, the one who was there when his mother died of a cause he wasn’t so sure about (as she died before he could remember, possibly when he was 2 years old), the one with the hard-set eyes of iron gold and a face that was stern and a fang that was overgrown and reached the side of his face like his old official trademark, he knew his father cared, he knew his father was a good father, he knew it was entirely his fault he became this way as a criminal, but he hated him either way. It seemed like ever since he learned how to walk his father made him work. He didn’t much believe in child labor laws. He thought if a child was born unto this world, they were born to work, and they were born to try to make a living out of their supposedly candy-eating and see-saw and sandbox playing days. Once he was out of school it was time for work, as he made him work in his own textile mill factory, off in Temple, Texas. He hated it, as it smelled strange of smoke and dyes, and even when he dreamed he could imagine himself spinning the yarns, of his father telling him of the cotton they had to pick in the dreaded inferno-blazing Texas sun that glared in his eyes as he touched every cotton plant, of the yellow fields that he thought strangely looked like dehydrated piss. He thought to himself every time he went to work that children shouldn’t have to work at his age. He was 10 years old. His life was merely beginning. And it was beginning with the weaving of fabric, as he dyed it red and blue and green and he smelled cotton and smoke and he could hear his father yelling over the machines, “Nack, damn it, you’re doing this wrong! Here, let me show you how it’s done. I wonder if my own son can do this job as well as me one day, but it doesn’t seem likely. You keep working at it, Nack. You keep working on it and maybe I’ll promote you. But you need a lot to work on it before you get that pay raise. Come on Nack, hurry up, we ain’t got all day!”

His father never wanted to hit him, but the force of his criticisms was enough to hurt. On some days, he said he couldn’t do anything right. That the future of Warwyk’s Textile Industries Incorporated were falling on his barely green shoulders, and that he better work harder, work faster, or else he will never be as good as his father, he will never take care of the company if he continued to work the way he did.

But he was only 10. He still had school to worry about. He still had to keep up with his friends. He wanted to do other things that normal kids did, like play videogames or have sleepovers or play in playgrounds or going to the forest and picking up salamanders from rotting logs, like he always wanted to do in the woods next to them, but his father forbid him from going there, that no work and all play would make him a very stupid and lazy boy, as he continued to nonchalantly dye the clothes, not caring of what his son felt, the son who just had his mother die eight years ago, who still couldn’t get over it, who still couldn’t understand if his father understood of the car accident he told his mother had died in, off the highway to Dallas, of what it felt to his soon blackening heart as it was sickened and infested with maggots and worms over the years.

His father barely told him good things about him. Always he was lazy, barely a hard worker, his schoolwork could be much better with A pluses even if he thought it was hard enough just trying to get a B and paying attention to the teachers, he tried everything to please his father, but he was never impressed, he only pressed him down further in the ground, in hopes that the constant criticism and the constant battering of his self-esteem would make him into a man, much more mature than the other kids, a smart child who would succeed in academics and go on to Harvard and maybe get a PhD or a Master’s Degree, like his father never did, as he was forced to work all his life by his father, as his father was constantly stressed and overwhelmed by the Great Depression, and he beat him with belts and called him a no good son of a bitch, and when Nack’s father was now in charge of the textile factory and renamed it to Warwyk’s, his own father shot himself, without saying goodbye, without saying that he loved him. Warwyk tried to remain a strong man, and he wished Nack would be the same, after their mother, Magdalene, suddenly died one night on October.

Nack wished she was still alive, even if he couldn’t remember her voice and what she looked like except having blue eyes and brown hair. Maybe things would’ve been much more different. But nothing could change the past now. He was here in this textile factory, working from 3 to 9:30 pm, his hands constantly red from the dye, his fur having little tufts of cotton attached to him. He thought as he worked all those years, until he was about 14, he would hate cotton for the rest of his life. Sometimes he even refused to wear cotton shirts. But when he was 14, he completely changed. Nack soon lost his care for the world and his concern of keeping up a professional appearance and being the man that his father always wanted to be. It wasn’t long before his father found out that Nack began to cut classes from school. Getting detentions and suspensions. He even smoked cigarettes and liked them and always carried a pack of Marlboros around him. He smoked weed a few times with some friends too. Whatever was going to make him forget about that fucking factory and his fucking father and his fucking mother being dead in the ground 12 fucking years ago without remembering much about her. Nack sometimes even put firecrackers in cats’ asses and watched them yowl in pain, thinking it was a funny way to spend his time when he wasn’t at school and he wasn’t at work. Sometimes he went to the forest (even when his father still forbade him) and smashed frogs with rocks just to see what they looked like with their blood and organs all over the place. Teachers recommended Nack to see a psychologist. They said he was beginning to show sociopathic tendencies, that he sometimes liked to see students who never harmed him in the first place break down and cry in front of him, that sometimes he liked being disruptive in class and sometimes he wouldn’t come to class at all and just sit outside and smoke. Despite the teacher’s constant warnings that if he didn’t put that cigarette out he would be suspended for a week, he only laughed, and only blew the smoke in their face, then usually he left the school grounds, thinking he was lucky he was out of school for a week. His father, while he punished Nack by making him work more hours at the factory, made him go nowhere else but the house and warned him against the dangers of going out in the middle of night, as night was often the time of sin and the time of murder, but he knew he was increasingly growing helpless for what he could do to make his son a good boy. He didn’t much cared for doctors that had dealings with the mind, and refused to believe that his own son, his own flesh and blood, was becoming the same type of person as serial murderers and criminals. He wanted his son to be a man, a respectable, hard-working man much like he and his own father was, but Nack was slowly growing distant, slowly becoming closer to the life of sinners and killers, and he was only 14, the age where people still considered you as a kid. Still considered you young and bursting of life, full of things to learn and understand, but Nack hardly wanted to understand anything but of how much money he would need for cigarettes and Xanax, as his job didn’t seem to pay him too much as his father continued to cut his pay for being a bad boy, but he didn’t care. He knew he could get more money by stealing. He knew he could get more money by selling his father’s valuables. He knew he could get more money by being a bully around the children at his school, beating them up and taking all of the cash they had in their pockets, to feed his constant hunger for the little yellow pills and the green leaf that made him forget things for a while, made him forget of his father, and made him forget of that he had a job to do by the time he got out of school, at 3:30 pm, but he didn’t care at all for that, as his father never cared for him, and he would never care for his own real son, the textile factory that continued to loom and laugh at him with its steely lungs, with the fumes blasting in his nose of dye and burnt cotton, and he thought he would rather smell of the stench of weed instead of the stench of failure, of constant disapproval and disappointment.

His arms were rotting off his body. He would become limbless as well, like the bodies that were only turkeys ready to be roasted for the nice Christmas feast (Dead head Fred! Dead head Fred!). He would become yet another corpse of the King of Spades. He would stretch his skin and make a map of it. He would keep his fur and make a blanket out of it, while wearing his teeth and fangs around his neck.

His eyes were falling off him, his green shallow questioning pupils staring back at him, as they sat on his lap, wanting him to ask, why?.

He was blind.

Goddam nurses in this hospital…

Trying to kill Phony…

This hospital…

I’m going to fucking kill all of them!

He could hear the shattering of glass, as all the patients shouted rapturously, as if Jesus had come to save them, save them of their own personal hells. Some continued to sit there and scratch their flesh just to see if a little bleed was going to come through. They were waiting for their own personal Jesus to come through their bodies, in their own deaths.

If they don’t want to be saved, then they don’t have to be…

He rocked back and forth, his arms were corpses, his eyes rolling away, his teeth falling off from his bones, he rocked in his knees, as the nurses laughed like hyenas in the savanna, as he could imagine lions all around him, seeing the big ice capped mountain in the distance, the heat making him sweat beads, the vultures circling in the sky, the zebras continuing to march in their little zigzagged lines.

Row row row your boat, gently down the stream…

(Long drag of applesauce entering his body, and the corpse of a female patient)

Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream…

The head surrounded him, in a black long pillar of shadow, its fangs open, saliva crawling down them, the forked tongue trying to escape, the slit eyes staring back at his empty sockets, and as he tried to escape from his long white luxurious jacket that was nearly choking him, he screamed, a long, hollowed, stifling scream that the moon even flinched as it heard it, flickering in the sky and almost giving itself up into the long silhouettes of God, the stars ready to fall from the sky like long drags of cocaine, long injections of heroin, ready to burn down the whole world, ready to make it burn, ready to make it alive by being dead, its own minutes of heaven.

The dragon opened his mouth wide, his black, bloodied, hollowed out mouth like a carpenter’s wood carving, and he struck him like a snake, swallowing him in one gulp, as he traveled down Satan’s throat, as he screamed long and loud that even the Acute Ward could hear him, that even the Chronics, Big and Tails and the other non-functioning patients, could hear him, and then he laughed, then he snickered, then he began to sing while rocking back and forth inside his stomach, smiling and full of happiness and warmth.

“Row row row your boat, gently down the stream…Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream…”

The nurses stared onward at Sonic, locked in his own little prison, singing quietly to himself, restrained completely in a straitjacket, with a piss stain on the floor.

“Give him a few more electroshocks, and maybe we can send him back to the Acutes.”

“If he attempts suicide again, can we send him to the Chronics Ward?”

“Why yes, of course. Because if he does so, that means he’s been a bad, bad boy. Like his little friend Miles was, for finding out the real reason our king made this world. If he ever tells anyone, we give him a lobotomy. If Sonic ever finds out too, the naughty, naughty hedgehog, then we’ll give him one too. Put a stake in his brain. That’ll show him. That’ll show him who the real ruler of this land is. And that’s the King of Spades.”

He imagined himself in that warm savanna, before sunset, with the hyenas watching and staring with their red blood lusted eyes, gazing at the cold mountaintop that looked so promising to his mind that was currently in flames, but his eyes, how leaded and shredded they were! And he soon fell asleep, his head resting where he pissed himself, blissfully unaware.

And he dreamed of dragons. The same one that he thought had swallowed him and his sanity whole.

“Alright. My father used to sing it in Mandarin, but hell do I know the Mandarin version, because I can’t speak a word of it. But he soon decided to sing the English version, the version that he said reminded him of how that awful America would burn down, and never would it try to use its awful maidens of media or sell another awful product or try to get someone to eat a greasy hamburger at McDonald’s ever again.”

She took a deep breath, gathering all the air in her cigarette tarred lungs, and she sang the song, one of the only remnants of her father she carried with her.

The mountain tops glow

With the sun’s light that falls like snow

The fog surrounds us and it would tell

Of a story of a man who fell

His mind cracked, his eyes ached

He realized that money was power and everything was at stake

Everything was dark, everything was silent

So he put a silver cock next to his head and caused a riot

The sun couldn’t shine then, it was too vain

Because the sun only shines for the well and sane

The door was rusted, made of solid steel that was even difficult for the nurses to hold open, but it creaked loudly when it was ajar. He could see bloodstained words on it, saying boldly in his green panicking eyes, RUN FAR AWAY FROM HERE. He could hear groans being echoed from the other room, the old man that sung of old forgotten songs, while he waited for his pasty dinner to be fed through him with a spoon, and the nurses giggled, their breasts bounced, he could see violet eyes peeking out like sudden sparks of flame as they took him to the electroshock machine, the man singing with mirth, despite the room being completely gray, with bricks all around covered in graffiti and blood and shit, and he could hear his voice ringing through his ears as they put the device on his head and put the rubber molding in his mouth, and he wanted to scream, he wanted to kick his feet in the air, he wanted to run far, far away from here, to another land than Wonderland, to a place that was peaceful and to a land that was grand, possibly to New York or California, places where he would rather live in than Texas, especially not in a state that had this hellhole place still existing years after years, the system not realizing that it was the 8th layer of Hell itself, and shutting it down where no one could ever enter it again, and everyone would be safe and go to another hospital like Austin Lakes, which seemed like a cakewalk compared to here. Or Austin State, which he heard wasn’t a very good hospital, but still a much better place than here. The man’s voice bubbled in his ears, as the nurses prepared to ignite the switches on the machine, and were ready to pull the lever, like Dr. Victor Frankenstein before he gave birth to his monster.

Row row, row your boat, gently down the stream

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream

The nurses chattered, laughing, giggling, smirking, before the man was gurgling through his apple sauce and pudding, singing again, repeating himself endlessly.

Woow woow, woow you boot, guntly dooon dah fream

Murrily murrily murrily murrily, lafe iz mut a veam

It’s time to take your medicine…

Sonic Thaddeus Seabrooks…

We have a surprise for you…Sonic…

And they turned it on. The lights ignited, he could hear it faintly buzzing along with the ignorant man, and as he listened in on the crackling and the machine gathering heat, he suddenly felt it through his bloodstream and through his brain and through his arms and legs. ZAP!

He muffled a yell in his rubber molding, his eyes clamped shut, his body shaking erratically once again as they pulled the switch, and his brain was on fire, the sparks of Zeus’ lightning bolts stabbed his brain, he wanted to slam his fists down the table and throw a tantrum much like a child would, because he wanted cake, and cake was always good when it was made with dragonflies and piss.

Row row, row your boat… (Gurgle, gurgle, mutters of approval from the applesauce and pudding and his juice)

Gently down the stream…

Why did they send him here, to the land filled with cheesecake and lover’s defeat, the land where no one could find their feet? The sparks sparkled, his head flashed, he swore he was going to spill a snake from his mouth, the jaws oh how mighty was the one missing detachable fang!

He was a snake himself. He could detach his jaw. And swallow the whole world whole.

Phony…

And if you want, you can kiss my ass on that too…

Let’s go home, Sonic…

Gently down the stream…

He could hear the clatter of the nurse’s breasts as they grew feet and shoved him inside his sickle cell anemia. He was going to die in here, in padded brains, padded locks, the pillows comforting him, the angel maidens singing him to sleep, singing him down the stream…merrily merrily merrily merrily, life was but a dream. A wretched dream where the kittens ate the desecrated body of a dog who had no eyes but fangs like human teeth, as it wriggled like a dead human fetus, as the jaws continued to reach out, as the kittens licked and bit it like a mother’s nipple, as the fetus puppy continued to move about, its small stubby limbs trying to escape, before it was eaten down to a whittle, the kittens eating away his organs, his brain, his fangs too, as it shrieked loudly, shattering the blood-soaked mirrors, shattering the blood-soaked linoleum of the walls.

Dead limbless corpses were everywhere around him, struggling to be free of the hospital, as their blood-soaked bodies squirmed like worms, as he could hear the King of Spades laughing his dark laugh, as he could hear and feel the firebolts frying his brain.

Don’t die…

Because if you do…

I’ll cry…

He could smell the scent of shit and piss and drool and blood and iodine and Lysol, all the scents mixed together in a special concoction in his nose. And he wanted to puke. His fingers twitched, and his body began to shake erratically, as there was one emotion that he thought he could never understand in his mind, and that was fear. He was afraid. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want electroshock therapy. He didn’t want a lobotomy. This is what usually happened to all the patients in this ward. They were given many electroshock treatments, or a stake was driven to the upper lobe of their brain, bruised, and no longer functioning in this fast-paced world that soon became as slow as molasses, as slow as the severely retarded, and they were no longer men, but caricatures, broken shells of the people they once were, as they shriveled up and curled inside their own bodies, the snake retreating to its stomach, its scales and liquid bone. In desperation, Sonic prayed to God, even if he was only a mere answering machine now, his son somewhere far away (possibly listening to his parent’s calls for the umpteenth time), that he didn’t want either of those things, and he wished he would be taken out of this ward, as it was entirely a mistake and he didn’t deserve to be here why would he be here why would he need to be here? His eyes looked around, and they twitched as much as his fingers as he wanted to pry himself free of his locks and chains, as he could see the nurses’ lips pursing, their breasts heaving much like they were actual heads that could breathe as they were crushed in their tight bras and their tight shirts, and they said to him, waving their petite fingers and flashing their fingernails that were the same color of licorice candy, “Nah uh uh. Good boys don’t free themselves of their locks. They wait to see what’s coming to them. They wait and see what his punishment for being such a bad boy is. If you wanted so much to be a good boy, then you would stay put, you would wait and see what the taste of your own medicine is.”

Come and taste your own medicine!

Rouge’s eyes popped open, her blue veined flesh in sweat, her aqua eyes gazing around the room, wondering if there was anyone inside this damnable place that wanted to hurt her, anyone that was going to smash her head with a solid metal baseball bat, shoot her with their guns, or possibly abuse their “privileges” of having a prostitute, by treating her like they’re own person slave, their own personal sex toy. And as she searched for any weapons held in the air, a person that she knew absolutely didn’t belong here, she found none. Except Bark, who investigated her late night awakening and thought that possibly something was wrong. At the sight of him standing near her bed, concerned, her chest relaxed, her eyes no longer paranoid, and at Bark’s request, she explained the nature of her nightmare, the nature of the belief that such a thing could happen to her too.

Her own mother died at the hands of people like those, people who wished only to harm others for their own gain. To abuse so many drugs, to have so much sex, to have so much money from selling their crack rocks, that they were literally above people, above celebrities, that they were like gods in the Dallas street, but were lower than pigs, lower than hyenas who laughed only at the despair of an aging lion as he is driven out of his misery with sharp teeth and humiliation.

She covered her head with her hands, the blue withered willow tree she was, her eyelids dusted with sleep and anxiety, the red crevices to her prickled eyeballs. Her nails stretched, scratching the sides of her face, wishing the red bleed would show through, but the doctors have numbed them down, and she couldn’t escape from this torment she felt in her skin, and her wings felt rusted and decayed. She wished so much that she would stop having these dreams, she would stop remembering about her mother and even feeling a little sorry for her, as her mother never cared for her, never cared for the little bundle of maggot that she always called Rouge, she never cared that her own daughter was hungry, was sick and needed care, was hurt, was sad, but yet when she thought of her mother beaten in the head with a bat, tortured and nearly skinned alive, she thought that maybe one day, the same fate would happen to her. The same fate would fall upon her like wretched storms and wretched dead gods that fell from the skies like stardust, but yet the fate of someone who was going to be nothing more but a prostitute for the rest of her godforsaken life just like her mother, it was written in the stars and the sky, and she would fall like a shooting comet as well, the line of cocaine dashed off with a razor blade, her mother’s drug of choice. How she used to always stare at her mother sorting through it, with her credit cards or a blade, as the cigarette smoke streamed in the air like an Indian smoke signal on her ashtray, as she laughed and talked to no one but herself (Or maybe she had imaginary friends too and she was talking to them about how she just got a deal to be in the next Hollywood blockbuster, and that she used to be an extra in Gone with the Wind.), and mercutiously she would snort and chortle and giggle and snicker and she would brush her hair, her big brown poofy ‘80s style hair, and say that she was going to be a star, the next god in Mount Olympus who would be chosen to die for the fate of the humans.

Her nails, how whittled down they were! They used to been long tendrils of crescents, ready to scratch long cracks in her skin. The nurses soon discovered her self-harming, and she was put on One on One for a while, and then they clipped her nails. And no more could she scratch. But she still bit. She still punched. Purple splotches and red bite marks stained her body, and the only one who got to know those things were Bark, who simply said as he stared at them, “And doing this is actually going to solve anything? Do you know Rouge? Has this actually solved anything for you?”

And she would sit in silence, and shrug her shoulders. And say, “I dunno. It just makes me feel better.”

“It’s pointless to hurt yourself just for a fading emotion. Why would anyone look at your flawed, hurt body and say that you are a beautiful woman? No one, except pieces of shit, that’s who. You truly are a remarkable woman Rouge, when you allow yourself to be. But this injury to yourself isn’t going to solve anything. If anything, it will only make you uglier. It will only make you deader.”

And she said, “I like being more dead. It makes me feel more alive.”

“And why would you say that contradiction?”

“Because to know that I’m dying gives me more life, more wonder in the world. Because I am excited that I’m dying, I’m excited that I’m leaving this world, because I do not want to be like my mother, who was murdered by a bunch of drug lords. But I know that’s my only fate. The sun says so, the stars say so, and the moon says so. I am chosen to die like my mother. I am chosen to live like my mother. And I am chosen to not care about anyone but myself like my mother, except for cigarettes, the sweet mistress they call Mary Jane, and the sweet loving man known as Heroin. And I am a mess here. I haven’t had my fill of that drug for months. I haven’t had sex in months. I’ve had nothing but food that doesn’t taste like cigarette butts and people talking to me about my feelings, but my feelings are too masked to be revealed, as I do not know them myself. I think I would only feel better if I had that drug, Mr. Heroin, or at least a cigarette for Christ’s sake.”

She closed her eyes tightly, like shut lids to bell jars (that are no doubt rotting away in the doctor’s office), and she threw her fist upon the bed, making herself and Bark bounce, but there would be no new bruise on her skin, no sore fingers, as Bark was watching, and he never approved of her harming herself, especially not on his watch, with his two unshedded green eyes.

“That’s all I want, Bark. I want to be dead. I’m sure in heaven I get to have all of the heroin and all of the cigarettes I want and all of the regret and all of the emptiness would melt away, like the fading sea off the shore. I wished I could end it all. I wished I could find a metallic baseball bat and bash my own fucking self in the head. Did you know that my mother always called me a maggot? Maggot Nicholls, the great daughter to the aspiring actress of Roseanne Nicholls, who’s going to be the next Marilyn Monroe, the next Dolly Parton, the next great big tragedy, the next great big tidal wave over culture, the American corporate culture that my dad used to fucking hate so much. Did you know my dad’s in China now? A great big Chinaman, not wanting to take care of his own white maggot daughter. He was the only one who actually attempted to raise me. I actually grew close to him until he suddenly up and left and took all of his clothes but not all of his books on Communism. He wanted to spread the philosophy to my mother too, but he said my mother was too stupid to appreciate such things. He once told me he was going to take me to China with him. I don’t much care for China, but I guess it would be a better place than being with my mother, being in here, but he never did. He forgot about me. I only remember his favorite song that he used to sing to me, something that I maybe shouldn’t have known when I was a child, but it gave me warmth and peace when nothing else could.”

“And what song was it? Could you maybe sing it? Maybe it will bring you peace right now, especially with all those dreams you’ve been having.”

She sighed. She didn’t much like to hear the challenge to sing a song. It always terrified her, especially when her pimp used to make her sing the song when he discovered her voice, and wanted to hear it as he got ready to whore her out. In fact, he even advertised that she could sing beautiful songs for the men, and the stupid, slobbered men who always drank too much beer or had too much Mary Jane or Ms. Xanax, and her father’s song was the most famous out of all her songs, but yet when she was forced to sing it, it still brought her a type of inner peace, her own little miniature Buddha inside her body who flowed zen all throughout.

She wanted to pray to God to give her at least one last snort before she went, to give her a little mercy. Cocaine was the only thing that made her into an actual person. Inside she was fake and hollowed and round. Anyone could see her act. Anyone could see her lies inside her body and inside her veins. They could see them before she said them with her black and nicotine stained mouth. Cocaine made her into an interesting person, a normal person, and she wanted to scream to have that one last dose of the drugs in her veins, anything at all to make her be in peace as they ended her life, but they continued to gaze at her with wide eyes, with wide smiles, with wide weapons ready to beat against her wide skull, and they laughed again, as the man pulled the bat back, as the dildos and sex toys were thrust inside her, and she muffled out a scream before the final thing she heard before everything went black and she was sent to Hell for the rest of eternity was, “Goodnight, miss Roseanne. You’ll get your few minutes of heaven. You’ll get your little surprise, your few minutes of heaven, right here!”

The wall was sprayed with a burst of black blood on the brown and yellow linoleum and rust, and she died instantly, her head completely bludgeoned and a pool of blood flowing from the crown of her head, and the men toyed with her body before they soon got bored with her and rolled her up in a carpet and buried her at a landfill.

Roseanne was buried beneath the brand new Dallas State Bank building, and no one knew, except Rouge, but there was nothing she could do to recover her body and to give her a proper burial and a proper eulogy, so she simply said goodbye to the bank, and continued to live on in the streets on her own, until she met the man with the feather in his hat, into his long black limousine, and she became a preteen prostitute.

Rouge thought what it was like to have your life end by the swinging of the bat, the hard metal bashing through your head and brains, and to have no regrets whatsoever in her life, not even that she didn’t take care of her daughter as much as she liked to, that she actually thought she was going to miss the little maggot, before she was sold into the same trade as her, the one who wanted to be an actress as big as Marilyn Monroe, as big as big could get, before she fell to the Earth, becoming stardust, the dust that she would oh so love to snort into her nose and through her brain, for one last time.

—

Sonic awoke, finding that the walls were no longer dark green and white, but piss yellow and bare, the linoleum stained with rust, stained with shit. He could hear the moans and screams and wailings in the distance, sounding like he was in a savanna, surrounded by hyenas, laughing themselves maniacally as they awaited his inevitable death until they could rip apart his flesh and bone with their crescent-shaped fangs, with their silent red eyes watching, with the heat wavering the distant horizon, making him sweat and hallucinate an icy mountain in the sky that awaited for him to take a climb up its icy gown, cooling himself of the sun’s heat that drizzled on his back. He thought for a moment that he was in Africa, away from the terrible hospital, to a home where hedgehogs had originated, and while he was in a land of poverty and disease, it was better than Wonderland, because it was a constant land of death and hopelessness. But as his eyes adjusted to the bright light and the yellow walls that made it painful and throbbing, the nurses were talking to each other over him, black silhouettes hidden under the stabbing light, and he noticed immediately that he couldn’t control his arms and legs. He looked to his left, then to his right, discovering that he was restrained, with black painful latches, and staring into the nurses’ faces were painful, as he could literally see nothing of their upper torso, not even their eyes, as the wailings and cryings and groans were growing louder, as he could see a blur of other patients inside their individual cells, stretching their hands and laughing with mania and laughing with drunkenness of insanity, as they never saw this hedgehog before in this ward. He was new meat, the new meat about to be grilled on Dr. Splinter’s grill, and they laughed and sang and pissed themselves and yelled and yelped and flailed themselves about or walked repetitively in a tight-knit circle or they simply made no response at all but looked at their wrists, trying to cut through it with their dull fingernails, surrounded by bare whiteness as all the cells were padded, some smeared with shit, some with piss stains on them or blood, and Sonic wished this was all a dream, that he was never here, in the underbelly of Wonderland where most of its insanity had thrived, in the Disturbed Ward.

I work a little at the Disturbed Ward Sonic. It’s constantly loud, it smells awful, and it’s not properly air conditioned so even in the winter it can be really hot for some reason…sometimes I hear really strange noises, like little weird…murmurs…

Rouge awoke from her slumber, heard the clamor in their voices, and started to cry.

“Oh good job Gary, you made the little maggot cry.”

“Stop calling her a maggot when you’re one yourself!”

“I don’t shit myself and have a big gaping hole to stuff myself with brown colored garbage.”

“Shut the fuck up you slut!”

“I’m an actress, Gary! Not a slut, not a whore, and definitely not a prostitute!”

“Whatever!”

Rouge continued to cry, as her father held her closely, feeling the sharp stabs of the cold wind as her so-called mother walked away from the house, the screen door shutting with a bang that caused Rouge’s crying to grow louder.

His father shushed her, bounced her in his knees, bobbing up and down much like a crane who needed to eat his fill of fish for today, and his father started to sing to her in a low voice, one that sounded smooth like corduroy, smooth like the cigarette smoke’s lines as it still hung in the air as her mother smoked outside of their trailer, her red eyes staring outside of their window, her mean scarred gaze that Rouge’s small aqua eyes were fixated on, as Papa Gary began his song.

The mountain tops glow

With the sun’s light that falls like snow

The fog surrounds us and it would tell

Of a story of a man who fell

His mind cracked, his eyes ached

He realized that money was power and everything was at stake

Everything was dark, everything was silent

So he put a silver cock next to his head and caused a riot

The sun couldn’t shine then, it was too vain

Because the sun only shines for the well and sane

Rouge cooed, and noticed by the time she gazed back at the window, her mother was gone, counting her money, seeing how much more she needed to get a little crack in her system, a little white rock that could keep her away from this place that certainly the sun never shined on, the place where darkness brewed, in the caverns of the alleyways, where pitiful men only existed to lie cheat and steal Roseanne’s life away. The crack helped her, for only a little while, before the men threatened her, before she was put in a situation like she was right now, with yet more rapes, more searing cuts on her dress and body, more blood streaming on the floors as the men continued to cut her with these razor blades, just to see the nice sparkle of sherry from her body flow.

Her father tried to care for the little maggot. He tried to care for her until he left the both of them, until the house’s bills began to pile, until her walls were bare and she could sell no more of her dead mother’s crystal animals, until she even tried to sell the Madonna and Def Leppard posters, even tried to sell her husband’s books on Communism and Karl Marx that he couldn’t take with him, but eventually they lost their redneck little home, with the nicotine stained walls, the glass animals that once inhabited it, the crib that she kept in Rouge’s room even though she got too big to fit inside of it, and they lived in the streets, where she continued to sell her body for cocaine, while Rouge tried to survive on anything she could get, as her mother certainly wasn’t going to look out for her. She was too busy. She was too busy climbing her way to fame with her acting skills. She was going to be bigger than Marilyn Monroe, bigger than Dolly Parton, by the selling of her breasts and her tired, worn out vagina.

But yet as death was staring at her in the face, she couldn’t feel a single tinge of regret. Her mind was empty; her mind was obliterated away with the snow white powder, the powder that kept her alive when nothing else could. Not even her passions, not even her daughter, and certainly not her husband.

“Roseanne…Roseanne…”

They kept calling her name, with malice and misery on their tongues, holding a dildo, ready for the bat to swing, ready for the guns to fire. And as she thought on all the moments in her past, asking herself if she regretted anything at all in her life, she said no. She didn’t. Cocaine was the only thing that kept her alive. Cocaine was the only reason for her to live. God gave her no other reasons. The white crystal powder was enough. Not her daughter, not her husband, just the drug that made her achieve heaven, who made her into a happy person for a few minutes, and then she would need more, and right now it’s been hours since she last had the drug in her nostrils, and she sweat, her voice was parched, her eyes had a crevice of blood in the corners, she hadn’t slept in weeks again, and she barely ate anything more than a morsel that she could get out of a garbage can and a couple cigarettes and maybe a beer. Her hands and body couldn’t stop shaking, even if they were restrained heavily with cable wire, but she thought at that moment that she wanted more of the drugs, she wanted to get high, at least one more time, before she died, but these monsters, these beasts, they wouldn’t let her get her few minutes of heaven for at least a few seconds, they laughed heavily and the cigarette smoke was surrounding her, making her eyes water and her nose barely breathe and filter through it, the men were no longer playing cards and ignoring her but watching her with interest and with anticipation, waiting for her brains to splatter on the wall, the rusted walls that needed more blood to feed. It needed more blood to breathe.

“Roseanne…”

The sounds of footsteps were growing louder. They were ringing in her ears, the sounds of breathing, the sounds of stomping, the sounds of guns clicking and being loaded with extra bullets. The men smoked their cigars, the silver smoke hanging in the air and choking her nostrils, and she could see the walls were stained with a little brown rust, possibly dirt or blood that has collected over the years. The men laughed uproariously while they played black jack, their cigar smoke wafting in the air, their mouths blowing it like steamed up teapots, as their evil brown eyes that were the same color as the wall, brown and rusted with a little splatter of blood, gazed up at her, and they chortled, as they played with their guns and carried what seemed to be a black metal baseball bat, the man even having trouble carrying it as it was made with nothing but solid steel, not hollowed out aluminum like she knew most bats were like now, because kids were little pieces of shit and they didn’t know that if you hit someone over the head with these fucking things they would bleed like a motherfucker.

“Roseanne…” They snickered and crackled. “Roseanne, we have a nice little surprise for you. That’s why you’re here…that’s why you’re here…that’s why we wrapped you up with cable wires and gagged your mouth, because it’s such a nice little surprise…Roseanne…”

They were calling her name mockingly, laughing like the little shitfaced hyenas they were, as one man practiced swinging with the bat, slicing through the air, whistling and hurting the Air Spirit with so much pain that it whined with a loud screech. He couldn’t stop having a big white pearly grin on his face, none of the men couldn’t stop smirking and snickering and slithering like snakes, as they carried guns, bats, sex toys, and malice against Roseanne the bat, who was only a mere prostitute who simply wanted the money so she could buy more cocaine. Cocaine was the only thing she cared about in this world and cocaine was the only thing that cared for her. She had a daughter, named Rouge, but she didn’t care for her, because she was nothing but a piece of shit whore that would grow up like her, much like her father was, wherever he was, possibly marching in the streets and working in a factory with leaden air in China. She remembered him reading on all of those books on Karl Marx and Communism and hating everything “corporate America” was, so she guessed that was where he was, in the land of bamboo and dynasties.

“Roseanne…it’s time for you to take your medicine…Roseanne…it’s time for you to have your nice little surprise…”

Rouge was born in 1982, two years after she met her eccentric father and got married and had a child together and lived in a trailer home with two pitbulls in their yard and the walls were stained with yellow nicotine and she turned on a police surveillance device, that always echoed throughout the halls with loud and obnoxious pitches and screeches, to keep track of the pigs in uniform. She always wore too short skirts and had poofy hair (as was the style in the 80s) and a shirt that always showed her stomach, that had small stretch marks as her so-called husband carried around the white bundle of maggots and flies, her little so-called daughter, Rouge. She smoked another slim cigarette, held between two fingers that made a V-shape, her bloodshot eyes and her weeks of not sleeping so prominent to Gary Nicholls, as he rocked little Rouge Nicholls to sleep, the bat that came from her, from her worn out and tired vagina that she knew didn’t need a damn baby to come out of it, it needed to house dicks inside it like it always did, because that was the only way she could make money. But now she had a family, with a husband she never loved in the first place, with a daughter she never loved when it came out of her and even when she carried her, and she couldn’t get how most of America could stand this bullshit, to live with someone you never loved with a child you never loved living in a piece of shit house that might as well been a trash heap, surrounded by her now dead mother’s little glass animals that she haven’t sold yet to people who were interested in them (i.e. Suckers, as none of her mother’s trash was a treasure, not to her, anyways) and posters of Madonna and Def Leppard, bands that she heard of a few times and never cared much about either, but yet her husband demanded that their house needed a few sparks of life, a little redneck oddities to keep it alive and to make everyone avoid their little abode.

“Gary, how about you just surrender that child to adoption already, I ain’t gonna take care of her no more. I got things to do. I don’t need a shitting and crying baby to take care of after all that.”

Gary looked up at her, his blue eyes sparkling in his horn-rimmed spectacles. “Doing what that makes you so busy that you don’t want to look after your own damn child?”

“I got two jobs, Gary. I’m an actress and I work at the iron factory south of here. I ain’t got time for her. Just put her in adoption already for Christ’s sake.”

“You know what you are too, Roseanne. You’re a prostitute. That’s how I met you. You know it. Stop telling yourself you’re an actress and that you work at the factory because both of us know that’s not true. Stop feeding yourself these fucking lies in your head. Maybe you would be a better person if you didn’t live in a fantasy land all the time.”

“And there’s your little psychoanalysis bullshit you’re feeding me!” She snuffed out her cigarette, and then proceeded to light another one. She needed the crack in her system. It’s been almost a day since she had her fill. So cigarettes would have to help her now, save her God, save her Jesus, the idols she never worshipped but her mother did and she was dead now, with a gunshot wound to the head by her ex. This is why she’s been feeling so goddamn shitty that she needed to start another shitfest with her so-called husband, right in front of her so-called baby. “If you’re so smart, why don’t you get a job? You could go to college, you could be a doctor! And then you could support my poor ass, huh, Gary? You pile of shit!”

“I simply don’t want to be like those snobs who think they’re better than everyone else! I’d rather be a fucking redneck than a fucking plastic bourgeois man living on wine and little else!”