BH一天一篇
Strapped to a bed in an asylum, Julia Brown did not feel insane. She had a lot of time to think, and her thinking was clear. Clear...clear...clear... like water.
They had come for her quickly, Dr. Carson and the two heavily armed police officers. They pinned her to the floor and shackled her wrists behind her back with a nasty pair of hand restraints that cut into her skin. It hurt, but she refused to cry out. Dr. Carson stared at her in the back seat of the police car, but said nothing. He seemed to be enjoying himself, and Julia wondered if she was imagining the lecherous tint in his stare. She wondered if she was too far gone to really care.
She felt a little better once she was admitted to the asylum. Once she was back among...her own kind. She spent most of the day strapped to a bed, under the strict observation of a silent nurse. They would shine lights in her eyes, take samples of her saliva, and prick at her with needles. She was numb to it all. There were other patients like her in the beds across the room and in the rooms across the hall, dreaming the same dreams and dreading the same nightmares, enduring the same treatments with the same hopes for freedom. A silent, unspoken empathy emerged among these patients, and there were many of them throughout the asylum. From this empathy she was able to draw...strength. In the eyes of the doctors and nurses, her condition seemed to improve.
Initially, life at the asylum followed a simple pattern. Each day around noon she would be led to the cafeteria, where she would feed with a handful of patients on whatever foul dish the cooks prepared. Other than the daily meal, her schedule consisted of trips to the showers for "sanitation" purposes five times a day. The pattern developed a rhythm, and that rhythm became her world.
It seemed that she ate with a different group every day. Or maybe it was the same group, with a different set of stories. Everyone looked the same; she recognized none of them from one day to the next. Maybe that was the point.
Most of the mealtime conversation was about the doctors. Complaints about their condescending nature, vented frustrations over their stubborn insistence that the shared condition of the patients was just a disease, a mental disorder, and that they were working benevolently towards some kind of cure. As if she wanted to be cured. Thoughts like that were the scariest. Thoughts like that made her think maybe the doctors were right.
Sometimes, when they were feeling particularly lonely, the patients would spend the meal hour discussing the events that brought them to the asylum. Through these sessions, Julia quickly learned that her experiences were in no way unique. She heard tell of husbands kicked out of their homes because their wives couldn't live with the nightly flood. Others spoke of the morning discovery of a beloved pet, stuffed face first into a clogged drain. Occasionally a glassy-eyed patient would speak of a child, drowned and mutilated in a bathtub or a swimming pool. The tales were different, but they all shared a common theme: murky, un-sanitized water.
Sometimes, these stories left Julia feeling ashamed of what she had become, but more often they had a cathartic effect. The same could not be said of the showers. Yes, they were refreshing, and yes, she did feel at her strongest only when the cool water splashed across her skin. For that feeling, she was grateful that the inmates were showered five times a day. Sometimes she felt that it was the only thing keeping her alive. At the same time, the showers were damning, shameful, and terrifying. Julia Brown was always a private person, and being naked in front of others was always a disconcerting experience for her. In the asylum, that shower experience became a nightmare when she, and everyone around her, began to develop scales.
