All the Way Home

I can’t move.

I thought, my back pressed firmly to the hospital bed beneath it. I could see the room around me, the standard and dingy holding space in the behavioral health facility.

A scream struggled in my throat, locked sideways like a chicken bone. Nurse! Nurse! I tried to croak. The words burned on my tongue, a temper rising in my chest unlike one I’d ever felt before. Nurse! He’s in my room!

The man at the foot of my bed stared. His eyes were watery and wetly reflecting green light from the neon sign outside my window. They glimmered like my pet rats’ but without their devotion. One hairy hand stretched out and took hold of my big toe.

“This little piggy went to market,” he croaked.

Worms. There are worms in my chest, I swear to god, I feel them. They’re wriggling through my ribs and eating at my heart. They’re eating my heart, Mom, they’re drinking my blood.

“This little piggy should’ve stayed home.”

Dad, Dad, please come back, he’s going to rape me, Dad please, I’m going to die.

“This little piggy ate your roast beef.”

A pregnant tear of drool jumped from the drooping cusp of his bottom lip and dangled, bouncing up and down between my spread ankles.

“This little piggy wishes he had some.”

Daddy please, get me out of here. God, please God, I was wrong, he’s going to…

The man knelt down at the foot of my bed. The smile didn’t leave his face as he pinched my pinky toe, bringing it close to his mouth.

“And this little piggy went....”

His smile opened gaily, his teeth clamping down around my toe.

GOD! ANYONE! PLEASE!

---

Sasha, the morning nurse, cooed my name and shook me awake.

The built-up scream in my throat whined out like air slowly releasing from a balloon. The bed trembled beneath my legs, rippling with aftershock.

The man from my nightmare was gone; all of my toes were still intact, though swollen with cold from the room's overactive window unit.

“What’s wrong, are you dreaming?” Sasha asked as she focused on my trembling, prostrate form. I didn't answer.

She grabbed onto my arm, offering a guiding hand out of bed and, presumably, toward the bathroom.

It was just a nightmare.

Thank god.

God, I giggled to myself, drifting further up out of my fog. When was the last time I’d begged that asshole for anything?

Sasha had me standing almost upright when my knees buckled, and she caught me with the broad, fleshy insides of her arms, my head crashing softly into her swelling breasts.

“The worms ate my knees,” I whispered to her, the sleeping medication weighing down my words.

Her fingers fidgeted at my wrist, stopping on one of my two plastic covered bands, the yellow one with FALL RISK staring out in black. It was secured over the fluffy white bandages swaddling the healing wounds on my inner forearms.

She led me to the bathroom and flipped the light switch. Though my head still dipped and swayed like I had a noodle for a neck, I pulled an arm from her grasp to balance myself in the doorway. Sasha let go of me carefully and walked out, leaving me to the bare-bones bathroom with sickly light, gray floors and no shower head.

The mirror was metal. They made them like that so we (suicide risks like me, I mean) couldn't shatter them and kill ourselves on the shards. I was able to get a good look at myself through it, though it was warped and smudged with a thick layer of fingerprints.

You’ve lost the will to live, the mirror seemed to say.

Each of my wrists gave a loving throb at the thought, but I dared not reach down and reopen my almost-healed stitches. They’d catch me, anyway.

I look crazy.

But I’m getting out today.

--

I waited for Dr. Patel, a small, neat Indian man with pinched features and a powerful smell, in the main living space of the short-stay behavioral health facility. I looked anywhere but at the man sitting at the card table across the room; in the soft glow of early morning, he didn't look as intimidating as he had in my dream the night before.

If I look him in the eyes, though, I thought, I'll see that hungry, green light.

He, on the other hand, had other ideas. I could feel his gaze roam up and down my pajama-clad body, searching for my curves underneath like an x-ray machine.

Sparse mustache hairs perched on his upper lip, shading his white, wet teeth.

“You know what I could go for right now?” He asked quietly.

His voice brought back another nightmare memory. This little piggy ate your roast beef…

“A joint,” the man answered himself, leaning back again in his chair and letting out a satisfied huff. “A joint and a blowjob.”

I looked up at him and briefly met his stare, empty and pulsating like neon. My stomach turned.

I’m getting out of here today, I’m getting out of here today, I’m getting out of here

---

"Today?" Dr. Patel said, his eyes not leaving his paperwork. He continued to scribble notes on my chart, running out of room and spilling into the margins.

Worms. Worms in my chest, worms crawling up my neck and down into my forearms. Worms eating my brain, leaving tunnels behind my eyebrows and letting hot blood drip down into my esophagus. Worms, green behind my pallid skin, pumping life where I tried to end it, pushing against my bandages, begging to rip in two and take me away.

"You aren't leaving here today," he finished.

I’m made of worms, I’m made of veins.

“But yesterday you said I could go home," I started. He cut me off mid-sentence.

“No, no, no, not today. I didn't say today. I wouldn’t have. 96 hours mandatory hold for suicide attempts. 96 hours minimum.” Dr. Patel stopped scribbling and put down his pen, not looking at me but at a spot fixed over my shoulder.

Another night here, I thought, another night of nightmares.

"But sir," I stammered, remembering my dream: the man at the foot of my bed, licking between my toes, worms growing fat in my tongue so that I could not speak.

and this little piggy went

“Minimum,” he snapped, cutting me off in agitation. He turned away and grabbed another file off his desk, still not looking at me.

“My mom’s in the waiting room to pick me up…”

please please please

“Next patient please,” he said, still facing away from me. I turned, as if in a dream, and walked out of his office.

The next patient was waiting just outside the door, his eyes filled with a noxious green light.

As I passed him, drifting slowly back to my room to breakdown in solitude, the man from my nightmare brushed his fingers over my lower stomach. I ignored the touch, ignored the unnatural gleam in his eyes that undressed me, ignored the man entirely.

all the way

Once back in my room, I sat in the stiff cotton sheets of my psych ward bed and thought of home.