I bite down on the thin wooden block until my teeth create splinters that pierce my tongue.
There, the first string I sketch connects to the wooden wrist. Breathe. With another stroke, the wooden wrist connects to wooden fingers. My pointed piece of charcoal glides across the parchment.
Tears perch on my bottom eyelids, like a hurricane meeting a dam.
Breathe.
I make the second string, like a rope of spiderweb flowing in the wind, tied around the second wooden wrist. A sob rattles from my chest and I grind my teeth harder into the slab of wood. Keep going. More wooden fingers. Two legs. Two ankles.
Smudging the charcoal, I add the shadows.
I saw what working in that asylum did to her. She’d cry as she’d tell me the horrors she saw.
Breathe.
I sketch the wooden neck, the head, the shoulders. Finish the puppet.
Even after hearing of the patients she’d care for, of their treatments, of the way their screams would vibrate the asylum walls—I still am going through with the interview to work there today. To fulfill the promise I made to her.
I add the hand and the fingers that control the strings. Add the nails, and the creases in the knuckles. Control the panic.
“Delphine will be here in a few minutes to get you ready.” Aurick’s stiff voice is muffled from beyond the threshold. “Are you well?”
My strokes against the paper pause and my teeth bear down on the wood.
You’re okay.
But the memory of my twin sister vomiting in the sink after what she witnessed at Emerald Lake Asylum flashes behind my eyes. They held a child’s head underwater. He couldn’t breathe. And they called it his ‘treatment’!
Hot nausea rolls like an ocean wave in my gut.
I spit out the block. “I’m fine,” I say breathlessly toward the washroom door.
But I am not. I am cramped inside a bathtub, drawing a puppet on a sketchpad in a cottage that is not mine, waiting for a storm of panic to pass over me. Waiting for the fear that wraps around my neck like a noose to loosen and fall from my shoulders.
In only a couple of hours, I will be greeted at the doors of the notorious Emerald Lake Asylum. I will step into its prison, meet their patients with complex psychological oddities, and even worse—the people who work there.
“You don’t sound fine,” Aurick utters through the wood of the door. “May I come in?”
“No!” I answer quickly. He can’t see me. Not like this.
Aurick has been my only friend since my sister, Scarlett, died only a few weeks ago. He found me in the North Saphrine forest, alone, cold, and with ashes covering my hands. He let me stay in his winter cottage. Fed me. Gave me a warm place to grieve. He was nice to me, didn’t ask questions. How can I ask him to bear witness to my crippling fear? I’m the one who begged him to help me get an interview to work in the asylum. If he sees me like this, he’ll cancel the meeting.
“Skylenna,”—his voice is like a father’s scolding a child—“if you’re scared, you don’t have to do this.”
Oh, but I do. I must. It was Scarlett’s mission; she hated working in the asylum—dreaded every moment of it—but she couldn’t leave those poor, wounded minds to fend for themselves. If I turn a blind eye, I am no better than the people who revel in their torture. So, she made a plan to change their ways. Change the treatments. Show that there was a better path to treat them.
But she died before she could accomplish that dream.
And it was my fault.
I grip the charcoal, my nails cut into it. Fight the fear. But what if I can’t handle watching the patients being punished for simply existing? And what if I lose my mind like Scarlett did? What if I end up in that asylum as a patient?
“I’m not scared,” I grumble to Aurick, still lingering at the door. “I’ll be out in a moment.”
Breathe. I wipe the warm tears from my eyes. The trembling in my legs begins to calm like a pebble settling at the bottom of a pond. That’s it. I add the finishing touches to the puppet. The lifeless smile. The hollow beady eyes. The sad, upturned brows.
I exhale, feeling tired and sodden like a towel wrung out and left to grow mildew in the corner of a washroom.
I can do this. If Scarlett was able to endure it, then that is the least I can do. She told me what to expect. She told me about the waterboarding, the scalding baths, the chair binding. I was present every time she fell apart from sadness after being in those treatment rooms with her patients.
I grip the edges of the bathtub and lift myself from its comforting porcelain cocoon. I stash the drawing under the sink, even though I probably won’t ever look at it again. I’ve drawn hundreds just like it.
As I clean my face with cold water, I avoid the reflection that will peer back at me in the mirror. I refuse to stare into those cold green eyes. Scarlett’s eyes.
The eyes I gazed into as I lit her house on fire.
