La Soledad
by Daphne Carpenter
Soledad could hear the incessant ticking sound of the clock outside her sterile white-walled room. She counted each second under her breath as though it were to be her last.
The cruel bed and its leather restraints from which she had been freed was to her left, and to her right, nothing but invisible memories. At this time, the young woman sat on the cold tiled floor against the wall, dressed in a light blue hospital gown that tied in back, and white bloodstained underwear. She was barefoot with her knees bent in towards her chest, and as she sat there wavering in and out of this despondent state, she could feel a tiny network of electromagnetic pulses moving their way through her body, torturing her.
“WHAAT!?” she screamed again, towards the overshadowing camera on the wall. She could see “them” staring back at her through the lens. Dispelled by the drab desolation of the room, her mind wandered.
They were in love.
He was warm and tall, soft, not harsh, and they slept with their limbs intertwined. For the first time in her life, Soledad could sleep with both eyes closed, safe. Something of this nature had to be a dream (or at least this is what she had convinced herself of), so for that, Soledad had decided to never wake up.
After a short time in the nectar of love, Soledad was with child. This was a source of intense emotion on many levels. It made Soledad—an otherwise troubled young woman—happy, no longer like a lone tree in a dark forest, but like a flower in a lush jungle of endless possibilities. For the first time, she was in her heart mind.
But now began the nightmare.
The events of Soledad’s first night back on the unit were fateful. She panted in anxiety as two male orderlies, the same ones as before, led her abruptly towards the end of the dull hallway and through the doors that opened up into Unit B.
She wasn’t supposed to be there. But somehow her deep and complicated history with the place had manifested her return. The familiar stale scent of oatmeal, worn office carpet, and bleach sliced into the poor girl as soon as the doors closed behind her. When she spiraled around to face the circumstances of her environment, her eyes began to twitch in desperation. They scanned the room, but nothing had changed in that ugly place where, as an adolescent, she had suffered extreme depressive black-outs, trying to erase from her memory the Man’s hands, sliding invasively over her bare, private skin. This of course was long before her metamorphosis into womanhood had begun.
(When Soledad was 14, she crossed paths with this man again, and of course, she had not forgotten. So what happened next was foreboding; as he slept in his bed that springtime, when the air was alive with flowers, she approached him with vacant eyes and an arsenal of hateful thoughts. The cut went in deep, enough to make him remember her until the end of his days. Ten days after this encounter, Unit B became her home, and hence began one girl’s new hell—pills, wrist restraints, needles, cold empty rooms, bruises, ghosts.)
She managed to escape from Unit B once the curse had been lifted.
But now the two male orderlies were dumping her back into that haunted realm of misery. And the nurse was waiting.
“Welcome, Soledad,” droned Nurse Scary, in the same sickening tone as ever before. She made her way towards the young woman with her grey arms extended. She was floating, hovering just above the floor as she approached. “I’ve been expecting you.”
(The nurse was a reptilian-eyed despotic robot, a dispenser of numbness who stripped unlucky humans of their lives and emotions with forced doses of whites, blues, yellows, pinks, and also with those debilitating injections.)
Immediately in defense, Soledad’s protective claws came up to the surface, and like a frightened animal, she launched at Nurse Scary with the strength and ferocity of a bear. The young woman’s piercing shriek was heard for miles.
But what was to come in direct overlap was inevitable; the two male orderlies worked swiftly to take the girl down into submission—just as they had done many times before. Soledad’s belly hit the ground first, and it was at that moment that a lightning bolt of desperate despair shot through her. Her screeching eyes flashed like strobe lights—mouth wide open in a colossal silent scream—before the light faded into darkness.
Soledad disappeared.
After the surgery they took her to the cold white room. Her skin had turned a translucent white, and bruises, like rain clouds, painted her wrists and arms. No longer was there a warm feeling in her belly. In the sterile white-walled room she sat catatonic, staring at them stare at her through the lens. Her mind wandered in dark distraction as she waited. She waited for The Dream.
She could feel him drawing near—she could hear the trees move open to the sides as he made his way towards her in the wind. But until she could touch him, Soledad took a deep breath, and into her own mind she vanished.
To Be Continued.Daphne can be reached at daph.occupylamedia@gmail.com and at www.paintzflwrs.blogspot.com.
