Wall Pretties

They were screaming at the walls. It was a sound so high pitched that if a wine glass were to be placed on the floor, it would shatter into hundreds of shards. Each girl was up pinned up by their night gowns with rusty nails according to insanity. Their night gowns were made of a thick fabric that literally could only be ripped apart by huge garden scissors so their chance of falling or coming off of the dirt filled wall was incredibly slim.

The room was completely lined with these young women. Wall pretties as the head nurse liked to call them. This particular asylum was like no other. You could never leave and you could never get better. You may find yourself asking how one ends up in a terrible place like this. When you are deemed insane, they’ll put you here in this “treatment” facility.

The screaming stopped for a moment and all you could hear was Alice, the last in line, singing to the wall in a soft voice.

“One, two, head nurse is coming for you
Three, four, she’s at the door
Five, six, our death predicts
Seven, eight, here comes our fate
Nine, ten, nailed to the wall again…”

She continued the morphed children’s song over and over again for hours as if it were the most comforting melody.

It was days that they were stuck to the wall. All but three of them were pinned dead to the wall and one had fallen to the ground. Alice had been silent for the past day, her mind on the brink of insanity. The nurse hadn’t returned to give the patients the food or even enter the room to laugh at them like she usually had done. She disappeared and left the girls to rot.

Two of them had broken their nails off from attempting to push away from the wall and be set free. One of them had lost her voice completely from yelling for days on end. Alice however, remained silent.

A day later and Alice is the only girl left. The others were hanging dead. Her body was thinned out to the point of her bones being shown and she’d been holding on to the wall shivering for hours.

It took one last day for anyone to find the wall pretties. Two police officers accompanied by a search and rescue pup had opened the door to find one dying, young woman and six lifeless. Alice was in the corner of the room (quite a frightful sight, really) hugging her boney knees and chanting:

“One, two, head nurse is coming for you
Three, four, she’s at the door
Five, six, our death predicts
Seven, eight, here comes our fate
Nine, ten, nailed to the wall again!”