Monster.

I woke up to see morning sunlight stream through the barred windows. I seemed to be doing nothing but sleeping since my suicide attempt. I felt groggy due to too much sleep and my head and arm were throbbing in synch. My throat felt dry and scratchy but there was no water beside this bed for me to drink. I missed Dr. Stanton and the hospital already. Sure no one talked to me there, not even the nurses but at least I didn’t get attacked for no reason and then accused of provoking it. The sunlight cast a faint yellow light on the white walls of the ward, making the room look less sterile and lonely. The colour cheered me up a bit. I noticed that Maggie, the crazy woman who had attacked me was gone from her bed. She must have been taken while I slept. Where she went I didn’t know and I didn’t care. I prayed she wouldn’t be back at all. Nurse Jackson was back however, sitting on her hard-backed chair near the large metal door. She was watching as a young girl twirled her way up and down the ward. With a shock I realised it was the girl from the bed next to mine. The sun shone behind her making her pale skin glow gold, like she was an angel. My breath caught in my throat; she was beautiful. The girl was around my age with her blood red hair cut in a chin length choppy style. Her arms were covered from shoulders to wrists in tattoos I couldn’t make out from this distance. Her small, thin build and her graceful movements made it obvious she was a natural dancer. All eyes were on her as she danced her way around the ward; even Nurse Jackson looked happy watching her. Then abruptly, the girl stopped dancing. She gave a small smile and then jumped back into her bed. Nurse Jackson’s happy face was replaced by a scowl as she took a large rusted key from her pocket, unlocked the door and left the room.
‘Hello’,
I heard someone whisper as soon as the door was shut. It was the dancer in the bed next to mine. She was staring at me again with her wide green eyes. The vibrant colour of her eyes and the intensity I saw in them unsettled me.
‘My name is Liara. What’s yours?’ she asked.
‘Briony’, I replied. For some unknown reason, I instantly liked this weird girl.
‘That’s a pretty name’ she said, ‘what are you in for?’
I didn’t know if I liked this girl enough to trust her with the truth just yet. So I decided I’d just tell her the simple version and leave out any thoughts of eating human flesh.
‘Uhm, I tried to kill myself last week’ I told her.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, they’ll find out what’s actually wrong with you soon enough. I tried to do that three months ago and they’ve discovered I’m a bipolar manic depressive with anorexia.’
I couldn’t believe this girl was being so open so quick. I felt kind of guilty for not telling her why I’d tried to kill myself. Maybe in here it wouldn’t even seem that crazy. Still, I’d keep my mouth shut for now. The girl was nice enough but she wasn’t a doctor, she was a patient in a psychiatric hospital. My problems were on a need to know basis only and she didn’t need to know just yet.
‘Are you a dancer?’ I asked, trying to steer the conversation away from mental health problems.
‘Yeah, I am – well, I was. I’ve been doing ballet since I was six. My parents wanted me to do it but I had to stop because it caused the anorexia. I was becoming paranoid that I was too fat to keep dancing so I started starving myself’
Well, there goes the plan to stop talking about our mental problems I thought. Liara was starting to make me uncomfortable. I wasn’t used to people being so open and honest about their problems to strangers. Still, someone was talking to me, maybe I could be relieved of some of my curiosity about this place and it seemed like this girl would easily tell me everything I wanted to know.
‘Where did that woman go?’ I asked gesturing towards Maggie’s vacant bed.
‘Maggie? Oh, orderlies took her earlier to go for her session with the Doctor. She’s due back soon.’ Liara told me.
My heart sank. There went my hopes of her never coming back. I don’t think I could stand another attack.
‘Don’t think too badly of her because of yesterday’ Liara continued ‘She’s mentally unstable. Her baby was cut out of her stomach when she was nine months pregnant and she’s never been the same. She thinks it’s still alive.’
‘But why did she attack me?’ I questioned, ‘I didn’t do anything!’
‘Maggie really doesn’t like when people watch her ‘rock her baby’, she said, ‘next time you hear her humming don’t look at her and nothing will happen.’
Liara shrugged her shoulders as if to say ‘duh!’ like I was being stupid. What had happened to Maggie was horrific but a made a note to myself never to look at her again whether she was rocking her imaginary baby or not.

Maggie came back to ward just as Nurse Jackson was bringing around everyone’s medication. An orderly brought her to her bed and I couldn’t help noticing that she wasn’t restrained this time. A shiver of fear went through me. What if she pounced on me again? I looked everywhere but at her but I could feel her gaze on me. I shuddered involuntarily. Nurse Jackson was giving Liara her pills – two big white ones. Suddenly I started to panic. What if I was given pills? No one knew exactly what was wrong with me yet so what could I be medicated for? Thankfully when the nurse reached my bed she didn’t hand me anything except a message.
‘You have a session with Dr. Reid at three o ‘clock’, she told me curtly and then walked away to continue along the other side of the ward. I looked at the clock on the wall beside the door. It was 1pm. I had two hours to figure out exactly what I was going to say. Do I tell this doctor about my crazy thoughts or keep it to myself? If I told him maybe he could tell me what was wrong with me and cure me. Then again, I hadn’t had any urges since the day before with the receptionist. Maybe I was curing myself or perhaps it was because all I was doing was sleeping. I wasn’t awake long enough to have the thoughts. I decided that for now, I’d keep it to myself.

I ushered out of the ward at three o’ clock by another huge orderly with a nametag that read ‘Sean’. Was it a rule that to be an orderly in a psychiatric ward you had to be male and built like a tank? I suppose the bigger you were the easier it would be to deal with patients when they went wild like Maggie did yesterday. There was still no one at the nurse’s station today.
‘Where are all the nurses?’ I asked Sean, ‘I didn’t see any yesterday either’.
‘Oh, they never really stay at the Nurse’s Station on this floor’, he told me cheerfully. ‘There’s a nurse for every ward on this floor and they tend to stay in their assigned ward like Nurse Jackson stays in yours. The station is mainly for paperwork’
‘I see’ I replied, ‘how many floors are there and how many patients?’
Sean seemed to stiffen when I asked this and a scowl crossed his face. It came and went so quick I thought I’d imagined it.
‘There’s four floors, six wards on each floor and around a hundred patients. I think. I’m not that great at the math.’
His expression told me I wasn’t going to get much more information from him so we walked the rest of the way in silence. He took me through the last metal door beside the nurses’ station that brought us into another hallway that contained another seven doors and a flight of stairs at the end. The doors in this hallway weren’t heavy, metal doors. They were your average wooden variety that each had a Doctor’s name on a brass plaque outside. We stopped outside the third door on the left, in front of a dark wood door with a plaque stating that this was Dr. Reid’s office. Sean knocked and I waited nervously for the doctor to answer. The door opened and a statuesque, stern looking woman greeted us. She was wearing a black suit with her blonde hair pulled into a tight looking bun at the back of her head. She looked down at us through the black square framed glasses perched on the bottom of her nose. I was tall, but this woman was a giant.
‘Ah, you must be the new arrival, Ms. Briony Alexander’, she said. Despite her appearance she had a warm, friendly voice and I relaxed slightly. She turned to Sean, gave a small nod of her head and gestured for me to come inside.