Waiting and Knowing
Tuesday 03/02/2010 1:42 PM
 Artistic re-interpretation of this image I found via Google: http://www.flickr.com/photos/root-2/3667539992/ Thought it would be a good visual for my short story “Waiting and Knowing”. File Under: Fire; Photograph, Digital Manipulation/Composite; Someone Else's Image |
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Screams on top of screams echo through the granja, what Mexicans call what we call nut houses. Straightjackets and such.
Dr. Jimenez sits next to the cell of his patient, a young woman named Eilalue. After she arrived, Eilalue never spoke, preferring to spend her time writing on index cards and then burning them. No one got to read them except that once, and now she only screams.
Dr. Jimenez was on vacation when Eilalue ran out of matches. She fought the orderlies as they dragged her from her latest card. The nurse saved it for Dr. Jimenez. Imagine his surprise (and horror) when he returned to his office, two weeks late due to the funerals, and saw those words written in her pretty scrawl:
“Dr. Jimenez will lose his family and there is nothing I can do about it.”
He went mad and locked the nurses out. He beat her. He drugged her. He made her tell him how she sees things but too late to stop them. She lashed back by telling him about it all... the things so far away as to seem avertable, the disasters without date, the genocides. That's when he started screaming and gouging out his eardrums just to keep her words outside his head.
Now, side-by-side, together in their world of moan, patient and doctor scream at each other through the walls, all the while waiting and knowing the horrors just upon us that we are powerless to stop.
I wrote this story last month for a micro science fiction contest sponsored by Hilobrow.com. The theme of the contest was troubled or troubling super humans and there was a 250 word limit on all submissions, which works out to roughly one double-spaced typewritten page. This was my second story as the first one didn't turn out too well. The contest submissions are posted in the comments section at your Link of the Day. There are lots of great vignettes there that you might enjoy reading if you have the time.
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