Cracked Cathy - Asylum Excerpt

Cathy Proctor slouched in a simple wooden chair; her head lolled forward like a ragdoll, chin on chest inflaming the chronic tension in her neck. She relished the moment of escape into the physical pain – a pithy respite from the emotional agony that was all consuming. Her drab, brown, itchy, mohair cardigan was pulled tightly around her tiny, fragile body as she picked at her hang nails. Her fingers sore and bleeding as she cradled them in her lap; much the same way that she had cradled her baby before she had been taken. Cathy’s once bouncy, copper hair now clumped in greasy strands like dripping candle wax, framing the harrowed face that shadowed her deep-set eyes, her liver iris’s drowning in inky sacks. Her once vibrant flame snuffed out. The softness of her delicate features, ravaged by the wretchedness that had become her life, left her weathering a haggard, stale, sallow look, much older than her twenty-five years – her youthful dew, stolen, slipping away like the memory of her baby’s soft face. They wanted her to look up. She tried to never look up. Instead she focusing on getting lost in the triangles of the geometric pattern of the trippy, sickly burnt orange and shit brown, linoleum covered floor (you could tell the acid flashback hippies a mile off, they stared at the dancing triangles too. Cathy wished that was the reason she stared. It wasn’t) concentrating on burning a deep hole, with her dying laser eyes, into the centre of the small, faded, off-white circles pressed into the centres. She hated seeing the reality of her life when she was forced to look up. The peeling paint of the heavily iron grilled, rot ridden windows. The comatose vegetable sad sacks, slumped in greying robes, oozing burger sweat, shoved like misshapen tomatoes into the comfy chairs – if you defined comfortable as sitting on a thousand lumpy stones – rocking back and forth like a harass of possessed rocking horses, gawking longingly beyond the bars that imprisoned them. Surrounded by the deranged, too far gone to realise that the real prison lay behind their haunted eyes, a prison they would never escape. They would never allow themselves to face the stark reality that their torture was within, much easier to look outwards, to search for some external rational for their pain, so they continued to gaze towards the hills and the baseless freedom the jeering river offered, never having to accept the awful truth that it was as much a facade as the prospect of any of them ever leaving the secure walls of Hayfield. Some days the façade slipped and the water would mirror their internal chaos in its own melanoid flow as it crashed over the fly-tipped carnage that lay unseen below its banks. Bleeding, gushing over rocks. The manic stream, deceiving, like the doctors’ smiles. The torment for these poor fuckers trapped in here was mirrored in everything everywhere, if you were to look long enough, deep enough. https://unbound.com/books/cracked-cathy