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My name is Kit Matheson.

I am twenty four years old.

I am sane.

I do not belong here.

 

                Alice Cook is a PSW who works at Bethel Hospital in the extended care unit. She has worked there for five years now, and has her daily routine so memorized that she can do it sleep walking. As she is right now. After working a double shift in order to be home for her son’s seventh birthday, Alice has found herself at the beginning of her third shift in a row. A new hire that was scheduled for this morning didn’t even bother to call in sick, and so Alice is stuck working the next four hours rather than racing home and catching some much needed sleep on the couch before her kids wake up expecting Saturday’s pancakes.

                Dazed out of her mind, Alice makes her rounds down the hall, pushing the rack of clothes ahead of her. Each item is labeled with one of the resident’s names, but the clothes are often swapped between patients. This is the dementia ward, and so the residents are relatively harmless and don’t notice when another person is wearing their clothes.

                Her face mechanically twists into a smile as she knocks on the open door before entering room 113, a room that had at one point been shared between two elderly patients, Betty Darwin and Carol Ethers. Now Carol was waiting for a new roommate. There hadn’t been anyone else arriving who had been compatible with Carol’s eccentricities of colour coding the days and the walls and the beds and the nurses. Betty, dear sweet Betty who had been loved by everyone on the staff until six months ago, was no longer-

                “Black!” Carol yells from her seat by the window as Alice entered the room. The colour has nothing to do with Alice’s skin tone, which was actually pale peach in colour, but is based solely on the silver bracelet that Alice always wears. It has a single black bead on it and was a gift from her husband before they got married and he became an alcoholic jerkoff who went and tried to rob a bank wearing only his boxer shorts and one old sock. The bracelet helped remind her of the good old days when her biggest concern was making it through high school with at least C’s on her report card.

                “Good morning, Carol,” Alice’s voice chirrups automatically. “How are the birds today?”

                “Miserable,” Carol huffs. “Ever since Betty went looney they’ve stopped chirping. And this morning a swallow attacked a blue jay.” She fixes Alice with a serious look. “I suggest you say you’re sick and go home. Something strange is going to happen today. And I don’t think it’s going to be a good strange.”

                Alice nods along, her eyelids feeling so heavy that it took the last bit of her will to make the decision to sleep in one of the empty rooms rather than risk other people’s lives by trying to drive home now. Her brain wouldn’t register what it was that Carol had said until exactly ten minutes later.

                Eight minutes later found her entering the isolation ward. It was normally only used during the flu season when the hospital had the inevitable outbreak despite how many precautions that the staff took. It was supposed to be empty right now, and nearly was except for one patient. Poor Betty Darwin, seventy three year old widow with no visitors since she had arrived at Bethel four years ago.

                Betty used to be a real sweetheart, always smiling and ready with a joke that always brightened Alice’s day. Carol and her had been real terrors, always escaping the extended care unit and exploring the rest of the hospital or wandering the gardens if the weather was nice. The two of them had been as thick as thieves and had seemed inseparable.

                But that changed six months ago when Betty had fainted just before boarding the bus to go back to the hospital after a day trip to the boardwalk in town. She had been rushed to the emergency room of Los Angeles hospital immediately, but had shortly come out of her comatose state. The doctors had held her overnight for observation to make sure that it wouldn’t happen again.

                The real trouble hadn’t started until Betty had been settled back into her room. Carol had begun to complain that Betty was always muttering to herself and sitting in front of the mirror. Even when the night staff had taken to restraining her to her bed at night, Betty managed to somehow escape her bonds just to go back to sitting in front of the mirror again, muttering the same nonsense to herself again and again.

                A specialist had come in, and was now coming twice a week saying that she had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. It was sad really.

                She knocks on the door before opening it and entering. Betty is sitting in front of the mirror again, her restraints dangling from her bedrails. She doesn’t glance up as Alice entered, just continued to stare at her reflection. Her hand slowly reaches out to touch the glass, resting a hand on her reflection’s cheek. The specialist had told the staff to remove the mirror in an attempt to get Betty to snap out of it. She had reacted violently, to the point of attacking staff and escaping her room, fighting off anyone who tried to pry her away from whatever reflective surface she could find. They had caved and brought the mirror back into her room.

                Sometimes Alice wondered what it was that Betty saw when she looked in the mirror. Some small part of her knew that it couldn’t be the wrinkles and grey hair and dulled, red rimmed eyes. Imagine how Alice would react if she could actually see what Betty saw, the young, smooth face of a girl with nose piercings and a tattoo on her neck of a lotus blossom, a single petal of which was all black. Instead of red rimmed blue eyes, the eyes staring back at Betty were gold, with flecks of green dispersed at seemingly random. Instead of grey hair that was falling out, the girl in the mirror had black hair pulled into spikey pigtails with parts dyed lime green. The face in the mirror did not belong to a resident of an old age home.

                Betty speaks, and the reflection’s lips move in perfect synchronization as if it were really the reflection who was saying the words in the heavily Dutch-accented voice.

                “Hello, Alice.”

                Alice smiles, even though Betty doesn’t look up to see it. “Hello, Betty. How are you today?”

                “Oh, I’m just fine.”

                “I brought you a blouse. I thought that you might be tired of wearing sweaters in this warm weather.”

                Betty smiles. So does the girl in the mirror, though Alice can’t see her. The girl in the mirror is wearing different clothes too, arm warmers that go nearly to her shoulders and a sleeveless black shirt that seem to have a stain above her heart.

                “That would be fine, dear,” Betty replies, absently patting the air beside her reassuringly.

                Alice helps her change. It is now nine and a half minutes since Carol had said her cryptic message. Alice is almost at the door when Betty speaks again. “Special day today for you, isn’t it?”

                Alice smiles, her feet aching as she stands there. Every other room in this ward is empty and had a working, comfortable, and clean bed, and she is stuck standing in the one room that’s occupied.  “Yes, it’s my son’s birthday.”

                Betty gives a surprised little bark of laughter. “Well, what do you know? It’s my birthday too.”

                Betty’s birthday is February 19. Today is September 7. Alice’s smile doesn’t waver. “Is that so?”

            Betty nods. So does her reflection. Her reflection is also smiling whereas Betty’s expression is serious. “Yup. Today’s a special one too. A quarter of a century.” Unseen by Alice, the young reflection’s face contorts so that their expressions matched in seriousness.

                Alice squints, something about Betty’s eyes catching her gaze. There were flecks of gold amongst the blue. Such an odd combination. How had she never noticed it before?

                “Have a nice day, Alice,” Betty says, turning her attention back to the mirror. Alice was already forgotten from her addled mind.

                Alice is now outside the room, but she can still hear Betty begin her daily mantra. Except that today’s is different. She listens to what she can only assume is going to be Betty’s mantra for the next 365 days.

                “My name is Kit Matheson. I am twenty-five. I am sane. I do not belong here.”

                It had now been ten minutes.

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Publication Date: 02-19-2015

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