Fantasy Magazine, Issue 2 by Fantasy Magazine

Author:Fantasy Magazine [Fantasy Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy, Short Stories
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2006-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Patricia Russo was born in Queens. She’s been writing stories for a long time. She also teaches ESL to adults and occasionally commits a random act of violence. Currently she lives in NJ. Other stories of her may be found in the anthology Corpse Blossoms, and issues of City Slab, Tales of the Unanticipated, and Not One of Us.

Light of the Moon

Karen Anne Mitchell

“I’m pleased to see that the medications are working.”

I watch the doctor as he speaks. He seems far away.

They tell me that’s part of the sickness, that sense of distance, and it makes sense. Familiar things are hard to touch, hard to taste and hard to smell and feel. Hard to see sometimes. The world spins, runs out of control, takes on a texture that is confusion and terror.

Madness.

I’m grateful they can treat this. And I’m grateful, you know, that they brought me back. It was hard for a while, and for a long time they had to keep me restrained, wrapped up tightly. I can still remember that, the straps against me as I lay there on the bed. Sometimes I screamed, and it was very dark, too, in those days. But they gave me my meds and after a while it grew lighter and I came back.

I’m back. I want to be back. I don’t want to go there again. I don’t want to be there.

It’s too clear, what I remember.

“You need to take them every day,” the doctor is saying. “It’s important. With your condition it’s especially important.”

“I will,” I promise him.

“Good. The staff at the halfway house will help you remember. They’re there to help you.”

There’s the discharge paperwork to be done and then he walks me to the front of the hospital, through the big door. It’s very thick, like a cell door, and it locks. I’ll be back, not to the ward but to his office, for more therapy. He wants to keep up with me and check on my progress. It’s part of being an outpatient, he says. We don’t want to drop you back into the real world without support.

Real world. I think about this as they drive me to the halfway house. I’m back in the real world.

I’m going out. I’m going to be free.

* * * *

They kept us naked.

I guess it was a power thing. They liked power. They liked being able to tell us what to do. They liked humiliating us. I think that was actually the hardest part of all, of being powerless. Of being unfree.

Freedom is power. It’s the one power you have to have, if you’re going to actually be alive.

Am I alive?

Am I real?

Back in the enclave we all thought about that a lot. We talked about it as we sat together under the light of the nebula. Helen spoke.

“They say it’s real. They say it isn’t a dream.”

“But if they’re in the dream, if they’re the dream? Can we trust what they say?”

Helen fingered her collar. It was thin and barely visible, like a tiny choker around her neck.

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