Good Mothers Don't by Laura Best

Author:Laura Best
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing
Published: 2020-06-29T12:58:11+00:00

A cluster of leaves from outside catches my attention. Pressing my face to the glass, I watch them through the window in the common room; some bright green birch and maple leaves moving in the wind. They look to be carrying on a conversation with one another. I wonder what they are saying. The world outside is green and new, and a part of me longs to be out there listening to the leaves jabbering back and forth in the wind.

The brown-haired girl is sitting on the tiled floor with her legs drawn up and her dress pulled down over her knees, staring at the wall. No one is paying any attention to her. They walk past as if she isn’t there. I go to her and look down at her, not sure what I should say or if I should say anything.

“What are you looking at?” she hisses, pulling her dress down over her knees farther, hiding her dirty white sneakers. She is the only one here who talks to me, even if it is just to ask for a cigarette. The others whisper about me in the corners until a nurse breaks them up, shooing them away like houseflies from a manure pile. The brown-haired girl is the only one who never whispers about me behind my back, and for that I am grateful. Two orderlies enter the room and pick her up by the arms like a life-size doll. At first she says nothing, does nothing, except to dangle in midair. But then she kicks and screams at them: “Take your goddamn hands off me!” She looks at me as they carry her away and stops screaming long enough to say, “Get yourself out of here, Elizabeth. No matter what you do. Don’t let them keep you forever.”

I turn toward the nurse, who is standing beside me.

“Where am I?”

If I’m going to get out of here, I have to know where here is.

“You’re in Dartmouth.”

“I promise,” I whisper as the brown-haired girl disappears through the door. Her screams slowly fade away to nothing.

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