The Flying None by Cody Goodfellow

Author:Cody Goodfellow [Goodfellow, Cody]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, ebook, QuarkXPress
Publisher: Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing
Published: 2021-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

9

There are times in life when you cling to the things you love, when they nurture and sustain the truth of who you are and the light you’re carrying, even when you just want the world to snuff it out. But there are also times when the pain is so raw that you know your cherished security blankets will only be stained by the memory of the pain.

Right now was one of the latter category.

Someone had taken all of her things from her cell at Sister Candy’s and transplanted them here, in this room so white that she couldn’t see the corners where wall met floor or ceiling; and in the blinding light that seemed to come from everywhere, her clothes and music and the unidentifiable stuffed animal she’d slept with all her life looked like muddy roadside junk.

Worse, someone had jacked her most downbeat, wrist-slitting playlist into the ancient public address system. Maybe it was intended to give her an anchor, but it only itemized the pathetic tokens collected in a waste of a lonely little life, and the strains of Nirvana’s “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge On Seattle” made her nervous system want to climb out of her skin and slap somebody.

But that was where they overplayed their hand. If the music selection wasn’t so gratingly obvious, she would just go on hating herself and being a proper patient, assuming she was in some kind of mental hospital and not abducted by aliens, who would probably have more sensitivity to a probing victim’s aesthetic needs.

She was in a bed. She couldn’t tell if she was strapped down or so medicated that she couldn’t get out of it, or if her brains had been scooped out and decanted into a counterfeit body of latex and balsa wood. A nurse came in every so often but moved so fast, she was a white blur amid the static blur-scape of the room, in and out and needles in her arm, pills down her throat before she could resist.

Her thoughts were pebbles of regret that ripped through the gummy residue of her brain like cranial gallstones, pulses of ugly truth that left her fragile self-image in agonized shreds.

Looking back, it was all so obvious . . .

She’d always thought she must be slightly insane because the world seemed insane and there was no place for her in it, and the whole world couldn’t be insane, could it? Eating itself, beating itself and stomping around in its own ashes, pumping its fists and shooting selfies while everything good burned and rotted and fell away.

No, it must be her, because she couldn’t get with the program, couldn’t strap on a bib and compete in the pie-eating contest of eternal misery.

But now, with the help of industrial strength anti-psychotics and oh-god-no-not-John-Prine-too coming out of the tarnished brass speaker like heartbreakingly slow electroshock therapy, she realized that she had truly snapped when she seemed to find her power. She bottomed out when she had locked

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