Maggie Boylan by Michael Henson

Author:Michael Henson [Henson, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2015-06-23T04:00:00+00:00

The Girl Who Spoke Foreign

THAT GIRL was talking in her sleep again.

Maggie Boylan sat up in her bed and listened. Everything else was quiet. Outside her window, snow fell on silent snow. The third shift monitors were dozing at their stations. Everyone else was sound asleep. Everything else was perfectly still. There was only this muttering girl with her moans and curses.

Oh fuck, Maggie thought, not again.

The way she talked was some kind of foreign, so that Please came out as Pliz! And Pliz no! So, over and over, it was Pliz! And Pliz! And No! And then a long string of perfectly crafted curses. Then the curses trailed off and the girl moaned and muttered and twitched and gasped and Maggie knew that, for the second night running, she could have no hope of sleeping.

The girl was just a young girl, barely old enough to be in this place. But she carried such a burden of cursing and grief. She was a tiny little thing, skinny as a weasel and just as loopy. But she bellowed out her curses like a bull in rut, curses not even Maggie would curse, curses made up of words Maggie could not even understand but which she knew to be curses by the vehemence of them and by the way it broke her heart to hear them.

The girl twitched and gasped so that Maggie couldn’t bear it, and she stood, threw her jacket over her shoulders, and stared as the girl mumbled and muttered and sighed and pulled the blankets up around her neck.

All day long, she don’t have two words to say, Maggie thought. Then she goes to sleep and she can’t shut up.

Maggie had tried last night to sleep on one of the couches in the group room, but the third shift people had run her back to her room. She had begged to be switched to another room, but they turned her down. She had tried stuffing her ears with tissue, but the tissues fell out. So she was stuck with all this muttering and cursing that made it impossible to sleep.

It’s that powerless shit, Maggie thought. I’m powerless. And powerless means you’re fucked.

It was bad enough that she was stuck in here with all these mental cases—Maggie knew she had a little problem with OxyContin, but she wasn’t mental—but then she had to put up with this little girl with the big barrel of a voice.

Tomorrow, when Maggie fell asleep again in group, that skinny little vixen who ran it would tell her again she was being resistant.

But she wasn’t resistant. She sat when she was supposed to sit and she stood when she was supposed to stand and she read what they told her to read and she wrote what they told her to write and she joined hands in the circle and mumbled the prayer along with the rest.

Resistant! she thought. If she wants to see resistant, I can resist my ass right out the door and up the road.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.