Short Story Piece: Amalynne O.
I’m going to my yearning chair. You could tell me it’s not mine at all, but it wouldn’t do to change my mind, I’ve already decided it inside… it has graced a spectrum of victims before me, but it is mine now. It waits for me past the din of polished shoes against linoleum floors and the metallic clink of cell gates wrenched open and shut, past the buzz of flickering fluorescent bulbs that tease light across the distant halls. I know the room awaits, the cave more rather, dimly lit save for a single bulb hanging by a wire, precariously swaying above an intimidating padded chair, arm rests jutting forward as if to laugh lightly that this is a place of comfort. New memories will file in, whether they are mine or not, I do not know, they are the torture for which I harbor a wretched blend of abhorrence and yearning, for perhaps a spark of self will be reignited as these false images flash before me.
There are triggers at times, brief swells of joy as a simple detail offers me fleeting clarity. The overhead lights shining from the ceiling outside my cell once provided me a tangible memory. I have only seen these lights once, as I was released for another session in the chair, tinged yellow with age, collecting its own victims in the form of sorry insects too captivated to escape the glow and hypnotizing hum. The memory slipped back to me naturally, a calm observation, as my mind allowed me back to the metro off Amsterdam and Broadway where the fluorescent lights blinked and flickered across the tracks as I waited for the train downtown. You cannot possibly quantify the dizzying elation I received and I latched onto to it, coveted it and prayed it would stay with me. It has carried me thus far. The smell of the grease in the morning air and the honk of taxis and the damp traces of sewage that rise off the pavement torturing my nostrils… that is a place I can attest that I have been, but only there, for nothing else is clear.
This moment is a game of waiting, from the cement floor of an icy cell, my eyes dull as I gaze across the hall to the rows of pained, pallid faces, as though I’ve taken a mirror to reflect a never ending length of prison, but it is no reflection or trick of the mind, something in me laments these visions are real. I have passed those faces of tortured acceptance every day on the procession to my yearning chair, knowing too they must suffer from the memories. I’m sure, they used to remember themselves as I once did, remember the feel of the world outside that haunts through beeps of traffic and the subtle chirp of a lark in the early morning, the echoes of a life we once shared with the world.
I used to think it wasn’t my choice at all, my feet dragged against a merciless cement floor, my body limp and heavy as I deigned their fingers and cursed their hold. In recent days, when the metal grate is swung back with its shuddering, mocking clink, I stand on my own volition, gaze past the eyes of the nameless gray-suited attendants and shiver with sinful anticipation to grasp at what was my true past. The chair will offer me clarity, I assure myself, today I will remember, today I will remember it all, I reach out into what was lost and retrieve it for me, selfishly so I may know who I was before this sordid reality. I will walk with steps that are deliberate, bare feet against gravelly cement, head down, avoiding the lifeless gaze of my fellow prisoners, the isolated vegetables with their glassy, faraway expressions that let me know they have truly escaped this place… they are not the victims any longer, but the victors.
The excitement of a space outside my cell exhilarates me briefly, a mingled horror and joy that is swiftly doused with the frigidity of reality as my escorted journey ends before an intimidating, windowless door. It has the kind of height and weight of a massive vault, though painted a sickening light green, deceptively soothing against the eyes as a punching clink releases the locks. One of my gray-suited escorts swings the door wider with a creak that pains my ears and alerts my mind to the victory at reach within... over a mental wall of spiked glass, but it will be in reach.
The seat will be cold when I am placed into it, no surprise in a place where everything shivers, cowers, flickers bleakly. The straps will be secured, and I will suck in a breath that is short, released with a shudder as the needle is inserted to my trusty protuberant vein and the memories will file in, stacked like cards and shuffled before eyes that can never close. I used to tell myself that torture of the mind was a mercy, a blessing, but I know now that the body can go numb, the mind can endure the wear of multiple lifetimes and I’m sure I have lived them during the mere seconds in the chair. A hundred lives I have lived, watching memories through the eyes of others, horrific images played back again and again, new, evolved, intensified, and nudged with determined force into my attic recesses, dominating every crevice and piece that could possibly remind me of why I ever deserved this. The images are raw and rock me to the depths of a fragile core… I am vile, feral, rabid, raging and psychotic without mercy, I am the woman drenched in the blood of a million lives, betrayed, betraying, quaking, I hold lifeless children in my hands… I could not have lived all the days, sinned all the sins to be guilty of every memory, but a part of me believes that one of them was real, just one to make me so deserving. In a way it is how I assure myself that this course is just, but at my depths it is a deception even I cannot swallow, an overlarge pill that goes down as a rough hoax.
The Velcro straps will be ripped off my hands splashing in pools of sweat as my eyes roll forward to view the single window hovering blearily at the far side of the dim room. The light will reveal the hour of the day and the sounds will tell me a world functions ignorantly beyond. This is why I yearn, for the elation of the window and the hope and the square chunk of reality. It is acrid and sweet as my eyes are allowed those brief moments to take in a darkened sky… they don’t grace me the joy of morning sessions any longer, perhaps I seemed too hopeful. It will surely be night, but even if the sky is an inky purple, I will transcend this world of artificial grays, softs greens, and sick yellows.
I don’t know how many days this cycle will continue, the mornings in a stupor as I gather myself, fight against the hoaxes created in my own mind or by the chair, the hours of taking in the lost faces across the hall that don’t seem to perceive me as I invent false lives for them in my head, to the evenings and my yearning chair… I’m hanging on a cliff, I know it, my sanity is waiting for my fingers to slip off the rocky edge, nails digging in, as I pray for the strength to pull myself up again… As the hours pass and I release cool, thoughtful breaths I assure myself the fight isn’t over and I stand glaring out over a vast horizon of lifetimes, but by the evening I am again struggling against the elements and the weakness of my hands as I am forced to the edge, yet another finger slipping off the crumbling rock.
I feel stronger today and I hear the murmurings outside my cell, the mundane conversations of men with menial lives, and I paint them all with the same dull brush, no one has shown mercy and I do not expect it. I haven’t spoken in months and I’m not sure I remember how, so we don’t exchange words when they open my cell, I stare forward and follow. There is a charge in the air, spurred by my own eagerness and desperation, I would run to the chair today if I could, I need a revelation because a single forefinger is keeping me on the rocks of sanity. The journey is a haze; the process starts with its usual horror, as I settle into my yearning chair, flinch at the needle and wade into a pool of swirling torture. My mind is bombarded but I feel as though I am drifting away and the torture starts to echo outside my ears as I am met by something strange and fresh but painfully familiar…
I am at the Laundromat. It’s a Tuesday evening and someone called me a bitch at work and my delicates are swirling round and round in hypnotizing circles as I gaze at my reflection in the circular window of the washing machine.
“This just feels like the drudges of earth, don’t you think?” my brother utters next to me.
We are sitting on cheap plywood benches next to a stereo that’s playing some obnoxious breed of Mexican polka.
“You know, saying that doesn’t make it any better,” I say, as I run my fingers through greasy hair.
I haven’t had a shower all day and I’ve worked a double shift, the last thing I need is his commentary, I’ve done what I can for him. We’ve done what we can. He’s my world though and I see our faces in the washing machine and I pray to god a year from now will look better than this. We’ve been on our own since they left, my mother’s mind and my father’s ethics, and Manhattan is a cruel place for abandonment. He didn’t go to school today, I know he didn’t go to school, but I don’t badger him anymore, all I hope is that he’s willing to buy off the dollar menu again because laundry is really breaking the bank today.
“Do you think I’ll get into Columbia too?” he asks distantly and I’m cruel to release a sharp laugh.
I could bring up school, but I won’t.
“You’re brilliant,” I answer indirectly.
He’s smug and it assures him briefly.
This is the worst it will ever be, I think to myself, life will be better, I will be better and I’ll step on the world if I have to, just to transcend this and see that we get what we always wanted. My brother wants a little yellow house in the south where he can marry a gentle belle that brings him sweet tea on a veranda and they can swing on the porch together and watch the afternoon wear away. I found a picture of a quaint yellow house and I gave it to him on his birthday and promised he would have it.
He does have it, he is brilliant, he makes his way in the world and I shine from an ivory tower of my own making. I build an empire, I rise to success and I want every inch of the world in a greedy fist. The years pass and I grow complacent but the world alters around me, my brother was the first to leave, he could see the changes before I could, he warned me… but I didn’t listen. I wanted to influence, I wanted to stay for my students. We were making breakthroughs, the kinds you can only dream of… the world was bright and open and the mind was a world to explore freely, the new world for a new era. As the world altered within the confines of science, a rumbling in the streets gave way to an era of equality, screams from the destitute for a system of reform.
With weakened knees the government crumbled under the persistent pounding fists of the impoverished, wailing “entitlement” as they waded in debt and struggled to feed themselves. The walls of society broke apart, brick by brick and an age of equality was embraced, the ultimate fix for a world caving in upon itself. An idealistic Utopia ignited the Reprocessing Initiative, a reeducation process for those who had endured a life of seemingly greater happiness and fulfillment than those less privileged. The advances in science and research, ironically, in part by my own hands, offered the perfect means for which to bring about this reeducation. It was scoffed at first, met with resistance, but the destitute were many and the successful few and like aristos sentenced to a sharpened guillotine, the “privileged” were filed into prison-like processing centers where the first of the specimen were to be “brought into a new light”.
Those who had never suffered should suffer and those who had never experienced the lofty graces of life would be distributed a sum of wealth, menial yet enough to appease the screeching crowds. It evolved into torture over time; the memories were intended to be distributed once, to settle in conjunction with therapeutic psychiatric sessions, but the pressure from the suffering beyond brought hell into the Reprocessing Centers. Little did they realize they were creating equality, a dazed mass of vegetables, now we were all the same. Whatever world functions beyond the walls of the processing center I know nothing of now, whatever course society is traveling I will never know. I know as my finger slips off the edge of the cliff face that I’ll never return to this world… and I am happy for it, at peace with it, I know who I am.
I’m sitting on a porch sipping lemonade, it’s sweeter than I like it but my lap is warm and my niece is sitting there showing me paper finger puppets and we laugh as a basset hound whines jealously at my feet. My husband is out on the lawn fixing a sprinkler for my brother who never bothered to learn anything practical in his life, and the smell of short ribs wafts from the backyard barbeque. Willows canopy a long dirt drive and I gaze out in bliss and I tell myself, this is happiness, this is life…
The needle is removed from my arm, the straps unhinged, the air is still and I can’t see a thing, my eyes swim with life. I shine brightest, like a bulb before it is extinguished and I release one last sigh as I come out the victor. *
There are triggers at times, brief swells of joy as a simple detail offers me fleeting clarity. The overhead lights shining from the ceiling outside my cell once provided me a tangible memory. I have only seen these lights once, as I was released for another session in the chair, tinged yellow with age, collecting its own victims in the form of sorry insects too captivated to escape the glow and hypnotizing hum. The memory slipped back to me naturally, a calm observation, as my mind allowed me back to the metro off Amsterdam and Broadway where the fluorescent lights blinked and flickered across the tracks as I waited for the train downtown. You cannot possibly quantify the dizzying elation I received and I latched onto to it, coveted it and prayed it would stay with me. It has carried me thus far. The smell of the grease in the morning air and the honk of taxis and the damp traces of sewage that rise off the pavement torturing my nostrils… that is a place I can attest that I have been, but only there, for nothing else is clear.
This moment is a game of waiting, from the cement floor of an icy cell, my eyes dull as I gaze across the hall to the rows of pained, pallid faces, as though I’ve taken a mirror to reflect a never ending length of prison, but it is no reflection or trick of the mind, something in me laments these visions are real. I have passed those faces of tortured acceptance every day on the procession to my yearning chair, knowing too they must suffer from the memories. I’m sure, they used to remember themselves as I once did, remember the feel of the world outside that haunts through beeps of traffic and the subtle chirp of a lark in the early morning, the echoes of a life we once shared with the world.
I used to think it wasn’t my choice at all, my feet dragged against a merciless cement floor, my body limp and heavy as I deigned their fingers and cursed their hold. In recent days, when the metal grate is swung back with its shuddering, mocking clink, I stand on my own volition, gaze past the eyes of the nameless gray-suited attendants and shiver with sinful anticipation to grasp at what was my true past. The chair will offer me clarity, I assure myself, today I will remember, today I will remember it all, I reach out into what was lost and retrieve it for me, selfishly so I may know who I was before this sordid reality. I will walk with steps that are deliberate, bare feet against gravelly cement, head down, avoiding the lifeless gaze of my fellow prisoners, the isolated vegetables with their glassy, faraway expressions that let me know they have truly escaped this place… they are not the victims any longer, but the victors.
The excitement of a space outside my cell exhilarates me briefly, a mingled horror and joy that is swiftly doused with the frigidity of reality as my escorted journey ends before an intimidating, windowless door. It has the kind of height and weight of a massive vault, though painted a sickening light green, deceptively soothing against the eyes as a punching clink releases the locks. One of my gray-suited escorts swings the door wider with a creak that pains my ears and alerts my mind to the victory at reach within... over a mental wall of spiked glass, but it will be in reach.
The seat will be cold when I am placed into it, no surprise in a place where everything shivers, cowers, flickers bleakly. The straps will be secured, and I will suck in a breath that is short, released with a shudder as the needle is inserted to my trusty protuberant vein and the memories will file in, stacked like cards and shuffled before eyes that can never close. I used to tell myself that torture of the mind was a mercy, a blessing, but I know now that the body can go numb, the mind can endure the wear of multiple lifetimes and I’m sure I have lived them during the mere seconds in the chair. A hundred lives I have lived, watching memories through the eyes of others, horrific images played back again and again, new, evolved, intensified, and nudged with determined force into my attic recesses, dominating every crevice and piece that could possibly remind me of why I ever deserved this. The images are raw and rock me to the depths of a fragile core… I am vile, feral, rabid, raging and psychotic without mercy, I am the woman drenched in the blood of a million lives, betrayed, betraying, quaking, I hold lifeless children in my hands… I could not have lived all the days, sinned all the sins to be guilty of every memory, but a part of me believes that one of them was real, just one to make me so deserving. In a way it is how I assure myself that this course is just, but at my depths it is a deception even I cannot swallow, an overlarge pill that goes down as a rough hoax.
The Velcro straps will be ripped off my hands splashing in pools of sweat as my eyes roll forward to view the single window hovering blearily at the far side of the dim room. The light will reveal the hour of the day and the sounds will tell me a world functions ignorantly beyond. This is why I yearn, for the elation of the window and the hope and the square chunk of reality. It is acrid and sweet as my eyes are allowed those brief moments to take in a darkened sky… they don’t grace me the joy of morning sessions any longer, perhaps I seemed too hopeful. It will surely be night, but even if the sky is an inky purple, I will transcend this world of artificial grays, softs greens, and sick yellows.
I don’t know how many days this cycle will continue, the mornings in a stupor as I gather myself, fight against the hoaxes created in my own mind or by the chair, the hours of taking in the lost faces across the hall that don’t seem to perceive me as I invent false lives for them in my head, to the evenings and my yearning chair… I’m hanging on a cliff, I know it, my sanity is waiting for my fingers to slip off the rocky edge, nails digging in, as I pray for the strength to pull myself up again… As the hours pass and I release cool, thoughtful breaths I assure myself the fight isn’t over and I stand glaring out over a vast horizon of lifetimes, but by the evening I am again struggling against the elements and the weakness of my hands as I am forced to the edge, yet another finger slipping off the crumbling rock.
I feel stronger today and I hear the murmurings outside my cell, the mundane conversations of men with menial lives, and I paint them all with the same dull brush, no one has shown mercy and I do not expect it. I haven’t spoken in months and I’m not sure I remember how, so we don’t exchange words when they open my cell, I stare forward and follow. There is a charge in the air, spurred by my own eagerness and desperation, I would run to the chair today if I could, I need a revelation because a single forefinger is keeping me on the rocks of sanity. The journey is a haze; the process starts with its usual horror, as I settle into my yearning chair, flinch at the needle and wade into a pool of swirling torture. My mind is bombarded but I feel as though I am drifting away and the torture starts to echo outside my ears as I am met by something strange and fresh but painfully familiar…
I am at the Laundromat. It’s a Tuesday evening and someone called me a bitch at work and my delicates are swirling round and round in hypnotizing circles as I gaze at my reflection in the circular window of the washing machine.
“This just feels like the drudges of earth, don’t you think?” my brother utters next to me.
We are sitting on cheap plywood benches next to a stereo that’s playing some obnoxious breed of Mexican polka.
“You know, saying that doesn’t make it any better,” I say, as I run my fingers through greasy hair.
I haven’t had a shower all day and I’ve worked a double shift, the last thing I need is his commentary, I’ve done what I can for him. We’ve done what we can. He’s my world though and I see our faces in the washing machine and I pray to god a year from now will look better than this. We’ve been on our own since they left, my mother’s mind and my father’s ethics, and Manhattan is a cruel place for abandonment. He didn’t go to school today, I know he didn’t go to school, but I don’t badger him anymore, all I hope is that he’s willing to buy off the dollar menu again because laundry is really breaking the bank today.
“Do you think I’ll get into Columbia too?” he asks distantly and I’m cruel to release a sharp laugh.
I could bring up school, but I won’t.
“You’re brilliant,” I answer indirectly.
He’s smug and it assures him briefly.
This is the worst it will ever be, I think to myself, life will be better, I will be better and I’ll step on the world if I have to, just to transcend this and see that we get what we always wanted. My brother wants a little yellow house in the south where he can marry a gentle belle that brings him sweet tea on a veranda and they can swing on the porch together and watch the afternoon wear away. I found a picture of a quaint yellow house and I gave it to him on his birthday and promised he would have it.
He does have it, he is brilliant, he makes his way in the world and I shine from an ivory tower of my own making. I build an empire, I rise to success and I want every inch of the world in a greedy fist. The years pass and I grow complacent but the world alters around me, my brother was the first to leave, he could see the changes before I could, he warned me… but I didn’t listen. I wanted to influence, I wanted to stay for my students. We were making breakthroughs, the kinds you can only dream of… the world was bright and open and the mind was a world to explore freely, the new world for a new era. As the world altered within the confines of science, a rumbling in the streets gave way to an era of equality, screams from the destitute for a system of reform.
With weakened knees the government crumbled under the persistent pounding fists of the impoverished, wailing “entitlement” as they waded in debt and struggled to feed themselves. The walls of society broke apart, brick by brick and an age of equality was embraced, the ultimate fix for a world caving in upon itself. An idealistic Utopia ignited the Reprocessing Initiative, a reeducation process for those who had endured a life of seemingly greater happiness and fulfillment than those less privileged. The advances in science and research, ironically, in part by my own hands, offered the perfect means for which to bring about this reeducation. It was scoffed at first, met with resistance, but the destitute were many and the successful few and like aristos sentenced to a sharpened guillotine, the “privileged” were filed into prison-like processing centers where the first of the specimen were to be “brought into a new light”.
Those who had never suffered should suffer and those who had never experienced the lofty graces of life would be distributed a sum of wealth, menial yet enough to appease the screeching crowds. It evolved into torture over time; the memories were intended to be distributed once, to settle in conjunction with therapeutic psychiatric sessions, but the pressure from the suffering beyond brought hell into the Reprocessing Centers. Little did they realize they were creating equality, a dazed mass of vegetables, now we were all the same. Whatever world functions beyond the walls of the processing center I know nothing of now, whatever course society is traveling I will never know. I know as my finger slips off the edge of the cliff face that I’ll never return to this world… and I am happy for it, at peace with it, I know who I am.
I’m sitting on a porch sipping lemonade, it’s sweeter than I like it but my lap is warm and my niece is sitting there showing me paper finger puppets and we laugh as a basset hound whines jealously at my feet. My husband is out on the lawn fixing a sprinkler for my brother who never bothered to learn anything practical in his life, and the smell of short ribs wafts from the backyard barbeque. Willows canopy a long dirt drive and I gaze out in bliss and I tell myself, this is happiness, this is life…
The needle is removed from my arm, the straps unhinged, the air is still and I can’t see a thing, my eyes swim with life. I shine brightest, like a bulb before it is extinguished and I release one last sigh as I come out the victor. *
