Lake of Fire
Photography: Jonathan Borba
Everyone sits in a circle headed by a pretty nurse. The room is too warm and the plastic chairs are sticky on Amelia’s naked thighs. Pull out the eyes and put them in expensive liquor.
“Welcome, everyone. Please sit down, Maxwell. Good sitting!” What am I, eight? “For our new faces, I’m Nurse Jessica, and I’m happy to be here with you today.” Amelia’s brain offers up another Rodgers and Hammerstein song. She’s almost grateful for The King and I. “Let’s open with a prayer. Please hold hands.”
Everybody joins hands except for Amelia, who doesn’t move. Siamese children are rustling in the nurse’s skirts, bustle full and hoops tripping little feet. The patients stare at her and prod her with elbows. When she refuses to join hands, Lucia begins praying while trying to drape her rosary over Amelia’s head.
“Padre nuestro, que estás en el cielo. Santificado sea tu nombre. Venga tu reino,” begins the woman. Flay the innocent. Wear the crown. Bloody, broken man – Betrayed man. If your eye causeth you to sin, pluck it out; if your hand causeth you to sin, cut it off.
“I’d really rather not. Please stop.” Pluck it out. “No, I don’t want that.” Cut it off.
“¡Hágase tu voluntad en la tierra como en el cielo!” Strips of skin – GUILTY! screams the archangel. Peel off His skin and cast your lots.
“No. Thank you, no.”
Sinner… hisses the serpent.
The woman is intent on forcing Amelia to wear the beads, and she prays louder.
“Danos hoy nuestro pan de cadadía.” Crown of thorns. Crown of shit.
“Please stop.” He begged for mercy and You BETRAYED Him! You betrayed us – The both of us.
“Perdona nuestras ofensas, como también nosotros perdonamos a los que nos ofenden—” Tear out the eyes! TEAR OUT THE EYES! Pluck them out! Cut it off! Kill it! Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!
“No! I don’t want that!” Lucia successfully gets the rosary around Amelia’s neck. Rage roars in her head. Amelia sees stars. “WHAT IS THIS?!” She twists the rosary tight around her throat and jerks it up like a noose. The rosary snaps and Lucia crosses herself. “I can’t even HANG myself with this! What is it good for? Nothing! There’s nothing you can say that can convince me that there is a loving, forgiving god!” The woman’s screeching infects Amelia’s brain like bleach fumes. Cut out the eyes. “I don’t know what you’re saying!” Plank in your eye. “I don’t know what you’re saying. Speak fucking English!” Amelia throws the destroyed rosary on the floor, and Lucia picks it up, shouting in Spanish.
“¡Gloria al Padre, al Hijo y al Espíritu Santo!” The theme song to a Spanish educational program they showed in Amelia’s elementary school in 1992 begins in her head, drowning out Lucia’s prayers. “¡Como era en el principio!” Whip the sinner-puppets. “¡Ahora y siempre!” The puppets sing a greeting in Spanish. “¡Por los siglos de los siglos!” Little white children respond. The song bores into her skull. “Amén. ¡AMEN!” A female orderly appears and sweeps Lucia out of the room.
Amelia stands on the edge of the group, livid, enveloped in static. Christ is bloodied and broken in her mind – A wasted corpse in a heap. Scapegoat. There is a tense silence until Rosemary reaches across her empty seat, sealing her out of the circle.
“Let her go to Hell. She deserves it.”
Nurse Jessica agrees but disapproves. “That is not the way to win souls.”
“Yeah, and fuck your Hell cuz if I fucking go to her Hell I’m gonna fucking fuck her and him, too!” points out Maxwell.
“Please come sit,” the pretty nurse gestures to the empty chair. Amelia sits. I will not make you my scapegoat. No moral person would accept the sacrifice of an innocent life to avoid the consequences of their own behavior. “You will receive no penalty for not participating in group prayer, but I do hope you continue to pray on your own. The rest of you may bow your heads.” Everyone bows their heads. Amelia drowns out the sound of their babbling with Nirvana. Every patient opens their eyes at some point to peek at her.
“Amen,” the group mumbles. They squeeze hands and settle in their chairs. The out-of-tune guitar twangs in Amelia’s mind.
“Today, we are talking about being proactive. Does anyone know what ‘proactive’ means?” asks the nurse.
Maxwell balances his chair on its two back legs and says, “Pedro, you need to get some of that zit shit. Pro-Activ.” Nurse Jessica ignores him and answers her own question.
“Being proactive is taking responsibility in ensuring a better outcome in your treatment.” Amelia is amused by the song. “What do you do to be proactive, Marvin?”
“Well, I’m here. I put myself in here looking for help, so I think that’s pretty proactive,” he replies.
“It certainly is! What about you, Pedro?” she asks the plain, bulky teen.
“Umm… Take my medicine?”
She nods to him. “Very good.” Amelia is next in the circle. “How about you?” The music skips.
“What?”
“What do you do to be proactive…?” The nurse doesn’t know her name.
“Amelia.”
“Amelia. How do you take responsibility in your treatment?”
“What do I do to be proactive?” If your eye causeth you to sin, pluck it out; if your hand causeth you to sin, cut it off. “Die. Try to die. That’s the only way it ends. This suicide… it made me feel like I had some control over it. Like I really tried to do something about my condition.” Pluck it out. Cut it off. “The people who want me to self-medicate don’t want me to do what makes THEM feel uncomfortable. They want me to pray, go for a jog, drink a cup of tea or something, go pet puppies at the mall, as if that would relieve my craving to cut off my feet and pop my eyeballs like big empty gumballs that split open exactly as I imagine my eyes would. I resent that.” Pluck it out. “If nothing can heal me— not love or God or myself— then it certainly seems that I’m going to be this way indefinitely. Possibly forever. And I cannot handle that. I can barely stand being this way for an afternoon; imagine a lifetime.” Cut it off. “Could you constantly live with something you hate as much as I hate myself? Probably not.” Drown her. Drown them all.
“Would anyone like to explain why suicide is the most selfish thing anyone can do to their loved ones?” Nurse Jessica opens the question to the group.
Rosemary looks at Amelia haughtily and says, “It’s a mortal sin. You’re going to Hell for that.”
“In Mark 3:29, Jesus says that the only unforgivable sin is denial of the Holy Spirit.” I DENY THE HOLY SPIRIT! I DENY THE HOLY SPIRIT! “Everything else can be forgiven.”
“What about all the people you hurt?” asks Marvin. I DENY THE HOLY SPIRIT!
“It’s the combination of ‘I want to die’ and ‘I’m worthless’ that is so deadly. You people want to live because you love yourself so damn much; the more special you think you are, the more your friends and family will grieve over you in your imagination. You couldn’t possibly do that to them – That would be SO selfish because they would miss you and cry. But when you think you’re the shit under their shoes, your existence appears more like something you would be kind to rid them of.” I wish I had been an abortion.
Maxwell points at Amelia. “Selfish! You’re a selfish bitch!”
“Eyes to me,” Nurse Jessica lightly snaps her fingers. “Henry, what do you do to be proactive?” The song stops as Henry takes a deep breath and looks up at the ceiling. Jack-in-the-box.
“I take showers. They remind me of the boundaries of my body, where I end and the world begins. The sensation of hot water on my skin, it just brings me back.”
“I do that when I’m too drunk to stand: sit on the shower floor til I’m sober,” quips Maxwell. A dozen drunken showers flash through Amelia’s head. Great. I have something in common with that psycho.
“In what other ways is a shower beneficial?” asks the pretty nurse. Faces in the marble. Blood in the bath. Henry picks at the fingernails on his left hand.
“I get clean. Sometimes, I get so depressed that I can’t even face washing myself. I can’t handle the thought of the whole process of showering. It’s overwhelming. Then, when I get in, I’m like, ‘Why can’t I stay in here forever?’” Nurse Jessica nods.
“And maybe there’s a type of rebirth in that baptism.” Don’t drown the baby.
“Yeah, maybe,” he allows, “Or a womb-related thing. I don’t know.” What are they doing to the baby?
“Very nice.” The nurse is pleased. They’re drowning it. “Thank you for a productive discussion.” Slaves sing a lullaby between Amelia’s ears. “Rosemary, what do you do to be proactive?”
“I don’t even know what that means,” sniffs the old woman. “Is it SEXUAL?”
With mastered coolness, Nurse Jessica explains, “Not at all. It means doing something to take control of your treatment. What makes you feel better when you’re down?”
“I wash my vagina. Or that nigger girl does it for me.” She said it again! shrieks a kindergartener.
“So, also washing.” Nurse Jessica deflects the question to the man balancing precariously on his chair. “Maxwell?”
“I drink. And take drugs, lots of drugs.” He eye-fucks the nurse and assaults her with his words. “Fucking hookers is also good. That makes me feel REAL nice.” Nurse Jessica tilts her head a thread of a degree.
“Something productive please.”
Maxwell barks a laugh and slams the front legs of his chair back onto the floor. “Productive like sitting on the floor of the shower, or hacking my arms to bits, or washing my junk? That kind of proactive productive production?” The pink lips of his inner eyes curl toward his eyebrows as he catches a new target. The third eyelid flashes again. “I want to know what John Doe here does to be proactive.” He stands up and looms menacingly over a tall young man sitting rigidly on the edge of the group. His eyes are glazed over. Is he lucky that he can’t function? “Mr. Doe, do you have any hobbies that distract you from being a grade-A psychopath? Gardening perhaps? What makes you feel better about getting an injection straight into your temple twice daily?” Or trapped inside there somewhere, screaming to be let out? “Hello? Anybody home?”
Nurse Jessica keeps her face impassive. “Maxwell, if you would like to be excused for the remainder of the session, you may be, but please use your words instead of actions.”
“Only if you chart me for it. Incident report!” He starts slapping his hands together like violent sex, grinding against the man’s chair and making grunting noises. “Incident report! Incident report!” Daniel comes over and Max immediately puts his hands in the air. Testicle tourniquet. He turns on his heel.
“Goodbye, Max!” bids the pretty nurse with a smile. X-acto knife. “I think we need a change of tone. Think hard. Amelia, would you like to make any additions from earlier? About being proactive?”
Amelia searches her brain. ‘Go with the program,’ urged Jason, who sodomized her wounds with his forceps and cared for her. Get out. Die on your own terms. “Yes. Music.”
“Yes!” Nurse Jessica just won the lowest-value carnival prize. “Music can be a wonderful tool in managing your symptoms. Many people find relief in it, myself included.” A diatribe about the psychological attributes of D minor runs in Amelia’s mind but she says nothing. “That is a very positive addition. Thank you for your participation. Please, all of you, take the rest of the session off. Use the time to do something proactive.”
The Jackoff
Photography: cottonbro studio
Amelia sits alone playing Solitaire after lunch while Henry smokes. G G G Eb Judge Judy blares in the background again, drowning out any chance of musical escape. G G G Eb / G G G Eb the intro repeats without resolution. The disembodied hands are typing: For the generations to come, none of your descendants who has a defect may come to offer the food of his God. No man who has any defect of mind or body may come near: No man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is hunchbacked or dwarfed, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles. Because of his defect, he must not go near the curtain or approach the altar, and so desecrate my sanctuary. G G G Eb She squeezes her eyes shut. G G G Eb I am about to scream. I am going to scream.
“Excuse me.” Amelia looks up to see a young man shadowed by Daniel. He smells dangerous. Like freezer-burn. Look at how close Daniel is.
“What.” The young man has pasty skin and no shame.
“I was wondering if you would have sex with me.”
“What the fuck? No.”
“Why not?” he says, throwing up his hands in exasperation.
“I don’t find you attractive.”
“You don’t get to judge me. You don’t even know my name!”
She inhales through her tear ducts and rolls her dry eyes in their sockets, “It’s a little late for that.”
“It’s Jack,” he announces proudly. “Jack OFF.”
“No fucking way.”
“Look, lady,” his body language becomes agitated, “I have a perfectly average penis. Perfectly average. It’s as thick as my thumb and four and a half inches long, just let me show it to you.” Jackoff displays his penis with showmanship. Daniel hastily steps closer. Amelia wants to hurt and humiliate him.
“That’s fucking small.”
“It is not!” he screams. “It’s perfectly average! You didn’t see it up close!” His mouth becomes a sardonic grimace and he lunges at Amelia. “You’re going to fuck me!” Rape the shit slut fat fuck – Tear open the pussy and make her bleed. Infect her with your seed and kill it in the womb. Daniel instantly restrains the young man. As he wrestles him away from her, Jackoff glares at Amelia and threatens to beat her to death if she doesn’t fuck him.
I’d kill it in the womb, she decides.
Music References
Getting to Know You - Rogers and Hammerstein
The experiences described in this piece highlight a critical problem—one that isn’t just about religious coercion in psychiatric spaces, but about how materialist power structures dictate what forms of meaning, healing, and spirituality are institutionally permitted. Christianity’s dominance in these spaces isn’t necessarily about its doctrine itself, but rather about how it has been shaped through centuries of integration with Western governance, healthcare, and social control. It remains the default lens for moral and existential framing, not because it’s uniquely effective, but because the institutional systems that sustain it have evolved to reinforce their own ideological continuity.
A deeper issue here is the failure of both science and secular institutions to account for non-materialist dimensions of human experience. The physicalist paradigm, while powerful in many ways, is incomplete when it comes to the subjective, interconnected, and emergent aspects of consciousness. Other spiritual and religious traditions—whether polytheistic, animist, or non-theistic—offer robust frameworks for mental and emotional well-being, yet they are systematically ignored or dismissed in favor of the dominant paradigm. Not because they are less effective, but because integrating them would challenge entrenched hierarchies.
This isn’t just about theology or mental health—it’s about how societies decide what forms of human experience are valid, and what narratives are allowed to shape our understanding of ourselves. When the institutions charged with care and healing prioritize ideological conformity over actual well-being, they reveal the limits of their own self-awareness.