Already Dead
Photography: Rachel Claire
The sun is coming up and Amelia is still awake. In order to distract her from visions of decomposing heads being sewn onto new bodies, she keeps her eyes open and listens to ‘Real Solution #9’ by White Zombie in her mind. A good Christian lady speaks sternly to her from a pulpit. Would this be considered a recitative? Lucia begins her morning prayers in Spanish at the top of her lungs. The ward starts to wake up. Rosemary needs to wash her vagina. Amelia has been waiting for an orderly to give her permission to escape her confinement. The door opens halfway.
“Out of bed, Amelia,” a woman says, then disappears. She trudges to the common room where Henry and Marvin already occupy a table.
“Could not fucking sleep last night. Henry? Marvin? Do you hear this bitch across the ward?” She plops down in a chair.
“Who, Rosemary? Was she at it again?”
“Not her. The religious Mexican,” Amelia starts. “Lucia? The one who tried to make me wear the rosary, screaming I don’t know what for two hours straight last night and then again this morning.”
“Yeah, she does that,” Marvin shrugs.
“Yes and it’s driving me crazy. At least scream in English so I can come up with some clever arguments to entertain myself. She’s always railing at me in Spanish and I fucking hate Spanish; it’s my second least-favorite language.”
“Well, think of who you’re dealing with, here,” says Marvin. “This is a woman who screams, and she just happens to scream in Spanish. If she were from Germany, she’d be screaming in German. She is mentally ill.” Amelia is aggravated by his logic but Henry breaks the standoff.
“Marvin? Don’t be offended when I say this, but, I’ve been meaning to ask… Are African-American women’s vaginas… really purple?” Marvin laughs but Amelia is ensconced in the song again.
“Everyone is different. There is sort of a general standard, and then there are exceptions. And those exceptions can be… differently pigmented,” he explains.
Maxwell barges into their conversation, already holding three cups of coffee. “Who wants to give me coffeeeeee?”
Marvin speaks without looking at the man. “I’m sorry but we’re all drinking our coffee.” He goes immediately to the next table without comment.
Henry makes a face and says, “At least you don’t have to deal with THAT nutcase in your ward. When he gets going, he never. shuts. the fuck. up.”
“And your roommate is gone,” adds Marvin. “Always nice to have a room to yourself.”
“It’s just, I haven’t slept more than three hours at a time for almost a month,” Amelia slumps in her chair. “I don’t know how I’m functioning. I can never get to sleep. My mind won’t turn off.” She grimaces. “And the nightmares…”
“Bad?” asks Henry.
“GRUESOME. The other night I dreamed a witch was pulling out my intestines and turning them on a spit, but like, slowly.” Lying on a table, strapped down, abdomen sliced open. Wrap the intestines around and turn turn turn. It made a sticky, glopping sound.
“That explains your bad mood,” Marvin says, knowingly. His presumption irritates her.
“That one single dream OR my general desperate desire to see Death’s maggot-ridden grin.” Take me into your arms and inseminate me with your pus.
“And that,” he concedes.
“Yes, that,” says Henry. “What IS that? I’ve never heard anyone talk about being suicidal, and it’s SO interesting, and SO fucked up. ‘Death’s maggot-ridden smile?”
“Grin,” she corrects him. Chew off my face. “And please don’t call me interesting.” He backs off a little, but still asks.
“Did something bad happen to you?”
“No. And I think that makes it worse because I have nothing to blame it on.”
“So, you just… want to die.” He does not understand.
“No, I want to kill myself.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Yes.” Amelia becomes still. “Suicide is more… empowering. Waiting to die, well, that’s more passive, and you have no time guarantee on that.”
“You don’t want to die an old lady, in your sleep?” Marvin inquires as the food trays are distributed. It’s the exact same breakfast as yesterday, with an orange instead of apple slices. Jack-in-the-box. An easy meal to not eat.
“I decided to kill myself on February twenty-seventh of last year. I’m rather proud of surviving so long after that— preparing. Myself and everyone else. I told everybody that I was going to kill myself, including my fiancé. I even told my roommate how I was going to do it. Her response was, ‘I’m glad to have you here on Earth for as long as you’re willing to stay.’”
“Oh my god,” Marvin remarks in disbelief, digging at the navel of his orange to start a peel.
“I mean… I guess it was kind? The rest of them didn’t even have that much to say. They assumed it was a joke and not a warning. I ‘reached out’ so many times, desperate, drowning. What I got was this.” She politely claps her hands in muted applause. Everybody’s clown. “My last journal entry was: ‘I’m sorry. I can’t wait any longer. Please forgive me.’ That’s all I had to say. So believe me when I tell you—” she picks up her toast as Nurse Rhonda approaches, “—I’m already dead.”
Better Than Yours
Photography: Ayşenur
‘Milkshake’ by Kelis loops in Amelia’s head as she steps in rhythm into the registered psychiatric nurse’s office. Fuck this stupid song. She knocks lightly on the half-open door.
“I’m Amelia. I’m supposed to come at one thirty?” The woman is leaning back in her chair with her ankle on the top of her thigh. She makes a minute gesture with the very tip of her left index finger, toward the chair.
“Yes, please sit down.” The RPN does not introduced herself or shake Amelia’s hand. “I have some questions and some answers for you,” says the statue.
“Alright.” Amelia sits. Fuck this fucking SONG!
“Are you currently in a state where you have more energy than usual?”
Amelia pushes through the repetition to speak. “I’m not sleeping, so it’s hard to tell. There is a point where insomnia becomes so intense that interacting with others is simply a series of flashing colors, lights, and sounds with a sum total of ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ when it’s over. But I don’t remember a single individual goddamn word.” The RPN nods, bored or indifferent.
“How do you feel emotionally?”
“I feel like when you accidentally step on a snail barefoot and it crunches and squishes between your toes, and that gummy part that sticks to your skin?” The RPN arches an eyebrow. “That’s it. That’s exactly how I feel. Visceral. I can feel all my guts.”
“You feel… like a snail?” asks the sculpture.
“More like if you blew up the Saint-Chapelle stained glass window in Paris and arranged the shards according to the principles of Dadaism. Like a sheet of blotting paper saturated with oil –That rainbow gleam that happens on wet roadways.” Spray me across the asphalt. The nurse is uncertain what to write. “I feel like a really old crayon smells, if that helps.”
Perplexed, the figurine haplessly passes to the next question on the form without filling in the box labeled ‘Emotional State.’ Like roadkill. Like a raccoon carcass bursting with larvae.
“Do you ever see things that maybe aren’t real?”
“Maggots. Crows. People lurking in corners. Bicyclists swerving into my car when I’m driving.” Amelia tries to shake off the song but the earworm is buried deep. “The real problem is the music. It never shuts off. Sometimes it’s so loud that I can’t hear myself think. The worst is when I only know a short portion of a piece, and it plays over and over and over again. I get these awful loops stuck in my head and the only way to fight that is to hum the theme to I Dream of Jeannie.” Don’t be a weirdo and fucking do that in front of her – I’m not! Jesus! “I don’t know why that works but it’s a fucking lifesaver.” She thinks of the I Dream of Jeannie song but doesn’t hum it out loud. A brief moment of silence before Kelis starts again. The nameless nurse’s toes twitch, a sign of life.
“Interesting. Do you ever think things that later make no sense?”
“Yeah, that’s why I stopped drinking bottled water in high school. Unless I could see it coming from the tap, I KNEW it was lighter fluid. It was so stupid but I couldn’t bring myself to drink it and risk having my lungs set on fire. My whole first year of college I thought I was balding. I believe that the right half of my physical body is evil, split down the middle…” The song hijacks her thoughts and she can’t finish the account. “It was worse when I was religious.”
“Very interesting,” the woman perks up subtly at this addition. The song is a dry scab, red and itchy around the edges. “What about behavior that others might think is… odd?”
“Like only eating food made from the recipes of an ancient Roman cookbook?”
“Yes, like that.”
“I go through phases. For a while, I wore nothing but togas I’d sewn myself. One of my journals was written backwards and left-handed, another in a language I made up. There’s a rabbit suit in which I often attend class. People on the El think it’s funny. Most of the weird shit I do is too amusing to be a concern and a lot of it is anonymous. For some reason it’s funnier when they don’t know it’s me.”
“Okay, okay,” she’s scribbling now. ‘Milkshake’ continues to pound its tactless beat. It has to stop. I can’t take this song anymore, please. “How have you acted toward others recently?”
“I’ve been a bad friend. Angry and irritable and reckless. And mean. There is nothing left in me to give to anyone who claims to care about me. I guess that’s why I quarantine myself when I get like this.”
“Quarantine,” repeats the nurse, eyes on what she is writing. “That’s a strong word.”
“Not strong enough for what I deserve.”
“Do you often go into a depression after these episodes?”
“Every day is just varying degrees of suicidal. Each depth of depression has its own nuances.” Fuck you brain. Fuck you Kelis. Fuck this crazy shit. I am DONE. I’m DONE.
“Are you experiencing any good feelings right now, like euphoria or extreme joy?”
“I can’t even remember joy.” The song digs deeper into Amelia’s eardrums like a hot corkscrew, tapeworms embedded in her most sensitive parts. “I just want to die.”
“You’re having suicidal thoughts right now?” asks the nurse.
“Yes. On the good days, I don’t want to live. Then I want to die. Then I want someone to kill me. Then I want to kill myself. In that order. And it’s been that way for almost a decade.”
“So,” the RPN uncrosses her legs to hunch closer to the desk, “suicide ideation since puberty.” Her pen stops and she looks up. “Even when you have a lot of energy?”
“Extra energy makes it worse. It’s harder to control my impulses,” Amelia growls through clenched teeth. I want a new song NOW! Fucking RIGHT NOW you stupid fucking assholes! The disembodied hands hesitate above the typewriter, then tap out:
M-i-l-k-s-h-a-k-e.
“And would you say you spend more of your time depressed or agitated?” Oh, fuck you – Very funny. So fucking clever.
“Depressed. Though the two are not mutually exclusive.”
“I see.” Now, only the phrase ‘my milkshake’ repeats itself incessantly. “Thank you for sharing this information with me; it will help us properly diagnose you.” The RPN pulls out a prescription pad. “First, we have to get you sleeping. I’m prescribing Trazodone. You cannot abuse it or get high on it because it puts you out in fifteen minutes. Possible side effects include—” The song pauses when it registers with Amelia that she is going to be taking a psychiatric pill. “—nausea, vomiting, dizziness, headache, fainting, and in some cases seizures. Here is the pamphlet. You will begin taking it this evening at nine p.m. med call.”
“Okay…” ::silence:: “You said you had answers?”
“Yes,” replies the RPN. “The question is sleep and the answer is Trazodone.” The stupid fucking song starts over from the chorus. “I want to see you again at the same time, the day after tomorrow. You’ll meet with Doctor Stephens on Monday and you can address any of your concerns then. Anything else?”
“I guess not.”
“Excellent. Have an excellent day.”
The Casual Anorexic
Photography: cottonbro studio
Henry and Amelia sit facing each other at a card table, waiting for their meals to be served. ‘Amazing Grace’ has been on a continuous loop in her head for the last two hours. As an orderly places a tray in front of Amelia, her stomach gives a lurch. Jack-in-the-box. Ewww, the kindergarteners complain. This is a standard hospital meal, she explains to them. Meat, starch, vegetables— even dessert. Amelia imagines maggots writhing in the meat. Potatoes are seared flaccid penises. Peas are poisonous berries. The cookie is the size and color of a drink coaster. Henry digs in.
“I have a love/hate relationship with Salisbury steak,” he says around a mouthful of pig shit half-hardened in the sun. “It’s so good, and as long as I chew every bite twenty-five times it’s really easy to purge.”
“Why twenty-five?” asks Amelia.
“It tricks my mind into thinking I’m eating more than I actually am and it mashes the food so fine that it comes right up.”
“But why twenty-five? Is that number special to you?”
“What? No. How can a number be special? I read it on a ProMia message board a few months ago.” He loads another bite into his mouth.
“Right on,” she says, attempting to cut a potato with the side of her spork. I am thankful I am grateful I am going to enjoy putting this in my mouth and chewing it around and swallowing it and digesting it into shit. Jack-in-the-box. Henry cocks his head to the side and swallows.
“So, I’ve been dying to ask… What’s with you? You’re obviously not that thin naturally; your shoulders are too wide. Restrict? Purge? Both?” STARVE THE DUMB WHORE FAT FUCK.
“I try to not obsess about it. I’m a casual anorexic. Yogurt and diet ginger ale. Too busy to eat. Kill myself a little more every day. It’s excruciating, but no more so than existing and not doing anything to alleviate my condition.” Amelia uses the prongs of her utensil to carefully stab the potato skin down the middle. It doesn’t need to eat, rasps a voice in her head. “Until recently, I was only starving myself recreationally. I don’t meet the BMI diagnostic criteria for anorexia but I do try to eat fewer than eight hundred calories a day.”
“I could never…” Henry admires her prominent collar bones, eyes shining, and sighs. “I don’t have the willpower for that. Don’t you get hungry?” He starts in on the potatoes.
She scoops the white fluff out of the brown skin. Buddha lived on one mustard seed a day for seven years. “Honestly, I fucking hate food. I get absolutely no pleasure from it. Eating is a chore and I only do it so I don’t pass out.”
“What, like, it doesn’t taste good?” Henry asks.
“It doesn’t taste like anything. Imagine forcing yourself to swallow a mouthful of attic insulation.” Jack-in-the-box. “Take away the taste of something and it completely changes the experience of eating. That shit you’re eating would be lukewarm Styrofoam in my mouth. A fresh peach is biting into a cold, runny, half-boiled egg. Chocolate milk is snot and red wine is the puddle that collects under wet garbage in a dumpster. All textures and fluids are indistinguishable from one another.”
“You binge, though,” he says with a conspiratorial smile. “Everybody binges. What happens after you binge? Do you deal with it?” Jack-in-the-box. “Or do you hate yourself for it?”
“I guess I don’t feel bad when I eat too much because it’s not about being skinny; it’s about being dead. If I eat too much, that’s just that much longer I have to wait.”
“You’re purposefully trying to die from starvation?” asks Henry. Amelia looks at him pointedly as he swallows.
“Anorexia and cigarettes are the only socially acceptable forms of suicide.”
“But not bulimia?” HYPOCRITE!
“No, because bulimia is succumbing to weakness then cheating your way out of it. Anorexia is being stronger than your most basic instincts. No one would ever admit it but they’re secretly impressed by anorexia. Just think of how awestruck they are by monks and saints who starve themselves.” She taps her spork on the edge of her tray. “Self-harm is valid if it’s religious in nature.”
Henry shakes his head and saws at his meat with his sad, stupid, plastic utensil. “Dying is not impressive. Dying is losing the game. You gotta be light AND alive to enjoy it.” Amelia’s eyes harden.
“You enjoy it?”
::silence::
“Your eating disorder is a billboard of your internal status. You obviously don’t enjoy it. And the way you do it – You can’t miss that. You can’t ‘He seemed so normal’ it away when you’re puking your guts up after every meal.”
“I didn’t mean I enjoy it,” he gets defensive. “I meant like… it gives me purpose.” This is a satisfactory answer for Amelia. She unhappily hovers her spork over the roasted potatoes and quickly puts one in her mouth to choke down as fast as possible, like a dog swallowing a pill wrapped in cheese. Henry smiles, “There you go. Not so bad, right?” It’s like eating papier mâché, she wants to say. It sticks in my mouth, my throat – Glue tumbling down my esophagus and coating my stomach like the thick white substance within a milkweed.
“It tastes like Wite-Out,” she confesses.
“I have some ketchup packets stashed in my room. Maybe the salt will help,” offers Henry. Amelia considers this gesture. It would be impolite to refuse but that will just make it taste like salty Wite-Out. It doesn’t occur to either of them that hoarding ketchup packets is strange. “Come on. By my count you’ve had about three-hundred calories today. That’s a good two-hundred more of potatoes and peas.” Sad little dicks and American nightshade. “Plus you have a cookie!”
“All right, Henry. Thanks.”
When he gets up to go to his room, Amelia clandestinely adds three of her potatoes and two scoops of peas onto Henry’s tray. Enough to make a difference but not enough for him to notice. Jack-in-the-box. Jack-in-the-box. Jack-in-the-box. She waits for his return to nibble on the dessert.
“Did we find something you like? How’s that cookie?” He places four packets of ketchup on the side of her tray near the wall, where they can’t be seen.
“It tastes like nothing— like if you chewed on a beautiful clump of dried dirt. Like a new house smells.”
“That’s because it’s a sugar cookie. Have a bite of mine. It’s peanut butter,” he offers. Amelia breaks off a piece and puts it in her mouth.
“Tastes like my silk long johns after sweating in them for five hours.”
“Seriously? It’s actually really good; I’m not fucking around.”
“There’s no difference between this cookie and this cup of water. Except one is delicious and satisfying while the other is just being chewed around like hay. Not even oats: hay.” She swallows the dry grass in her mouth and adds, “That’s a significant distinction if you know anything about horses.”
“I’m from Cedar Lake, Indiana. I know the difference.” She gives him both cookies then sets about squeezing ketchup onto her tray for the potatoes. Salty is more tolerable than sweet. “It’s weird, like… I feel sorry for you but I’m also super jealous. I bet that makes it really easy to restrict.”
“Henry it is so fucking easy for me to not eat. I pretend to eat a lot more than I consume. I cut my food up into small pieces, hide it under other food, comment on how delicious everything is, make sure I’m chewing every time they look at me, spit food into my napkin—”
“Drinking warm water with lemon fills you up faster,” he advises.
“For sure, but it’s an odd thing to drink at the dinner table. People notice that.” Jack-in-the-box. “The most important thing is to eat slowly. That way they finish their food way before you and it’s not as awkward. They’re done and ready to leave the table.” Henry nods his head in agreement as he starts on the second cookie. “It’s not that I think I’m fat or ugly. It’s that consuming food is just like eating that gravel they scatter on hiking trails. I mean, it’s easy to starve yourself when food tastes like the detritus in a vacuum cleaner. I assume. I’ve obviously never eaten these things to which I compare food.” She takes a sip of water. “It’s not hard to restrict when you find food repulsive. I once didn’t eat a salad because it was ‘too wet’ and that was gross to me. It’s fucken gross to me— I don’t know what else to say.”
“Well I would get on my knees and thank God for that gift,” he claims, then amends, “I’m just joking,” after seeing her facial expression.
“Gift. Yeah, that is a joke. We differ in many ways, Henry.” She forces a potato down her throat. “But you were right about the ketchup. It really does help so thank you.” He smiles, cheeks puffed with the last of her sugar cookie.
“Anything to keep a friend from getting charted,” he murmurs with a gesture at Nurse Rhonda approaching their table, clipboard in her hand. They stop talking as she examines their trays. Between sneaking food onto Henry’s plate, giving him her cookie, and ingesting several potatoes, it appears that Amelia has eaten half of her meal.
“Where did you get ketchup?” the nurse grunts. Henry’s eyes fill with dread.
“I found it under my mattress,” Amelia lies.
Rhonda seizes the unfinished tray, then crosses the room to dump the rest of the food into the trash, smacking the side of the platter against the bin to remove every last morsel.
“Bitch,” Henry mumbles under his breath. To their surprise, the dark-haired bully brings the empty tray back to Amelia and sets it in front of her.
“You will eat what you are served,” she clips, then moves to the next table.
Music References
Real Solution #9 - White Zombie
Milkshake (measures 3-10 only) - Kelis
That title hits hard.
“A good Christian lady speaks sternly to her from a pulpit. Would this be considered a recitative?”
I can’t help but hope it was a recitativo from Le Nozze di Figaro … my favourite scene being the Act II finale. But I also know it wasn’t.
(My only humanities course in uni, a required arts elective, was “Opera Appreciation 101”, which was a welcome break a few times a week from year 4 quantum & statistical mechanics classes, though I loved those too)
Part 1
https://youtu.be/fxm0lkoSMU4
Part 2
https://youtu.be/tfsdufSqbhE