Fair Grounds - Short Stories

The Queen

Ebony walked out of Muldons State Psychiatric home a free bird. Three years of enduring the constant smell of fear and piss; one thousand and ninety five days of nodding, agreeing and blending.

The night before she had been unaware release would happen as she lay in a catatonic drug induced state unconsciously humming in tune to the squeak of the bed springs while the guard bounced above her. The next morning instead of her usual tray of mind numbing drugs she was handed a floral sundress from the lost and found and put out on the curb like yesterday's Chinese food.

She stood there, certificate of sanity in her left hand, small yellow envelope with 250 bucks cash in the other. The group home she was assigned to was in walking distance. The job they had lined up would require the trolley but no skill. She was stamped with the seal of approval to return to society. (Provided she check in the group home by seven and met with the parole officer twice a month).

It should be easy. Cake. No worries at all. Especially since it had been three years since Val had touched her skin and seduced her with secrets and scents of blood mingling with sex and pain. Three years since he had promised to make her Queen, called her to his bidding, and to share his bed.

Not a peep from the others in all that time either. Coal and Onyx had disappeared from her mind as well. No one survived inside those shit stained padded walls. Her ability to hear their words vanished with the powdery white pills in tiny plastic cups. For the first few days they stayed around to comforted her. Whispering promises of Val's imminent arrival. Telling her their plans of retribution and pain.

But once they realized he wasn't coming back they tortured her with whispers of how 'he must be dead'. They all believed it. Why else would he let her be kept prisoner here? She willingly swallowed those bitter pills to push away the panic and quiet the voices. Jealous, they were jealous she was Queen.

She found it easy to comply after a while. Easier than those wires he stuck to her scalp. Voltages and watts flowing through nerves and muscles until her toes curled and straightened. Easier than being led around dragging chains on wrists by men who smelled like sour milk.

By the end of the first year there she began to doubt Val's promises and question his power. He left her there, alone, vulnerable. Guilty of 'crimes against humanity'. Acts so heinous she was labeled criminally insane. Where was his righteous kingdom when she was locked in those walls? Where was her Queens privilege? Maybe the others had been right. Maybe he had died. Or found another worthy of cleansing the kingdom of the wolves. That's what he called them, those evil men preying on the weak. Wolves. Just like the stories she had heard growing up.

By the end of the second year she doubted herself. She believed the fat round shrink in the square black glasses who said she had made the whole thing up. That Val was merely an image her mind made to 'help her cope, and seek revenge'. "Even the others in your little group pack," he said, whose names all meant black were "an extension to her illness. And her illness, an extension of being a weak and pathetic female whose legs learned to spread before they could walk".

It didn't matter that she could describe Val to the smallest detail or that she could show the scars from teeth marks across her skin that he gave while proving he was the real. It was only proof that the precious Ebony had "lived her fantasy". That's what the round man with the square black glasses had said.

In the end. By the third year, day one thousand and ten to be exact, she believed everything they told her. She believed she was the victim.  Believed that she invented Val to satisfy her longing for revenge against her helplessness.  Believed she had killed those men. Painted, played in, and drank their their blood. All for revenge of a father long gone. It made sense.  It was the second sign of progress.  The first had been giving up.

Ebony had learned to be a puppet, numb and subservient.  Swallowing the messages and even more pills willingly because it made Gary, the sweaty night watchman, seem more like a dream. And Val seem more like a distant memory from long ago.  The pain of separation easier with a medicinal fog. It all made sense.  And now, she was a new Ebony, a floral dress wearing cashier who had a parole officer and a room with a view of the landfill.

The Queen had fallen into reality. And it was harsh, but necessary. The preying woes of humanity weren't her concern any longer. Val was gone, and she was sane. She had the paper in her left hand to prove it.

She walked past the boarding house. Glancing at the slum of broken screens and grey doors.  She needed to walk first.  Clear the smell of stale urine from her nose before she could truly become Ebony of the floral dress. It was all good.  ' A step towards taking back her mind, and gaining a real life'. But  first she needed to make a stop.

The house on the corner of the quiet street was small with blue painted brick with a white picket fence broken by the trash bins. Red shutters flapped loose in the wind. "Better tighten those up Gary. The Big Bad Wolf could easily blow those down."  She imagined him in there, sweating as he slept on clean white sheets. Gathering strength for his thankless job in the 'nut-house' where the "residents" all made him feel like he was a saint.  Where he was top dog, barking orders, pulling chains, and banging comatose Queens who hummed to the tune of broken bouncing bed springs.  She closed her eyes and imagined a world where Gary was afraid.

Val stood on a patch of broken sidewalk, her floral dress dripping with blood and plastered with bits of bone that glimmering in the light. The concrete would stain, proof of his being and it brought a smile to his ruby stained lips, the feeling of his return filled him with vigor and a rush of adrenalin.

He stepped out of the pooling congealed blood and over the fat sweaty man in the blue jacket, lifted his right hand upward toward Ebony's dry ruby lips. As she stepped into his embrace her skin vibrated with pleasure.  He placed his bloody finger inside her mouth and she leaned forward to accept his offering. The taste and smell of tin and copper erasing one thousand and ninety five days of piss and doubt.

His lips touched her neck and shivers ran up and down her spine.   Together they shared a passion filled kiss celebrating the spoils of war against the pack. The Alpha and his Queen. Coal and Onyx laughed as they all stood, pack like, over Gary's gift of blood. Together they would rid the world of preying wolves and squeaky springs.  In her mind she saw the shrink. A round man with square glasses looking down on the crazy girl who spread her legs before she could walk. 

"It's time to go my Queen. We have much to do tonight.  I smell a fat round wolf with a pension for sizzling young Queens minds."

Ebony wiped the knife she had been holding in her hand from Gary's kitchen upon her borrowed floral dress. She let go of the certificate proving her sanity, and the small yellow envelope she had traded Val for.  The paper flew in the wind as if it had been waiting for freedom. She placed the knife in her beige state issued bra and smiled. It was good to be the Queen.

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Yes Ebony was Val, and vice versa but who says which personality is really the reality at all?  And what if the connection between them is so deep they wouldn't even exists without the other?