Shilan

One

Something slid across my bare ankles, drifting slowly.

It felt both smooth and rough, tickling my skin. I kept my eyes shut, breathing through my nose as I waited for it to pass.

When I realised it was only drifting farther up my thigh, I forced my eyes open with a groan rumbling in my throat.

I always had to miss one of them, didn't I?

Gripping the tub's chipped rims, I pulled myself into a sitting position, the murky water I was in rippling out of its rest, and scratched at my ankles lost in the brownness of the water.

"Darn cockroaches," I murmured, voice thick with disdain.

Before getting in the bathtub, I'd knelt beside it till my knees had numbed, and rid it of the mass of insects and rodents (both dead and alive) that'd gathered at its mould-infested centre. This varying collection of pests could accumulate in the span of a mere day or two, when it got warm, in a matter of hours.

Though I worked hard to scoop them out, one would always hide under the lip of the tub, waiting to climb in while I undressed.

Biting my tongue, I plunged an arm back down into the water and skimmed the floor of the tub with my hand until I had the swimming cockroach in my grasp. I'd always known these bugs could hold their breath for minutes on end, but this big guy had broken a record.

Smothering a gag, I threw the bug across the dim room with an unceremonious fling of my arm. A tingling and crawling sensation seized my skin as it always did, so I leaned back into the water with a slow exhale, trying to level my breathing.

No matter how many times I'd done this, I'd never get used it. No matter how many times I'd done this, I'd never believe it to be a normal occurrence.

Nothing about this place was normal, and it would never be.

I drew my arm to my chest, hoping nothing else would disturb me again. If one had ever told me there'd come a time where my baths would be in a rusted tub of browned water and insects in a room with peeling walls, I would have laughed heartedly and suggested they found themselves a place in an insane asylum.

Yet here I was, three years and counting, living in an asylum myself.

Digging bugs out of tubs.

The roach landed by the dirty wall before me with a gruesome splat--just below the line written in blood. As I ran the lemon-scented detergent Adam had stolen from the kitchen for me along my gangly arms, I couldn't help but read those three words to myself:

Look at you

The letters were matted brown yet glaring, the dark rat blood having trailed down in long tears. They were hard to ignore: judging, and asking you to judge.

It was a demand a patient in an asylum of this sort could not obey--no one remembered who you was to look at them in the first place, they had lost that ability long ago. But I'd never been a patient here; I'd been a prisoner. And I knew well who I was. When I looked at myself, I saw a twenty-two year old aspiring woman trapped in a place she should never have to be. A place no one should have to be, really.

Running the remaining detergent in my hair, I rubbed it in until it formed poor suds. My dark hair ended just by my ears--the longest it'd been since I'd arrived here. There'd been a time when the nurses had been militant on shaving our heads completely, but after a while, they let us be--the same way they decided not to bathe us anymore.

For that last part I was immensely glad. Sandpaper was never made for people's skin, and nor were brushes with bristles made of metal.

A loud banging abruptly sounded from the door behind me, rousing a rat to squeal.