Inferno

Purgatory: i

Blaze

Psychotic.

I existed on the brink of insanity, the world observed through narrow, ebony tunnels with no beacon of prospect shimmering at the end like an extravagant prize. Success and misplaced trust was stolen from me. My childhood butchered. Innocence lost. Body defiled. Hope gone.

Conflagration.

The flames of an uncontrolled, inevitable inferno had left blackened marks on not only the plush walls that surrounded me, but on my weary soul. My whole body ached painfully with the burning fuel that yearned to be released.

Purgatory.

My carcass was trapped there, wherever there actually was. The Sanctuary. I was biding my time, my internal combustion ignited with trapped fire that was eating me from the inside out. My skin danced with heat, streams of sweat trailing down my forehead only to eventually sizzle, boil, and evaporate. Damnation might have been better then in the cell. Hell would have been better than that.

My head reeled and my insides lurched as the unlit room flashed and flickered like an old Vision Box full of static. My body spasmed with a violent flinch as I attempted to cling to reality. Reality was simpler than the terrible pictures that made up my memories. My heart hammered as I succumbed to the unnerving strength of the flashbacks.

A small girl spun through the kitchen with tiny flames on her fingertips, the fire spreading up her arm and over her skin. In a panic her mother dumped the scalding hot water she had been preparing to cook with over her daughter. The daughter gasped in surprise, the boiling water not even leaving a mark. The flames were out but no burns from either the fire nor the water existed.

My body swayed as more came in the haze.

The little girl with dark red hair like her mother's screamed and fought in a struggle to stay out of the black ambulance. The men in dark scrubs shoved her into the truck, her head thumping against the metal walls. She scrambled as the doors shut, her face and hands pressed to the glass to cry for her parents. They did not respond. Instead they watched their daughter ride away, faces emotionless but tear stained with shame...

Shoved in garments of white the red head shrieked for her mother and father every night until she aged invisibly. The light left her eyes not even a month later...

Her mask remained through the beatings, the cold-blooded killings she witnessed, when each year passed in solitude, and when she was raped countlessly by her aide.

I topped over on my side with a quiet moan and scream. I could remember all too vividly the agony of electrocution and anger inflicting tests and operations that were supposed to remove the warmth and the violence, that were supposed to calm me down. But they did not work.

They only heightened my rage.

My spontaneous tantrums and outbursts became less impromptu and more frequent. More aides were hurt when I suddenly learned how to fight. In all honestly, I was taught some by other inmates. Most of it was driven by instinct and animalistic fury. Once the workers thought that I was a danger to other members of the Sanctuary, I was shut away in Isolation. 4986i was not to be messed with or handled any longer.

That didn't stop them from taunting me during meal time.

I continued to lay on my side until the flashbacks subsided and I could see properly once again. I struggled against my straight jacket, momentarily unable to sit up. I closed my eyes and smooshed my cheek into the soft quilt that made up the ground and tried to rest.

It seemed impossible to dream in the Sanctuary. Other patients spoke about how in all their time when they finally received a dream state of some sort it was lucid and malevolent. Before I was locked away there was a time when human contact was aplenty. I wasn't sure how long ago that was or even what day it was. Time was elusive in Isolation. The only constants were the walls blemished with scorch marks, the straight jacket, and the heat inside of me fighting to get out.