|
Orange Bottles and Girls in White Dresses
Ten feet high, four feet wide. The mouth of a dragon, open, teeth bared. And I walk inside. It’s almost like I’m outside of myself, a fly on the wall, watching the girl with mouse-brown hair and a scar on her left cheek, walk in through the door.
Old worn oak, three feet from the ground, green cushions. A throne. A throne for the girl with the scar.
I sit down, kicking off my shoes and spreading my toes before the fire. Ten long appendages, each nail painted a lusty pink.
They tell me I pay too close attention to detail. They tell me I throw fits when things aren’t perfectly lined up on my kitchen shelves. They tell me I have to take white pills from a cylindrical orange bottle. They tell me I’m crazy.
I tell them they’re misunderstood.
They want to fix me, to take scans of my brain to see the pink, mushy insides and see if some of the wires aren’t connected. I didn’t even know there were wires in the human brain.
I’ve been evaluated through uncomfortable interviews, as I lay on lavender cushioned love seats, creating lies for the man in glasses to scribble down, as I watch the water trickle down the window pane like liquid diamonds. I’ve been hooked up to wires by cuffs on my wrists and around my head, as the lady with red hair and a nose ring who smells like grass, tries to figure out what natural remedies will help me with my “problems”. She hands me brown glass bottles of funny smelling liquids with little glass droppers and bottles of herbs, saying to make sure when I get home to throw the white pills from the orange bottle down the toilet, and to only take what she has given me. When I get home, I take them all will a tall glass of white wine.
They’ve been trying to fix me since I was five. I told my mother there were girls in white dresses dancing on the porch and Darby, our orange tabby cat, was actually bright purple. She brought me to see a doctor, a gangly man with round horn-rimmed glasses, to get me checked out. I refused to stop believing in the girls and Darby’s true color, so he had me sent to a specialist. The specialist poked with needles and drew blood, as I kicked my legs in the giant cream-colored leather chair and hummed, “Mary Had a Little Lamb”.
I moved out of that houses as soon as I could, but my mother always would come to pick me up to bring me to more doctors, to shove more pills down my throat. She told me something was wrong with me, that the things I saw weren’t real and I obsessed too much over the small details.
They tell me I’m crazy.
I tell them they’re delusional.
Teagan King is a student at Northern Michigan University in Marquette, Michigan, graduating this Spring. Upon graduation she will be moving to a local youth camp where she works and will be busily planning her September wedding. Other than writing she enjoys painting, reading and watching endless episodes of Doctor Who.
Email: Teagan King
Return to Table of Contents
|
