Blue Ruin

      She called herself Blue Ruin. She used to say that was really just the name of her body. Her moods were named so she could feel something in her Blue Ruin body. Anger was Alice and happiness was Hannah. Sorrow was Susie and contented was Carolyn. There were moods for which she had no names. Hysteria was one of them. Hysteria was such a transient mood that she felt she had no need to name it, but she had been hysterical numerous times. That was the best treatment for hysteria, they told her, and she always woke up better in the morning. She woke up and it was all over. That probably was the best part: the end to it all. The next morning she was merely a numbed, fuzzy Blue Ruin waiting for a feeling to come again. It was how she began each day, really. Perhaps the sedatives caused a bit of confusion and grogginess, but she always woke up numbed and waiting for something to emote a feeling as to name herself for the day.

      Blue Ruin woke again from another hysterical episode. She remembered bits and pieces of it as she came to, as she could always do. Her memories before the sedation were like distorted puzzles pieces that she needed to fit together. And she had gotten quite good at putting the pieces together in a way that they made sense. It was something about her refusing to come in from the courtyard over a man she thought she saw. They told her that it was merely a tree, but it spoke to her, she swore. If anything, she knew it couldn’t possibly be an auditory hallucination. Perhaps the man in the tree was an optical hallucination, but the voice was too clear and real. She had been living with her illness for enough years to decipher the difference to herself. She wanted to find out more about the man near the tree. His voice was so real and everything about it was strangely familiar. It was so foreign and so familiar to her all at the same time. His tone and dialect were both foreign and familiar to her. The only thing she remembered him say was “Jana”. The name sounded so familiar, as if it were part of her. He said “Jana” to her last. And then they told her to come in and she refused… and then threatened to stab herself in the jugular with a sharp, barren branch from her man-tree if they stepped any closer to subdue her. She held the sharpened tree branch centimeters from her porcelain neck. They did so anyway. First grabbing the branch from her small hand and hugging her tiny body and setting the large-bore needle into her tiny deltoid muscle. She was no match… and she was fast asleep.

      Blue Ruin came out of her tiny, bland room where they set her to sleep. She was still dressed in her clothing from the day before. Her shoes were still stained with the dried mud from digging her heels into the moist ground during her lost fight and her strawberry blonde hair was tangled. She walked shyly and quietly to the nurse sitting at her post in the commons room. She knew this dark-haired nurse. Her name was Mary. Mary saw she was up.
“Hello, Anne, did you sleep well?” Mary greeted her. Anne was just a name they called her. It was a bland, simple name. She learned to answer to it at any time, even though she never felt “Anne”. Anne was just a name she could respond to.
      Blue Ruin simply nodded quietly.
      “Anne, would you like to have something to eat? Would you like to get washed?” Mary asked calmly.
      “I would like to go outside” Blue Ruin mumbled shyly.
      “No. I don’t think that’s a good idea, Anne” Mary replied both gently and sternly to Blue Ruin.

      Blue Ruin wanted to yell. She wanted to protest. Blue Ruin was definitely Alice today. And Alice was a smart girl, if not also crafty girl as well. Alice knew she needed to keep her anger quiet. If she raised her voice, sedation would come again, and Alice would definitely be lost and the blurry Blue Ruin would come to. Alice just sat inside Blue Ruin and sulked at Mary sitting doing her paperwork. She was angry that Mary was treating her like a child and taking away her rights. She wanted to see the man in the tree again and speak to him. She wanted to find out why “Jana” was familiar and why his voice was so eerily memorable. The body Alice was stuck in may have been easy to overcome, but Alice’s brain and spirit were not. Alice sat thinking of a way to outsmart her prison guards known as the asylum nurses. Alice observed the plain little commons room carefully from her uncomfortable chair. Mary was still charting, but this time with her back turned. She must’ve thought that Blue Ruin was fine now that she hadn’t heard a word of protest from her. The room was quiet and the staff was overworked. She saw another nurse, Louise, guarding a door, but dozing. The guards were doing much the same. She decided to make a break for it during the staff’s apparent nap time.

      Alice made a double check and planned her escape route seamlessly in her mind. She slipped off her shoes so that she would make no noise as she gingerly tiptoed across the hardwood floors of the asylum. Slowly, carefully she stepped like a sneaking child towards the nurses station where Mary was still charting mindlessly. Alice crouched down behind the nurses station and crawled like a cat as to not be seen from the corner of Mary’s eye. Alice was near the door and Louise was still dozing away. She snuck past Louise with an easy success, quietly cracked the door and jumped out onto the massive front steps of the asylum. She had successfully escaped, as she had done before, and with happiness she twirled in her stocking feet like a ballerina for a moment. She immediately heard the name “Jana” from the familiar voice.

      And Alice turned into Hannah inside of Blue Ruin, for she was happy now. Swiftly she ran towards the voice coming from her familiar tree. The twigs of falling branches and sharp leaves of holly bushes pierced her stocking feet, but she didn’t care. She just ran and ran until she reached the tree calling “Jana” repeatedly. She reached out to the tree and it turned into the man. He reached out for her hand and took her into his arms. She accepted and returned the embrace. And then the man, in his familiar voice told her “I love you, Jana”. She replied the same and she kisser her secret lover in the garden’s lovely lips in the crisp, autumn air.

      Unfortunately, she hadn’t heard the guards run on the search for their escapee during her exhilaration. During the time of their precious kiss, a gunshot grazed her right ear… and then shattered her secret lover in the garden’s skull. She went back into lost Blue Ruin mode and screeched in pain and fear. Her secret lover in the garden exerted a guttural sound from his kissing lips and her mouth filled with blood from his bleeding brain. She swallowed the metallic fluid of life in panic and then vomited. Blue Ruin felt her secret lover’s body go limp… and her own go limp as well. The familiar needle went into her deltoid and sedation hovered. She was honestly happy for the sedation this time for the panic she felt was terrifyingly overwhelming.

      Blue Ruin began to come to later in her bland little bed. Her right ear was horribly painful and deaf now, but she could still hear the nurses’ conversation in the background.
      “Poor girl. She just lost her love. What was his admitting diagnosis anyway?” the one nurse spoke.
      “I’m really not sure. All I know is that he wanted to take Anne home when she was stabilized and Doctor Samuelson wouldn’t allow it. He told us that the insane shouldn’t procreate. He seemed fine, just she seemed to have issues” the other nurse spoke.
      “And her records say her real name was Jana. Why have we never called her that? Aren’t we here to rehab her of some sort? She could’ve truly come home and lived with her husband. She wasn’t necessarily dangerous, just a little strange” the nurse replied.
      “I don’t know. It’s all Doctor Samuelson. He has some kind of method to his madness. We are not to question it” the other nurse hushed her.
      “We are to burn Mr. Jones’ body. Deaths here don’t look pretty on us. And we are not to tell Anne about the death of him, God forbid she had another hysterical episode. She’ll be fine, just deaf in the ear she was shot in and a bit painful and maybe some memories of the incident. We have medications for all of that. Medications for pain, sedatives… and for memory loss” Doctor Samuelson spoke.

      Blue Ruin was afraid, but couldn’t do anything. The pain in her ear was excruciating and the sadness of Susie was taking her away into a horrible painful numbness. The nurse came in and saw the pain in her face. She silently slipped a few drops of bitter Morphine under her tongue. And Blue Ruin slipped off helplessly as a numbed experiment, for that would be all she would ever be.