Page 100 of Cruel Cravings

There’re feet approaching the closet door. The thick Russian accent calls out to me. It grows closer as I shrink deeper into the closet, hoping that this time it’ll work. My prayers to become invisible will come true.

My sister didn’t please them. She made mistakes, flubbed a key, and now it’s time to be punished…

The electric jolt rips me back to the bed, where I’m forced to look up into Dr. Wolford’s smug, condescending face as he demands to know if my sister is alive.

“Answer the question, Jael. Is your sister alive?”

I can hear her music playing. The sprawling notes fill every corner of the large home, even as she flubs a key and our mother screams at her. Even as the closet door is drawn open and the monster finally finds me.

“Tell me what you believe,” Dr. Wolford grits out, losing any patience. He looks across the bed at the orderly closest to the machine. “Turn it up. Turn it up ’til she learns.”

I scream and arch as the hot, prickling pain swallows me up.

None of it makes any sense. How can my sister be dead when I can hear her music? How can she be gone when I know deep down she’s alive?

The world as I know it shatters. Everything crumbles and nothing means anything anymore.

It doesn’t matter what’s real and what’s not. If I’m sane or if I’m crazy. It couldn’t matter less as Dr. Wolford barks his next question and the bones in my body vibrate from the intense, electric pain.

“Is he real?” he asks. “Does Brontë—the shadow man—exist?”

All noise falls away. My sister’s music fades and sobs come to a choking halt. I blink between wet, clumped lashes at Dr. Wolford as he glares down at me and waits on an answer.

The dark corners of the room may be empty, but I know deep in my being they weren’t before. I know with certainty he was there, he was among the shadows. Maybe not before in the closet, but at the hospital, on the road, at the cabin, everywhere else I have gone for years.

He was real and he saw me when none of them bothered to.

“Yes…” I croak, voice broken. “Yes… he’s real.”

Dr. Wolford’s expression tightens, his eyes subtly narrowing from behind his wire-framed, round glasses.

A long, intense silence passes where he stares down at me like a failed experiment he couldn’t find more nauseating, and then he barks his next order.

“Get out,” he snaps. “Both of you. Leave the room. Don’t bother with the machine, just go!”

They rush to make his request happen.

The door swings shut and the padded walls promise to keep whatever happens next a secret.

But I already know.

More tears fill my eyes as Dr. Wolford steps to the foot of the bed and his hands work to unbuckle his belt.

“You know what happens, Jael,” he says, smirking. “You know what happens when you don’t accept the treatment. I have to get creative. I have to make you adapt in other ways. You have no one to blame but yourself.”

31.Jael

Violet - Hole

Nothing I say is going to change what he’s about to do. But it does provide clarity I’m not sure I’ve ever felt before—dozens of therapy sessions flash before my eyes where I’d been distraught and confused, sobbing on one of the armchairs Dr. Wolford always made me sit in. It was always after he’d spent the entire session prying whatever traumatizing detail from my past that he could out of me.

I had told him all I could remember, but it was never good enough.

He wanted to dig deeper. He pushed harder, making me relive the moments I had hoped to forget forever.

“Close your eyes, Jael,” he would command. “Pretend you’re back in the closet hiding from the monster.”

I would do as he said, then hear his footsteps padding closer. I’d take in a sharp breath like I had in the closet, trying so hard to be silent that I’d often need to cover my mouth with shaking hands.

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