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Delta40
09-27-2010, 04:26 AM
So, the tale went like this: A woman who cracked, found herself in a psychiatric unit. 'This is insane!' she thought as she discovered how well she actually fit in- but only at first. Later, when she saw her distorted image, she realised she now had two double chins. It had been one hell of a struggle to force her core feelings through and an extra chin was all she had to show for her breakdown. Had anyone noticed? Heard? Before she arrived at the unit, Double Chin was a useless torso dangling on a washing line. the wind wound her powerlessness round and round the wire, till one day, she snapped and blew off into the wind to be reborn in the unit. Who the hell would have known she was in the dumping ground for emotional waste? The odd thing was, even when a therapist told her she must take ownership of her past in order to move on, she still wanted to kill herself. The psych unit was a grace - at least until she vomited everything out and became human once more. Double Chin thought a breakdown was when all that stuff came out but apparently, she was just gearing up for the big spew. Would that happen while she curled up foetal style in the bed with raised bars?

In the distance a voice screamed hysterically, 'The sky is falling in, the sky is falling in!' Double Chin found it hard to breathe surrounded by crazy ****ers all day. They lurked in the corridors, crawling along grimy walls as if their sight had left them, when really it was their sanity. Each morning, she was stalked by a Humpling who snorted and dragged one foot behind when she made her way to the dining room. The nurse would not listen to her fears of the unknown, except that is, to smile benignly, say 'there there' and lead her back to her room, leaving Double Chin to study flecks of apricot wallpaper. Huge chunks had been chipped out as past anguished souls dug their nails into the flaking plaster and bashed their skulls in a fruitless search for peace. When Double Chin rocked back and forth, the wallpaper moved and proved that she could still kill herself.

In the common room, chitchat clouds blurred her identity and Double Chin felt safe in the haze of banality. Even though she secretly wanted to shine, the psych unit was not the place to do it. Everyone operated on such low wattage, the tv always sounded ridiculously loud. Once, she went near the saloon piano and tentatively keyed D A D but the volume of her musical pain nearly put her into spin cycle.

A lost soul twitched her nose at Double Chin and recoiled in horror. 'You've had a bowel motion and you haven't wiped yourself properly. I can tell. Go and clean yourself up.' Some greasy lowlife chuckled and renamed Double Chin 'Two Faeced *****.' The humiliation might have been unbearable if she gave a hoot but the M&M medication fed to her by a hairy nurse each morning, made her nothing more than a dead numbness, so that anything she wished for would remain firmly out of her reach - even death. The Humpling shuffled back up the corridor, dribbling as always and Double Chin smelt and felt the coarse history of its life scrape her body as it passed her on her way back to the sanctuary of her bed.

Studying the wallpaper patterns that abruptly stopped at her bedside drawer, Double Chin thought it was time to cry a river and float back to the surface.

zoolane
09-27-2010, 04:45 AM
I love this story, double chin character is vulnable state, she still able to understand situation she in but I do think she had some emotion or pyhsical abuse from father in the past.

I can not wait for next part.

Delta40
09-27-2010, 04:58 AM
Thanks Zoo. I hadn't thought of a next part - lets play it by ear first...

dafydd manton
09-27-2010, 04:57 PM
As a kid,and because of my father's job, I lived in the grounds of mental hospitals, units as they are so charmingly called now, for the first 17 years of my life. I have seen a tremendous number of mentally unwell people, broken by the system we call life, and then, in the parlance of the day "Put Away!", sometimes never to re-emerge. You have captured the horror of the worst cases, and the foul smell that always made me gag. The protrayal of figures feeling their way along damaged so walls was so accurate, I went back to pre-1972, when I managed to escape into what we think of as being the "normal world" (Says who!) Your portrayal of the despair of once-healthy people, as the realisation dawned that this was probably for ever, is very moving, very well thought out, and painfully accurate. Thanks for sharing this, which is so good, I almost wish I had never read it, yet I know I will come back to it, inevitably. Delta, you have surpassed yourself, even by your high standards.

Delta40
09-27-2010, 05:15 PM
Gosh, that is a really gracious review Daffy. Thank you so much. I wondered about its authenticism.

dafydd manton
09-27-2010, 05:23 PM
Painfully accurate. Too accurate for comfort, which is admirable. I can still smell it...... and I wish I couldn't!!!! 38 years down the line......

Jerrybaldy
09-28-2010, 07:47 AM
Hello Delta.
I got a little confused when you wrote about the additional double chin from the breakdown and then double chin became the character name.

Beyond that I felt the numbness of her existence and I even felt that you educated me on the subject - that the breakdown was not the outpouring and that was still to come - she was ' gearing up for the big spew'.

You led up to the humiliation of her uncleaned *** and then showed her lack of concern in her present state and state of mind. It felt to me that the doors to this place were a bit more accessible to me by the end and that it wouldnt take a huge leap to be in there myself.

It was a very provocative read.

The last line seemed to return you to poetry writing rather than short story mode and didnt seem to bring an end about.

cheers Delta dear
JB

Delta40
09-28-2010, 05:38 PM
The last line seemed to return you to poetry writing rather than short story mode and didnt seem to bring an end about.

cheers Delta dear
JB

You might be right. That may be why Zoo is waiting for the next instalment.