LIV | Some Suspicions
❦
I do my best
to make the days
pass
faster
so that the nights will come,
and I can
whisper
my thoughts to Tammie
in the privacy
of my bedroom.
The nurses are always listening,
I know,
but at least
other human ears
will not hear.
We aren’t
conspiring anything.
The nurses
can tell you that.
We spend our nights
dreaming of our future.
The nurses
won’t tell the others.
We’ll be together after this too—
Tammie tells me this
often.
It makes me feel
warm and fuzzy
inside
but it makes me
more and more anxious.
Will Tammie
disappear like those patients before?
How can I keep Tammie
from getting replaced?
Does Asher want to hurt Tammie?
Why does he always frown at her?
Is he seeing her
in Tammie?
I think of
Asher
and his ever-changing face
as he follows me around.
It makes me
so frustrated.
He always seems to be
thinking really hard.
But when I ask,
he’ll say
it’s nothing.
I know he’s lying.
So I can’t let him hear
what Tammie
and I
are dreaming of.
It’s more exciting
like this,
under this thin blanket,
wrapped in the foul smell
of vomit,
dreaming of a future
for the first time,
unwilling to move
when Moonlight Sonata wakes us up
in the mornings.
❦
Coffee splutters
from the spout
of the coffee machine
into my paper cup.
I wait,
hoping it’ll take all day
(so that it’ll be night again)
but it doesn’t.
When I turn around,
Asher’s there,
standing right
behind me
like a ghost.
The hair
on the back of my neck
stands.
I didn’t hear him coming.
He avoids my eyes.
I don’t know why.
Since he watched me paint
yesterday,
he hasn’t spoken to me.
Does he know
about what Tammie and I
think of him?
The last conversation we had—
was about
keeping our enemies
close.
Why does he look at me like that?
Was it because I left abruptly
when he told me about his dream?
Should I apologise?
❦
Apologise?
Did you
do something wrong?
‘No,’ I say,
squirming.
It’s hot under the blanket today.
Tammie’s
apologetic
smile
makes me stop moving.
Then you don’t have to worry.
I smile back.
Unless you did
something wrong
after all.
I pull the blanket back
so I can breathe.
The circular light
on the blank ceiling
stares back at me.
‘I don’t know,’ I say at last.
❦
His behaviour
is suspicious.
I watch him
from where I sit by the window,
painting pictures of
Tammie in my bed.
But then
so is everyone else’s.
Gavin
is pretending
I don’t exist.
He thinks I’m trouble.
I see his thoughts
in bubbles above his head.
Li Wen spends
most of her time
in Raymond’s lap
even though he ignores her,
and makes eye contact
with the object
closest to him.
She glances at me occasionally
and bends
to whisper to him.
He doesn’t look up,
she doesn’t come over.
But sometimes,
she’ll smile dangerously at me.
Zuraida too,
even though
we got off
to a good start,
she still ends up standing still for hours
in random parts
of the asylum,
and the nurses type furiously
on their phones
and end up spying on
the rest of us because of her.
(I notice the plain nurse
looking at me
every now and then.)
Perhaps
the most
suspicious one
is
Krishna.
She’s
nowhere
to be found.
I don’t see her during meals.
She’s not in the greenhouse
when I go there
to see if she’s uprooted
the rowan trees.
Even
at medicine time
these days,
her armchair
is empty.
❦
