Chapter Text
Somebody is crying in the corner. He looks to see what kind of person it is, but before his eyes reach them, his mind has drifted away and he doesn’t remember what he’s looking for.
He’s looking at a small room. There is a pot in one corner. There is a person in another corner. There is a door in another corner. There is Caleb in another corner.
What is that awful sound, and why won’t it stop?
Some time later, he finds his eyes settled on his hands, which are limp in his lap: threadbare hands against threadbare trousers. Can he move them? Two fingers on one of the hands twitch, but he doesn’t know if it’s his doing. He watches for hours, his mind blank.
He wakes up with a start, his neck stiff and aching, his hands trembling with fear his mind doesn’t remember. The room is quiet with the silence that comes after a thunderclap, after the scream of the lightning. Then the person on the other side of the room starts their endless, pitiful whimpering again.
Someone strong drags him to his feet. Caleb watches his feet shuffle down a hallway. There is cold water. He can’t breathe and he can’t see and he
The door squeals open, and a metal tin lands on the floor in front of him. Some of the porridge has spilled out onto his foot. It’s lukewarm. He’s supposed to eat. Later, the tin is gone and he can’t remember whether he ate the food. There is still a spill of porridge across the floor, crusty and sour-smelling.
He barely notices when the other corner goes silent.
Later on, there are people, and dragging a bundle across the stone floor, and then nothing. The nothing gets bigger and heavier and Caleb’s throat is closing up, his ears ringing with the quiet, and then the door squeals again and there is, instead of quiet weeping, a woman’s voice, talking. He slowly melts back against the wall and watches a string of ants track across the floor with bits of dried-up porridge.
The weeping stayed in one corner but the chatter is quick, filling the room, bouncing from one corner to another. It makes Caleb’s head ache, the way the words come too quickly for him to follow, so that as soon as he has grasped one ( shoes.) the voice is a hundred miles ahead and he is drowing in isolated words that make no kind of sense. (-- unless--village--won’t. )
And then--out of nowhere:
Caleb feels a hand on his face. He follows with his eyes: from the hand to the wrist, along the arm, to an older woman with gray in her hair, speaking in rapid common the last few words of a spell. As his eyes meet hers, she smiles and laughter lines run across her face like ripples in a pond.
He looks past her to the walls of the small room (cell) around him, a room that is his home in this hospital (asylum), that has been his home for the past eleven years, ever since the night of his graduation, ever since the night when he killed his parents, when he dragged the cart in front of the door (the harness empty and jingling softly, the feel of the age-polished wooden shafts so sickeningly familiar under his hands, except that--he notices with equal parts pride and shame--his calluses are gone) and he stretched out his hand and called out the fire and he heard them scream (the smell of singed meat) and suddenly he knew they were dying, he was putting an end to them, to his mother singing nonsense songs to herself as she worked in the kitchen and his father’s kind ways and gentle hands with the animals and everything was wrong and yet he kept doing it .
Caleb’s gutteral screams echo off the walls of his cell. He screams until his throat is raw and his vision goes dark at the edges. His new cellmate flees to the corner of the room, gibbering frghtened nonsense to herself, and still Caleb is screaming. He doubles over, gasping for breath, retching over his feet, and still he can’t stop screaming and he can’t stop seeing it. He tears at his hair and his clothes and his own flesh but he can’t. make it. stop. He can’t make his mind go away like it did before (eleven years ago, oh gods below, eleven years ); he is awake and he is here and he knows the truth and it is killing him.
It is a mercy when the keepers of this place rush in and kick him in the stomach and in the head until everything goes dark.