mariska

Colorado Mountains:

It had been raining that day too. I remember the steady drip drip drip on the kitchen window sill was irritating me. The window had jammed again and I wasn’t strong enough to force it either up or down. It would have to wait for Richard to get home. He was tall, my raven haired husband had more than enough strength to force the window closed. I had felt myself cringing even then, when I was alone. Richard had the strength to do more than close windows. The icy fingers of fear closed over my heart even now as I thought of how panicked I became then, standing in my kitchen, listening to the drip, drip, drip, knowing that I would be blamed for the damage to the window sill even though it was the rain. Even though I knew it wasn’t my fault I knew that it would be, it always was. Before I knew what I was doing I had heaved my five-foot frame onto the counter, and standing on the sink was shoving with all my might on the window. I slipped. My damp with sweat left hand slipped off the wood frame and I put my arm through the glass.

I rubbed my arm now where the glass had cut me, months later the faintly puckered scar and the muddled memory of the pain were the only remaining evidence. I walked to the window in my room to examine the other scar, the one that stood out on my right arm.

My mind drifted back to that fateful day, as it always did when it rained. I was trying to clean up the broken glass and the blood when I heard the front door close. Richard was home. You’ll never get it cleaned up fast enough, I heard in my head. You can’t mend glass. “I know.” I had grumbled. Some people thought voices in your head made you crazy, but mine had always been there.

“Talking to yourself again my little Irish Witch?” Richard had entered the kitchen behind me and hadn’t yet noticed the mess.

I gave a shaky laugh, my back still to him, and told him I was just cleaning up. I don’t know what tipped him off, I think he saw the broken window through the lace curtains, but I can never be sure. He was suddenly behind me, a handful of my dark red hair wrapping around his wrist, craning my head back painfully.

I rubbed the back of my head in memory, feeling that fear again for a minute.

It was then that he saw the blood and the broken glass in the sink. He immediately jumped the wrong conclusion. “What’s the matter little witch, did I interrupt, first the aliens and now a crazy wife. Let me help you since you can’t seem to do anything right.”

He had me pinned against the counter and picking up a large chunk of glass, he slashed at my other wrist.

I remember the pain. I remember his heavy breathing in my ear. I remember his talk of aliens and having no idea what he was talking about. I remember the paramedics arriving with their lights and sirens even though I have no memory of their having been called. Most strangely of all I remember being in the hospital, tied to my bed, sedated, and everyone seemed to be talking about the aliens. It took me a few days to figure out that Richard had told them I had tried to kill myself. He had finally gotten the full control he always sought by locking me up here; Mariska under lock and key, Mariska under glass. Now he could be the tragic, long suffering hero with the crazy wife. My reputation now firmly, and forever, in tatters

My dreams during those weeks consisted of broken glass and the drip, drip, drip, of the I.V., so close to the dripping in my kitchen that it gave me nightmares. I dreamt of the little green men from the movies coming to fix my window and talking Richard away with them. I drifted in and out of consciousness. It was hard for me to know when I was awake as everyone seemed to be talking of aliens getting closer.

I was in a different kind of hospital now. They said I was sick. That well people didn’t try to kill themselves and well people didn’t hear voices in their head. I didn’t argue with them about the voices, I knew it would be no use. They weren’t just ‘voices’, they were people, people who had once been alive.

During group therapy they made snide remarks that had me choking on my laughter. Yes darling, you’re perfectly sane, We all think that the houseplants should have backstories and offspring Delilah would mutter to the batty woman in the fluffy pink housecoat who firmly insisted that her plants loved her and would visit soon. Delilah had a flare for drama and called everyone darling. They should keep the loony birds in cages, Franklin would whisper, as if everyone could hear him, not just me. Maurice would repeat every inanity in a high falsetto while pretending to sip tea with his pinky finger out.

When I couldn’t sleep they kept me company. When I cried Suzette would sing me to sleep, she had been a Parisian Opera singer and even in death she was magnificent.

I wandered the halls now, in sweats and socks with little grippers on the bottom. I paused in my rounds at the nurse’s stations, which were all behind thick plastic embedded with fine mesh cages. They were always watching the news, never any soap operas or game shows, just the news. I knew that they weren’t supposed to be, the news could upset some of my fellow inmates. It felt odd knowing I was perfectly sane in house of nut jobs.

Tisk-tisk, more news, how obsessed they are with something of which they can do nothing about. I heard Delilah’s familiar snicker in my head, Aliens indeed. She was right of course. If they came, well, they came.

We obviously weren’t their first priority.

After I had been in here for just shy of eight months I realized I preferred it here. In here there was no Richard to pull my hair and hit me where the bruises wouldn’t show. Here I had my own space, my own thoughts, my own friends. The Brookside Sanitarium was my home now.

I had earned the right to walk the grounds and surrounding wooded area unaccompanied. I would often take a blanket out and lay in the grass to stare at the stars after dinner, as long as I didn’t leave sight of the building after dark. At first it was just me, well, me and the voices in my head. Martha, the sweetest of my voices, and my friend through the darkest times was always with me then, but after six months of solitary star gazing others began to join me. First it was just a trickle of the curious, and then it was a flood. There were dozens of us, even some nurses with tipped back heads resting in plastic folding chairs. None of us ever said as much, but we were all looking for the supposedly huge alien ship. It was easier to believe we could maybe see it than dash the hopes of my fellow watchers with the realities of space and distance. Sometimes one of us would gasp and point, but it would just be a shooting star or a crazily weaving satellite.

It’s there. The voice in my head whispered. I turned my head to look in the direction it indicated. I thought I could see something that seemed at once bright and dark, which made no sense. I knew it couldn’t really be the ship, but my imagination and my common sense rarely got along. Would it land here? Take us away? Kill us all? I could feel my heart accelerate, my breathing speed. I knew at once that I was terrified. They won’t come here. Stop worrying so. Martha’s voice insisted, I felt a feather light stroke of my hair. Knowing a spirit was touching them would be enough to send most people to, well, the crazy house, but seeing as how I was already here…

The weeks went by and according to the scientists we were the only planet left to be explored. I kept hearing the oddest and most wrenching stories on the news. People building fallout shelters just like during the Cuban Missile Crisis, people forming cults in preparation for the aliens to come take their souls, people spending every free minute in churches to prepare for the upcoming rapture, worst of all, people killing their own families to keep them from the horror and torture of the aliens. I see now why the nurses aren’t supposed to watch the news.

The formerly, but barely, stable of my fellow inmates began to rapidly deteriorate into quivering, huddled, crying masses of humanity. The nurses were finding patients hiding in closets, patients praying at the odd pattern in the common room wallpaper that looked like Jesus in a clown wig. One woman was found digging a hole in the garden with her bare hands, her nails bloody and torn. When asked what she was doing she began to scream, long terrified screams.

I watched them helplessly. I asked Martha why she and the others couldn’t help comfort these poor people? Do something? This is not for you to worry about love. They are in a place that will care for them, with others that will soothe them. They have their own people my sweet girl. Their own Guides and Guardians. I suppose some of them can hear, these poor souls with broken minds. But they don’t know how to listen.

An immeasurable sadness settled on me in that moment. I couldn’t imagine a life without my family, even if they were a family only I could hear and see.

I would worry about myself from now on. It was not my job to fix everything. Every night I still went out to watch the sky. The nurses continued to watch the news with a fervor bordering on obsession. Images from a space telescope showed the ship clearly on every news report. Huge and glinting maliciously, it seemed to me like a small moon. The malicious part may only have been in my imagination though. It was frighteningly, devastatingly beautiful. Like staring death in the face, but death had the face of an angel. As I pondered what it could have in store for us, I also wondered why no one had made any provisions for us. Were we forgotten here on our mountain? Surrounded by trees and streams, in our castle like a prison in the clouds? We must be, Martha whispered, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing will happen to us, trust me, I know. We’re safe here. “But how can you know?” They aren’t interested in inhabited planets; we are like ants to them, inconsequential.

Huh.

“But how can you know for sure?” I just do. “But HOW” I have been told that I cannot tell, suffice it to say that just like a game of telephone, I have been informed. “But who is holding the other receiver?” Martha glanced up at the never ending velvety blackness of the sky and said nothing. Delilah, Franklin, Suzette and Maurice joined us. We spent hours staring at the silvery stars. Martha had eased my fears and we laughed and sang long into the night.

“Is Mariska out there still?” Nurse June asked.

“She is,” Nurse Leanne sighed, shaking her head, “The poor dear, so sweet and beautiful. They would have set her loose before now but she persists in talking to herself. They medicate her but it doesn’t seem to help. Poor thing isn’t a danger to anyone, but she just isn’t right either.”

“Did you see on the news that the ship seems to be moving away from us?”

“Oh, pray that it goes away and leaves us be.” Leanne crossed herself.

Both women looked out over the lawn as they heard Mariska laugh at something only she could hear.

“Her husband called her his Irish Witch.” June said.

“He’s also the one who beat the living hell out of her. The one who put her here and never looked back.”

“I could be wrong, but I think she prefers it that way.” Leanne smiled as she watched her favorite patient point at the heavens and laugh along with another joke no one could hear. “She seems so carefree and happy, the rest of this lot are terrified of their shadows.”

“Maybe she knows something we don’t. Maybe her voices are better informed.” June mused.

“Maybe so,” Leanne conceded. “Little Irish Witch indeed.”

Mariska’s laughter once again floated over the lawn just as the news blared the report of the alien craft shooting away from the Earth, away into the darkness of space.