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Chapter One
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Het
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I wandered the grounds in my sleep.
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Extending my spirit beyond the fetal curl of my slim body, nestled into the scratchy, grey blanket and starchy, white pillows of my cot, I kept my physical eyes closed as my inner eye traveled deep into the drizzling night.
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That’s how I knew it before she was coming.
That’s how I knew it was all going wrong.
(They were planning on transferring me from the Boy’s Ranks into the Men’s today. Before anyone else was awake, so that no one could protest my leaving.)
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I’d heard Dr. Doht, known amongst the patients as “Dr. Don’t”, talking with a nurse as they stepped out of his office a few minutes before our biweekly sessions, yesterday. He’d said something about someone not being ready for transfer—I confirmed it was me when he told me dismally, at the beginning of our session, that he would be handing me over to the care of a recently hired nurse.
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He’d refused to tell me their name. Point blank. With that same exasperated and yet, somehow, unspeakably bored look on his bespeckled face that he wore everyday that we met.
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Had met...
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I’d been under Dr. Doht’s care since I was little. It was him, if I remembered correctly, who had been the one to release me from what felt like ages of solitary confinement. As soon as he’d been hired, he’d taken me under his wing, becoming my own personal psychologist as well as the only true father figure that I’d ever known…
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For him to be giving me up to someone else’s care, it must mean that what I dreaded the most was surely coming. Today.
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There was little I could do to escape it…
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My spirit had been treading along the eaves of the once-grand, gothic stone building that was the Shepphard Reft insane asylum. Where I had lived, if one was to call my convoluted existence here life, ever since… Well, as long as I could remember, really.
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I had been a “patient” here at the old, corruptly governed insane asylum ever since I was little. I had spent most of the first years of my life, as far back as I could remember, locked away in solitary confinement.
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For most of the time, anyways. I had been alone. My neck chained to the floor. I don’t remember who had taught me to use the toilet, only that I was expected to piss and shit in the same bucket. A bucket which had been changed out with sometimes distressing irregularity.
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Yes, I had been alone… Except for when he had come to--
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There were still the unbidden, disconcerting moments when, seemingly out of nowhere, something I was thinking or feeling or experiencing or witnessing would trigger my frayed memories about those other times without any warning. And, I would remember things…
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Those were the times when I most liked to extend my spirit.
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To leave my body behind, nothing more than a homeport to touch down on whenever it fitted my choosing. The body stored more than deep emotions inside it, after all, that’s where the impression of many foundational and intrinsic memories was, decaying throughout time, but, still, kept.
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Whole. Subconscious. Murky. Amorphous.
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There were a million and one ways to begin to understand it—But, there were only a few viable ways to actually escape it.
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Aside from the obvious choice of suicide (which I’ve always told myself is just something I’m not ready to fully understand until it’s time), there was, for me at least: drugs, remote viewing, running endless miles on the 400 meter dirt path outside that served as a track; the old fables and fairytails I always had my friend Tooth read aloud for me and the Boys before lights out, masturbating, thinking of song lyrics that I would whisper sometimes at night into the Nail’s ear as he lay in bed beside me, and...
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And, that was just the beginning of my diverse array of interests.
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Call it what one may, but leaving my body and casting out my spirit in a sort of transparent essence of my energy--and will--and something else I don’t quite understand yet, but it is all that I know to do when I’m under attack…
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This understanding of the balance between the corporeal and the ethereal was simply a part of my own intuitive knowledge that I had been born with. Part of being half-human, and half-fae, I guess.
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Or rather, part of growing up in a mental institution…
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Realizing that my thoughts had begun to drift, I refocused my spirit’s inner eye and sent it rolling madly this way and that before it landed somewhere near the front of the old, imposing stone building that my physical body was imprisoned in.
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And, I floated through the night sky, for a fragile instant, my consciousness whirling up above the towering, layered boughs of the old, forbidding Oregon forest surrounding the weathered, old castle. For a span of seconds that could have been an eternity, they were so blissful, my consciousness melted like butter against the weeping bellies of the bruised looking storm clouds.
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Lightning split the foray of dissipation of self in two. Jagged blue glowing hot like the creeping tendrils of poison in the veins; lighting up the dark sky. I floated down in my mind’s inner eye, surveying the front of the gothic structure. Taking in its familiar flying buttresses and spirelike pinnacles, its rose-tinted stained glass windows, and its forbidding cobble-stone courtyards with small stands of red alder trees on either side of the front walk.
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There was a fine swirl of mistral, hanging about the chipped, greying columns of stone that made up the entrance to the old institution. It was from there that I first heard the wary, tentative, and distinctly feminine footsteps of a stranger enter the building from outside.
Someone new and unfamiliar.
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The faint shadow that was cast by the secret extension of my spirit gasped at the sudden and fleeting scent of pale-throated lilies that hung suspended in the gloom beyond Shepphard Reft’s main entrance.
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Like a wake in the ocean, the floral scent of the foreign woman who’d just passed unspooled in suspended waves through the chilly, predawn air. I was instantly entangled by the purity of her scent. But, there was another recognizable note too.
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Cigarette smoke. She smelled like white lilies and cigarettes.
My resting body, bundled up in my tiny cot, locked inside the boy’s dormitories, deep inside Ward I, twitched. My dark brow furrowed slightly. Scrunched its nose. Mumbled something inarticulately.
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…
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