Tag Archives: insane asylum

Straightjacket to Hell

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I peeked out the front window of our house then bolted out the back door. The second man in white grabbed me. I screamed and struggled as he secured the straight jacket around me. Resigned there was no way to escape, I watched Lucinda hand the signed papers to the driver.

“Let’s see here,” he said, reading. “Promiscuous, belligerent, violent tendencies. Anything else?”

Surely, there were other sections on the paper Lucinda wanted to circle to drive me deeper into a hole. My mother only shook her head. “Isn’t that enough?” she asked, her face smug and determined.

Just before being dumped in the back of the wagon, I caught my mother’s Triumphant grin. She spat the words, “For the lips of a forbidden woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil, but, in the end, she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death. Proverbs 5:3.”

I hated her.

The driver snapped the reins toward San Antonio.

“I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not crazy.”

Pleading did no good.

“Not for us to decide,” they laughed.

“You’re a pretty thing, though,” the driver said.

Excerpt from The Last Bordello

Daily word prompt: Triumph

From sex to an Insane Asylum

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Earlier, I had been sitting at the piano, thinking of my deceitful yet productive visit with Mr. O’Connell, when Sadie shared her story in the kitchen. Horrifying as it was, curiosity forced me to stay. I heard every word. When she finished and said good-bye to Sheriff Tobin, I crept upstairs to our shared room. I opened my novel but the words blurred without meaning. (Meaningless)

I awoke to find the room I shared with her different, salty and sticky. No wonder Miss Fannie worked so hard to keep Sadie out of jail. It wasn’t just about her guilt or innocence but about Sadie’s demise if she were locked up again, secluded from the rest of the world. I wondered if the man who had raped her knew where she now lived.

I tried to imagine a girl of only fifteen placed in an asylum with no one to defend her, comfort her, or give her hope. Yes, she had been too young to have sex with Timothy, but that didn’t make her crazy enough to be thrown into a madhouse.

Excerpt from The Last Bordello

 

 

Entering the Insane Asylum

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The Pungent smell of an insane asylum.

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From The Last Bordello (voice of Sadie):

My limbs shook. My knees buckled. The men in white held fast to my elbows and pulled me toward a thick wooden door. When opened, the fragrant air vanished and was replaced with the malodorous smells of urine, vomit, rubbing alcohol, and something else I couldn’t quite place.

I saw only a few women, one being dragged in another direction. “Not surgery, not surgery!” the woman wailed.

The driver unlocked another door and pushed me into a small room that contained a stained mattress on the floor and a bucket for excrement. He told me to sleep well. I heard him laughing down the hall long after they had locked the door.

I thought it was a cruel joke, that my mother had followed behind and would now take me home with an “I told you so.” Before the tears had a chance to come, someone unlocked the door again.