The smallest creak outside of the thick door—the loudest laughter before the heavy steel was pushed open and harsh light stung her eyes, every voice, every laugh, every snicker and every sigh.
She heard everything.
They'd called it a break. A psychotic break. The doctors explained over and over again to her mother—eyes blown wide in disbelief, hot tears hitting the shiny linoleum that her daughter, for lack of a better word, lost her mind.
'He did this to her, she wouldn't—she wouldn't just do this!' her mother argued, having to watch as her only living child was interrogated by doctors, by police, by psychiatrists until the silence was unbearable. Until her eyes were dead and nothing lingered beneath them aside from the emptiness that lived with her now. 'Let me try. I'll talk to her—she's my daughter!' Iris insisted—begged, pleaded.
It took an hour of deliberation before she sat in front of her, four concrete walls and two men with steel trained on her, doctors and nurses with syringes ready, just so she could sit in front of her daughter. Her own flesh and blood, who resembled a corpse. There was no life in her once joyous brown eyes, the mirth they held long gone.
"M-Mia...Amelia," she heard from across the table, a stark difference in the dull droning she'd heard for the last...days? Months?
It didn't matter.
"Mama," she croaked, a smile gracing her dry lips, cracking the skin, before her brain caught up to it and it dropped.
"Baby. Baby tell me—they're lying. Right? You didn't...you couldn't have? Amelia please, just tell me you didn't—" Iris struggled to find the right words to say, the right question to ask. She didn't want to believe it. It couldn't be that she'd actually—
"I'm sorry, mama," Amelia whispered. "I'm sorry,"
"Mia," she said simply. "Don't,"
Before Iris could plead with her daughter once more, she made a move to lunge across the table, and in an instant she was face down on the steel, a needle in her neck as her mother screamed, cried, she begged them to stop—'It was an accident! She'd never hurt me I'm her mother!'
It didn't matter.
Days—no weeks...months?
Time passed, Amelia lay, face up in her hard bed, watching the ceiling as the light struggling to pass underneath the minuscule crevice of her door shifted, and she'd heard it again.
"She won't eat, she won't talk, what are we supposed to say?" A nurse whined. "It's hard when they don't speak,"
"Well until they can crack her this is all we can do. They don't even know how to diagnose, who knows if this shit is actually helping," the other murmured, Mia could picture her indifference.
"Ms. Clarke—we're here for your 2nd dosage," was the last thing she tuned into before the needle, and before the two stark figures clad in white retreated.
"You really think she killed him because he was abusing her? The news is trying to paint him as such a saint," one—Hailee, if Mia remembered correctly, shook her head.
"There's no other reason a woman would just...snap like that," the other...Kate? No, no. Kayla, agreed. "That's all I can describe it as. She snapped,"
They called it a break.
All the years leading up to it. The bruises, the hiding, the crying. Locking herself in her room for days at a time, forced to starve, kept from a bathroom and a shower for God knows how long, the blood—God the blood made her sick. Her burnt umber skin going purple, the crack of her ankle, then her wrist, then her arm. Her leg.
His neck.
Suddenly, the smell didn't make her gag. The thick feeling of it oozing down her fingers didn't send chills down her back and make her woozy. All of a sudden, the cracks didn't make hairs on the back of her neck stand up and the screams weren't as deafening as they used to be.
A knife wasn't as heavy as it once felt, and at last the pain was gone. The pain did belong to her anymore as limbs didn't belong to him. He owned this pain now, he'd carry it to hell where she was sure they'd meet again.
It didn't matter.
He didn't matter. The pain she was burdened with did not matter. The sentence she carried on her back was her cross to bear, and she'd bear it proudly, because what didn't matter to her was his now. Till the day it finally caught up to her it wouldn't matter. Until she was gone.
Nothing mattered anymore.
As her eyes closed, the news that played in the bolted down television that nobody ever bothered to change the channel of lulled her to sleep once again.
"The jury is still out in the case of Amelia Clarke—twenty four. In case you're just joining us for day thirty three of this disturbing trial, the defense is pleading with the jury to bring justice to a man they claim is innocent."
"Amelia Clarke—twenty four was charged with murder in the first degree of her late husband, Kenneth Clarke. The details of this case are gruesome—viewer discretion is advised,"
"We have police footage of Clarke being found in her home, lying on her side in a pool of blood once thought to be her own as she clutches a knife to her chest, there are no words to explain what officers ans investigators find next,"
"'My daughter was—is a good person. That man stole her from us, she was being hurt there. I know it—I can feel it,' Iris Jackson testifies in the name of Clarke. 'She was supposed to have a baby, did they mention that?! Did they mention that he killed her baby? She told me. She said it was an accident when he pushed her down—he didn't mean it'"
"Disturbing accounts from family, neighbors, and pages from a journal found crammed in bags of Kenneth's remains, dismembered limbs found in various places in the shared home tell the story of a woman battered, abused and left to die. Was this a murder or was it an escape? More on the chilling case of Amelia Clarke tonight on Dateline,"
"In the case of the state of New York vs. Amelia Clarke, we the jury find Ms. Clarke guilty but mentally ill"
"I hereby sentence Amelia Clarke to serve her sentence at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center—"
After a year, she'd stopped listening.
It didn't matter.
Hoppla! Dieses Bild entspricht nicht unseren inhaltlichen Richtlinien. Um mit dem Veröffentlichen fortfahren zu können, entferne es bitte oder lade ein anderes Bild hoch.
hi friends (:
i am here. i missed you all, everyone that kept commenting and messaging me and posting on my wall i adore you. UGH I LOVE YOU.
this is my attempt at getting my skills back to where they were! if you missed the announcement these will be shorts! no less than a chapter no more than five.
i think this will be not only good for me but fun for us! yall know i love talking to y'all and this presents a wonderful opportunity to not only get some good writing in but accept suggestions and a challenge or two from my lovely readers (whom i love)
i am so happy to post this and i hope yall like it even though its so different from what i usually write but then again, that's the point 🥰
