“Pulling Salt From Water” Kristina Morgan – First Place He entered at night. The only protection I had were the monsters living in my closet. I begged them to pull him off me. Quietly. Softly. So much so, that he couldn’t hear me. My words were hot breaths against his neck. I left my body to float on the ceiling. This man was not my father. He was an impostor who simply smelled and looked like my father. Old Spice was his cologne of choice. This man was not the man who seated me between his bicycle handle bars and rode me around the neighborhood. He was not the man who played hide and go seek with me and my two sisters. Not the man who taught me how to throw a football or quizzed me on math problems. He did not buy me a hamster for my twelfth birthday; my father did that. The monsters never came to my rescue. Instead, they tormented me on sleepless nights, telling me they were going to shave my head while I slept or eat my fingers down to the second knuckle. The monsters had been in my closet for years. I knew they were there, these lecherous old men standing three feet tall with no hair and mottled gray features. They wore dinner jackets and stank of feces. They never blinked. In the past, my brain caused me to lose words; I was locked in psychosis with no way to communicate. In the future, I will be hospitalized. There is a fear that I will not be able to get my proper medications. There is a fear that depressed and paranoid me will not be able to leave my house. I have a fear of losing words. I was sitting in a psychiatrist’s office midday wondering why he had fake plants. He was a bald man with a Salvador Dali mustache, the ends of which beautifully stood up. This was my first time seeing Dr. Denton. The file on his desk contained information about me. It was filled with an accumulation of hospital staff reports and my parents’ observations. Dr. Denton told me this as he randomly flipped through it. Dr. Denton was the one who would deliver the news. My diagnosis. He cleared his throat and in one breath said, “I have reviewed your file and believe you to have schizophrenia.”
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Vortex
Creative Non-Fiction
