"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."
― Edgar Allan Poe
We All Go A Little Mad Sometimes
By Leilah Ali
The institution was a flurry of activity, all of which went on outside the steel door. To her it was always The Door, because it separated her, from them. She sat on the edge of her hard pallet of a bed, staring at The Door for hours on end. A little slot hole near the bottom opened up at intervals of six hours, three times a day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner. Sleep, stare, eat, sleep, stare, eat. Listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen.
Monotony at its finest.
You hear many things outside the door. Screams that echo throughout hallways, derisive laughter, even singing at times—horrible, terrible, tragic songs. Songs about nothing, sometimes they are just muttered chants of random words. One that stuck with her was the inmate to her right just stating "walls, walls, walls", over and over again for hours on end. She looked to the simple gray walls of her cell. If you stared long enough the walls began to blur and dance in your vision. Walls, indeed.
The walls are thin here. Acoustics too good. Perhaps they did this on purpose, so that the insanity seeped in slower, letting more darkness in every time a person screamed.
The worst sound, Felicity thought, was that of footsteps coming down the hall outside her room. Footsteps were the worst; they sent jolts of fear through her heart, slivers of hope into her brain, and apprehension tingling through her fingertips. Footsteps were her enemy. They reminded her of things past.
"Now be a good girl Felicity..." The words whispered to her in her mind, wrapping a cold hand around her heart and squeezing squeezing until it hurt. Felicity brushed away the thoughts. "No no no no no not now not now."
So when she heard the tell-tale taps of someone's shoes on the floor, she turned away from The Door, trying to block out that fear and hope and apprehension. Fear of the silent jeers from the nurses, the silent whispers of murderer, she's a murderer. Hope for release, always hoping for an out. And apprehension, because who are they coming for next?
Felicity counted the steps the person took.
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
The steps stopped outside The Door.
The click of a lock opening, then, The Door opened with a screech.
He stepped inside carefully, leather briefcase the first thing through the door. He was immaculately dressed in a gray suit, face cleaned of emotion, an expression he had perfected over the years. He let his blue eyes rove over the patient before him, observing the way she sat (facing away from him) and the strait jacket that bound her arms behind her back.
Oliver waited for the nurse to bring him a chair, and when she did, he immediately sat down, opening his briefcase and taking out the yellow-paged notebook and his favorite pen.
He wrote "Felicity Smoak 9/2/2014" at the top of the page and then put his pen down. Oliver waited. He always had his patients make the first move, to see how they would react to his presence. So Oliver waited.
Being a renowned psychiatrist had its perks sure—personal driver, nice pay, etc—but lately he had been receiving cases of patients who weren't the even least bit interesting. They were movie stars who thought they were bipolar, or general and easily diagnosed cases of schizophrenia; Oliver was the miracle worker, the man that didn't fail, he had famously diagnosed several patients before who everyone else had deemed losses. His methods worked.
So when he had read that a 23 year old girl with no history of mental illness, nor any previous clues to an aggressive attitude/demeanor suddenly up and kills a grown man for no apparent reason, Oliver Queen was definitely intrigued. He had even made Diggle come here immediately, a detour from their original destination.
The last doctor who had seen her had written "highly volatile, extremely confrontational. Nurses report her apparently hallucinating at random, screams in her sleep. Tried to cut herself on several occasions, now permanently bound with strait jacket. No sign of cause for erratic behavior".
She still wasn't turning around. Perhaps a stimulus will elicit a response. He began to tap his pen on the notepad.
tap
tap
tap
tap
tap
tap tap
tap
tap
tap
Bingo. A snarl erupted from the petite female as she whirled around to face him, teeth bared in a feral expression. "Stop," she hisses. Oliver cannot help that his mouth has fallen open.
She's beautiful, terrifyingly beautiful, and it is completely unexpected. Her skin is pale, sickly looking from lack of sunlight, but her eyes are bright and her skin smooth and there's a liveliness in her pink lips. He is thrown off guard.
But only for a moment. He gathers his thoughts, and writes down her first response to him, "Snarled 'stop'", and then he looks at her.
"Hello, Felicity, my name's Oliver Queen. I am your new psychiatrist. I'm just here to introduce myself, ask some questions… get to know you better." He flashes his million dollar grin, the smile that let patients know that they could trust him. It does nothing to her. Her face closes off, a blank expression in place as she carefully studies him—studies him up and down.
She's calculating.
It seemed like she was gauging him, his strength, his intelligence, all in one look.
Oliver cleared his throat. "Okay." He pulls a voice recorder from his pocket and presses play. "Oliver Queen, September second, two-thousand and fourteen. Case of Felicity Meghan Smoak. Miss Smoak, how old are you? I'm just going to ask some simple questions at first."
Felicity looked ready to rip someone's head off. "If you already know," she asked, "why ask?"
"Just want to get to know you."
She laughs, a manic lilting laugh that echoes around the small room. She keeps laughing like he had said the funniest thing in the world.
"What's so funny Felicity?"
She stops laughing abruptly turning her eyes directly on him. "Because." She cracks her neck. "I'm not a fun person to know."
"Well, perhaps I'd like to know."
She scoots closer on her cot towards him, so he could smell the antiseptic and soap smell from her.
"27, Oliver Queen."
He writes it down, even thought he already knew her age. Felicity had begun to rock, back and forth in her chair, whistling softly some jaunty tune.
"Why are you here, Felicity?" he asks next.
She goes still. Whispers, "Get this off me first."
"What?" Oliver asks, her voice too low for him to hear.
"Get. This. Off. OF. ME!" She screams, lunging herself at him, the strait jacket causing her to fall to the ground. Felicity began to writhe, crying and screaming on the floor. "Get it off get it off get it off GET IT OFF GET IT OFF."
Two stern-looking nurses come in, administering a shot in her arm. She calms down immediately. No worries, he had gotten enough from her for now."
Session over apparently.
Oliver stood and walked out of the room, going up to the head of staff. "I'll be back next week. Make sure the strait jacket is off."
The head of staff just nodded.
Oliver exited the institution, pondering what he had just witnessed. He couldn't get the image of her eyes out of his head. They looked so innocent, naive, pure. How could this one girl have murdered another human being out of nowhere? What was the cause? Did she have a reason? She had never told the police anything, and other psychiatrists had gotten nothing out of her.
She was a challenge, a strange and difficult mystery, one that Oliver Queen intended to solve.