13 Years Earlier At Cliffside Asylum: Group Therapy

"Doctor, he's eating the glue stick again." Nurse Manchas just shook his head. He couldn't image that they were that tasty.

"Which one? Ed, Edd, or Eddie?" Hugo gestured to the trio of goats that occupied one of the rear tables currently working on collages. They had chosen their nicknames, based on some obscure animated children's show he's never seen, but since the names were harmless he saw no reason to restrict the practice. Manchas pointed to the middle one. Hugo just nodded.

"While they are goats and will quite happily eat almost anything, I will point those glue sticks are non-toxic. If he insists on eating it, he may. Just remind him that if they run out of glue sticks, they will have to switch to rubber cement to finish out their projects, and that it smells and tastes far worse than the glue sticks." Hugo instructed him.

"You don't want me to take it away from him? That can't be good for him." Manchas tried to press his case.

"It might not be, but since we are talking about a species that happily considers poison ivy to be a spicy delicacy, I don't think we have to get to worked up about it. Ranato, please keep in mind that I want to avoid taking choices away from the patients, as a matter of course, if I can avoid it during this art therapy program. Most of this is geared towards preparing them to move out of a rather regimented program like Cliffside here, to a more open and less restrictive psych ward program somewhere else. And part of that process is allowing them to make informed decisions on their own and to learn about the consequences that those decisions bring about, rather than having the decision be made forcefully for them. Even if that decision is nothing more than what glue they want to eat today." Hugo smiled up at the larger predator. "In addition to that I don't imagine you want to spend the rest of the session in a wrestling match with three ornery goats. You get one fired up, and the other two will act up just to be supportive of their fellow goat."

Manchas shook his head in agreement, and wandered back to try a gentler approach to goat artistic management.

Hugo turned back to the group he was working with. This group of six include most of the smaller mammals in his class: a porcupine, two squirrels, a rabbit, and two rats. The objective of this session was to draw somebody or something they loved, and see how they reacted emotionally to that process. He knew that most of these teenage mammals had varying levels of attachment and empathy disorders, and so they mostly drew things they loved. Scribbling with chalks and crayons, they mashed out pictures of food, some bad anatomically incorrect porn, and even some abstract images where he had trouble discerning any pattern or meaning in the lines.

All but one of them them, though. Judy was doing something different. Instead, she was drawing little vignettes of rabbits in a muted pastel style, using bright pencil colors on black construction paper. Images of family, relatives, and friends adorned the pages, all crowding out to the margins. It was quite impressive, really. In the past three months, she had taken to drawing like a otter takes to swimming, and her skills had grown in leaps and bounds. What a rabbit metaphor, he thought. But so true.

Judy had just needed an outlet for her energies, and this particular one seemed to be working wonders with her, he decided. After that first escape attempt that he thwarted three months ago, she had tried one last time to escape the group sessions, but she never even made it past Nurse Manchas that time. Ranato had been carrying a large cardboard box, and at first she must have thought he was struggling under a heavy load and not paying attention to the rest of the students. She then tried a repeat performance of the last time she had escaped group therapy, only to discover all to late that Ranato was not as distracted as he seemed. As she skittered past him, she discovered to her horror that the box he was carrying was quite empty as it came crashing down over her head. It had been a lesson that Hugo and the nurse had devised as a means of distracting her at that session, and getting her to second guess just what a box like that in somebody else's arms might meant the next time she considered that escape strategy. It would hopefully help with any future injuries to orderlies and their pride due to overly bored and energetic bunnies.

But the box hadn't been devised by them as a punishment; instead Hugo turned that box into the class lesson for the day. Hugo pushed her box to the middle of the room, opened the top, and handed her some crayons. He told her to decorate her 'fort' while the other students assembled their boxes to create their forts with the help of Nurse Manchas.

The patients, or as he like to consider them 'the students', spent the next hour coloring and decorating their boxes. When they were finished up he directed them to go visit and explore each other's spaces and to make compliments on their fellow artist's artwork. It was probably the first time that any of them had been able to define a space as 'theirs', and in turn be social with others in their social group inside those spaces since they been sent to Cliffside.

After a few minutes of pouting, she started scribble a bit randomly. But this soon gave way to a serious effort to decorate her box like it was a rabbit's underground burrow, using the brown color of the cardboard box to her advantage. She drew in roots and rocks, worms and insects, and more dark passages leading off into the depths of her imagination. But it was the detail and quality of the insects that she drew that gained the most admiration from the rest of her of fellow teenagers in the class, as they clambered about each other to explore what other bugs hid in her 'burrow'.

She had this grin splashed across her face as they crawled through the 'burrow', pointing out this worm or that spider. She basked in their attentions and their appreciation of her creation. That was the last time she tried to escape his class.

Or even trying to escape from Cliffside, for that matter. With that change in Judy, and the decreases in similar episodes from her fellow students as well, he had managed to gain some concessions from Swineton for their good behavior and grant him some considerable leeway in what he could do with his students during their class time. So when it came time for the students to clean up the room for the day, and after Ranato had herded them off to lunch, he stayed behind to make a phone call, and arrange a special surprise for his star pupil at tomorrow's group art session.

"Paging Doctor Weidii, Paging Doctor Weidii. Please come to the front security desk. Doctor Weidii to the front security desk. Your party is waiting."

Hugo looked up from his desk in front of the room as the speaker finish crackling out it's page. They are right on time, he knew. He turned to Nurse Manchas, "Ranato, could you watch the room? I've got to go to the front desk."

"Certainly, Doctor," the nurse replied.

Hugo jogged down the elevator at the end of the hall. He was going to enjoy this meeting.

A few minutes later, the elevator door chimed as it came back up to the floor. Hugo escorted his guest out and down the hall to the classroom door. Knocking on it, he waited until Ranato buzzed them in, and then opened the steel door for them to enter. He turned to his guest and asked, "Wait here a moment, please. I'll let her know you are here." He walked over to Judy.

"What are you drawing now?" he asked her, bending over the table to look at her work.

"Foxes eating blueberries. This one is Gideon, and the other one is Slick! Gideon's a bit of a bully, but he's really good with making pies. He'll make a great pastry chef one day. And you better watch out for the other one, cause Slick is sly and shifty. And the best friend a bunny could ever have..." She exclaimed, holding the picture up to him.

"I can see that, most definitely. I will have to put this in the portfolio with all the others. But in the mean time, you have a visitor." He stood back up.

"Vistor? I don't get visitors. Swineton revoked my visitor privileges after too many escape attempts." She scowled at the table.

"You did. But you've made such progress in the past couple of months that I convinced her to return some of them back." He stood back up, and turned back to the door. Judy slide her chair back from the table, and hopped down out of the seat to look back with him. As soon as she saw who was at the door, her jaw dropped open, and she sprinted over, gleefully yelling out.

"MOM!"