It's been a long time since I haven't heard him. The baby crying in the top corner of my room. Right next to the TV. It's howling gets louder than the blast of the AC. I can hear there is a problem. It's not hungry, cold or hot. It's in pain. It's little lungs are making that morbid sound. It coughs like it's drawning in it own saliva.
But something is new. There is something in my bed. On me. A dark shape. I don't understand it's form. I breathe, as usual. Try to concentrate all my will on one tiny movement that will break the paralysis.
A sharp pain in my pelvis aria. My back is burning. No. No. No. « No, no, no, no ». For what seems to be hours, my stomach contracts. I manage to scream. But in my ears it's just a whisper. Then a sound comes. A rocking chair. A woman lays on it, spread. Her chin down on her bust. And she laughs. « The dead room, » she says. Then I feel the need. The need to push.
Something grabs my ankles. It's cold and strong. A sharp pain again. My lower body is torn. A man in a green uniform takes a bloody, gray and purple thing from between my leg. He throws it in the garbage bin. « Unworthy, » he says.
« Pills! » The nurse is shaking me up. I wake up crying.
« You'll take a twenty tonight it seems, » he tells me with kindness.
« I'm bleeding, » I manage to say. And it's true. When I push away my blanket, there's a pool of sticky smelly dark blood.
« Oh my. Are you on your period? »
« Shouldn't be. And it sure shouldn't be that much blood, » I answer sharply.
« Some of your meds are blood thinners. Side effects and all. »
I sigh in relief. For a few seconds, I thought I had just given birth to a ghost baby. I shit you not, I really did. I take my twenty instead of ten milligrams of valium. It's just my fucking periods that arrived too soon. And too bloody.
After helping Mohammed changing my sheets and blanket, I finally go to my safe space. The walls are still too crowded. The floor is sticky under my flip flops. The old wheelchair is here, there are only two dirty normal chair left. And a half melted plastic bowl as an ashtray. Perfection. But there's one detail that destroys everything. There's someone else inside the smoking room.
Marge. She's called Margot but says she prefers Marge. She keeps eating with me and wanting to talk to me all day long. Sometimes, I give in. It's one of these times.
I inhale some tobacco. It helps. Makes your head even lighter than the medication alone. Dizzy, I see Marge and her wheelchair, her gray hair thinning but always impeccably curled. In her eternal nightgown, she looks at me.
« It's giving you a hard time, isn't it? » she asks. Her voice should be softer but decades of smoking gitanes has had its effect on it.
« Shouldn't you be sleeping, Marge? »
« Of course I should. I should be peacefully sleeping. »
« So why aren't ya? »
« I heard you screaming. »
I tense. It's hard being rude with an old lady when your crazy woke her up.
« Yeah. My sleep paralysis is giving me a hard time. Plus my period, » I admit shamefully.
She clicks her tongue as if I had said something utterly stupid.
« Not that. I was talking about the Dead Room. »
BINABASA MO ANG
The smoking room
HorrorIn a french psychiatric hospital, a woman can't sleep. Are the shapes and voice as unreal as the doctors keep telling her? Anyways, every night, she goes to the smoking room, waiting for the sun to rise.
