I want to ask why he’s glad I came but in the past he’s tried to make me forgive my brother and see him to help with his healing. HIS healing! What about my woman who lost her world for nothing more than an obsession?
“Fair enough. Let’s get to why I asked you here,” Dr. Leighton says and I nod, waiting for him to carry on which he does after a sip of his water. “Your brother went through a major breakthrough.”
I raise an unconvinced eyebrow but don’t bite. Men like him want you to ask questions. They want you talking so they can figure you out. Well, fuck him. He asked me here so he can do the talking. There’s too much in our past I can never get over. I have the pain of my brother’s knife burning in my chest every time someone mentions his name. I gave him everything and loved him more than anything and he played with me since he was a child. There is no breakthrough he could have that will change the pain I endured by his hand.
“We wrote you a year ago asking you to attend one of his sessions and you refused,” he continues. I hold my hand up to stop him.
“I will never attend one of his meetings. This is a waste of your and my time.” I stand but as I get to the door handle his words freeze me in place.
“Ryan is being released, Mr. Braxton.”
My head clouds and sound ceases to exist. My heart stampedes in my chest; my palms glisten with sweat. Thump, Thump, Thump.
“Drink.” The receptionist holds a cup up to my lips, mouthing, “Drink.”
The room and sound wash back into focus and I snatch the handle and drink all the water from the cup, swiping my arm across my mouth to collect the spill from my chin.
“What the fuck did you just say?” I ask, turning to face Dr. Leighton.
“I know this may come as a shock to you but this has been a long time coming.”
“A long time coming? Criminals who commit the kind of crimes he committed usually never see the outside of a prison.” I glare in disbelief.
Dry Leighton sits back at his desk; he must have risen when I had a freak out and went to get the receptionist. He nods to the woman still standing beside me, and she quickly leaves.
“Your brother wasn’t sentenced to prison though, Mr. Braxton. He was diagnosed with an illness that has since been treated and cured to such a degree that he no longer poses a risk to the public or himself.”
I stalk over to his desk and lean over it, making him straighten his shoulders. “There is no cure for him.”
“That is where we disagree, and if you had taken the opportunity to attend some of his sessions you could have seen the progression he made to get him to where he is today.”
Dr. Leighton was the insane one. How could he let someone who butchered people for fun free into the world, out to pick new victims or come looking for the ones he didn’t succeed in killing before?
“Your brother poses no risk to the public, and with guidance we believe he can live a normal life.”
This has to be a dream.
“I assure you this is no dream, Mr. Braxton.”
I must have spoken my thoughts aloud. I feel like I’ve entered the twilight zone. This can’t be happening.
“This shouldn’t be looked upon as a bad thing. So many people never get well and end up here for their entire life. Your brother is young enough to put all this behind him and maybe have a real chance at a life outside these walls.”
I can’t hear anymore from him; he’s as delusional as the patients he thinks he heals.
“When will he be released?” I ask.
“Within the next twelve weeks.”
3 months later
IT’S AN ODD FEELING. INHALING the fresh clean air after being cooped up inside white rooms and halls that smell of disinfectant for so long. We were allowed outside for a time but it’s not the same when it’s fifteen feet of greenery and concrete walls keeping you hostage as far as the eye can see. Now I’m inhaling clean air as a free man, feeling it flow through my system, keeping me alive. We are such fragile creatures, dependent on such basic necessities. It irritates me that I’m as weak as any other human when it comes to dependency on basic needs air, food and water.
Looking around the greenery I feel a sense of freedom I usually only feel when I’m under the slice of a whip or ending a life. The trees sway in sync with each other, dancing to the command of the wind. It’s like looking at a hoard of concert goers all moving to music like sheep, all mimicking each other while worshipping a being with the same capabilities as them, yet they see them as kings because they play an instrument or screech into a microphone.
I’m a real king. I didn’t live my life like cattle or conform to what society tells me is right. I broke rules, manipulated with calculated plans certain people’s whole perspective of their lives, and I did so with ease. I was born with a superior genetic predisposition and all the naysayers are just ants, jealous of what they can’t understand. The Doctors letting me leave this place are so fucking pathetic and self-absorbed that they would rather think they cured me than believe I could be this lucent in my manipulation of everyone including them. Medicine, therapy, imprisonment; none of it can cure me, but they refused to believe it and so I played them. I let them believe I can reform. Urgh. I roll my neck over my shoulders, my disdain for others is already beginning to simmer and I haven’t even got outside the gate yet.
My senses are heightened, taking in everything around me. The rustling of the trees, the sweeping of the grass blowing outward in the direction I’ll exit from. All is trying to flee, the wind whispering around me, warning everything of my presence. It’s as if the world knows night has fallen with no stars to lighten the sky, only darkness remains leaking hell back upon them.
My eyes throw out the ice in my heart, freezing the air around me before melting and dispersing into the atmosphere, the ambience of the world around me altering to warn of my presence.
I’m back.
Slipping into my fa?ade and replacing the cold demeanor that is me with the one I used to get me out of here, I smile at the people watching me from their posts. I’m free now, free from the binds of an insanity diagnosis. I’m free to live a life after taking so many. It still amazes me that they’re opening the gates for me. They really do pretend to themselves that they fix you and then they release you back into the world, back amongst your prey.
“Humanize people, Ryan,” my Doctor told me.
That was the problem; I did. Humans are weak, me included. We are slaves to our needs, our cravings, our hunger . . . and I’m so fucking hungry.
EIGHTEEN YEARS INSIDE A PRISON for the mind, and then free. People serve more for lesser crimes but I was sick, broken. Ha! I’m not sick and I’m not broken. I’m desolate, born empty lacking a soul. You can’t fix what was never broken. They believe they have though, with help from me, so now I will play that role.