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Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake.
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Present day
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LOST. IT’S NOT A DIFFICULT thing to be. It’s easy. A person who is your best friend one day can be a stranger the next; another wandering soul doing their best to pull free of a rush hour bottle neck. Don’t believe me? Hit the highway on a Friday afternoon in summertime. You can plug those coordinates right in but no matter how precise your GPS is, there’s no accounting for construction. The best you can hope for is a flash thunderstorm to make the half-cocked foreman with the bad back call it quits for the day.
Pass the exit signs to the state your high school sweetheart moved to and wave hello and goodbye. Trudge ten miles an hour by the prison that housed the inmate you faithfully wrote letters to for three years only to find out, on release day, you were simply a means to a well-stocked canteen.
Lost is something that comes in every form and too many ways to list. It’s not always the same as looking up and realizing you’ve gone five exits too far and there’s no U-Turn possible. Lost is also that moment when you don’t recognize who you are anymore—when you wake up at 6:32 a.m. to rub the sleep from your eyes and realize it wasn’t a nightmare. Your soulmate is gone. And you probably helped kill him.
Lost is the feeling in the pit of your stomach when you creep up to the mirror and, through a half-squint, face a fear you’ve worked tirelessly to outrun: That maybe there is no god at all. It’s the moment you realize you’ve given in to satiate an appetite you swore you had under control. Lost is running, glasses off and hair flying loose, down the hall to your empty marriage bed and praying for a final time that it’s just not possible.
***
“NAME PLEASE.” A FAT-faced woman with perfect teeth and a forced smile, who smells of peaches and mango, stares through an opening in thin glass out at me. She appears to be oblivious to the scratches—not only on the glass but all over my face. By the key-card badge that hangs from a lanyard around her neck, I can see hers is Reba.
“Regina A. Swansen. Gina for short,” I say in a mumble I wish wasn’t so flat. I smile at her, even though I’d rather be anywhere but here—the freak at the nuthouse in paper slippers waiting in a line for another cup of meds all for trying to save my husband and believing it my maker’s will. Why doesn’t she know my name by now? We’ve only been through this a million times. Must be protocol. Everything is protocol. I hate protocol. The other lady knows my name and doesn’t even ask.
Reba clicks her computer mouse three times. I can’t help staring at her through the crack. Her too-long purple nails make a clicking sound that makes me want to turn around and punch the life out of the girl behind me who can’t stop waving her hands in the air. I need fucking out of here.
I bring my own nails to my mouth, grateful for the blood still under them from last night’s picking spree on my thigh. It will ultimately get my privileges taken away. But right now, I don’t care. It’s not like I eat the shit they serve here anyway when I can help it. No one cares that I’m a vegan. They only know that now that I’ve had a taste of it, I can’t stop craving human flesh. Still, even with Rancher gone, I’m convinced there is some source for healing in it.
“Date of birth.”
I suck on my index finger, mumbling out the digits.
“Ah! A Virgo. Me too.” This time, though she’s told me this useless information before, her smile at least seems sincere.
I nod, deciding for the tenth time against telling her it’s only a guesstimate for legal purposes. There’s no reason to get into another family history with her. My history, the origin of my birth, my crazy story.
Crazy. Probably. Hell, at this point, I hope so. It’d be easier that way. If I could think of myself as insane like the rest of them, I might to able to live this way forever and forget all about the sanctuary and the animals, who will now be sent to slaughter because of me. Please, forgive me.
The woman behind me—Mollie—smacks me in the back of the head with one of her flailing arms. It takes everything in me not to throw her on the ground, rip the fucking thing off, and start gnawing on it just to show her what’s what. Some vegan I’ve become. If the people at P.E.A.C.E. knew, they’d drop that membership too. I’m fucking hungry and the fact that I’ve been standing in line for over twenty minutes for a med that won’t even touch me is helping absolutely nothing. Determined to at least make her calm down, I spin around.
“Cut. It. Out.” I spit the words out my teeth in short bursts.
“Oh, chill out! It was an accident. Why you always gotta be so mean?”
“Put. Your. Hands. Down.”
She sticks her tongue out at me and twirls in full circles, hands out perpendicular from her body, smacking the girl behind her in the chest.
“Ouch! Knock it off, freak!” the black-eyed teenage cutter behind her barks.
“Mollie. That’s enough. Do you need to go back to your room for a time-out?” Solomon, one of the only security guards I can tolerate in this place because he reminds me of Jacob, rushes over to the forty-something who mostly acts like she’s no older than three.
She crosses her hands over her chest in defiance. “Fine. I’ll be good. She’s mean!”
“Hands to yourself, please,” Solomon scolds her.
“I said I would!”
I have no idea what’s wrong with her. Frankly, I don’t care. It’s hard enough living in a place where the shrinks don’t know what to do with you, and you never even hear from the public defender the court’s assigned you. And it’s not like I can leave. I lie to myself and try to believe that God only gives us what we can handle. Then, more honestly, I admit to myself this is my purgatory. I need to get through it if I ever hope to see Rancher again.
“Gina? You want these?” Reba opens the Plexiglas window wider and holds out a paper cup with my usual eight colorful pills toward me.
“Yeah. Thanks,” I say, taking the cup and moving out of the line to the next window, where I’m greeted by the nurse who will watch me take them and make sure I swallow. I try not to roll my eyes as she counts them, hands me a plastic cup of water, watches me do my thing, and makes me stick my tongue out. With a purple plastic glove the same color as Reba’s nails, she runs her index finger along the insides of my cheeks. When she’s satisfied I’ve taken all the pills, she dismisses me.
It’s fucking humiliating. I was trying to save my husband. I should not need a “team” to help me take medicine. I shouldn’t need medication at all. Until Rancher fell ill, I was perfectly fine.
I’m not suicidal. I can assure you of that. Frankly, I’m not brave enough to face my maker yet. And so, for now, that’s the reason I’m here—in a holding pen waiting for my sentence and a lifetime of penance I deserve.
“Twenty minutes.”
I have no idea what Solomon is talking about. I ask him to repeat himself.
“Are you okay, Gina?”
I shrug. “I’m fine.”
Why does he even care?
“You sure?”
“Aren’t you a security guard?”
He smiles. “Sorry, word gets around.”
“What’s in twenty minutes?”
“Meeting. In the lounge. Kim’s stuff went missing again.” He raises his eyebrows and tilts his head in the direction of Mandy, a girl who is convinced she’s a cat and has a pension for kleptomania.
“Fabulous. Can’t wait for that. Is it mandatory?”
He nods, judging me, I am sure.
What a waste of fucking time. Why can’t they just listen to me? Why don’t they see? I was just trying to save my husband. I didn’t believe he’d really quit on me. I’m not that crazy.
It is they, not me, who are lost...
I fall to my knees, there in the middle of the hall. I don’t care who stares at me. I got over the rubber necks long ago. I raise my eyes to the ceiling and fold my hands in front of my face. I squeeze my eyes shut. And for the first time in forever, I pray for all of us:
Forgive us Father, for we have sinned.
Vegan