FEATHERS

Is Gena suffering from schizophrenia or is everything she sees and hears real?

   

    She liked the pretty feathers he brought her. They were all different shapes and sizes. There were lots and lots of different colors. She would laugh with delight when he’d bring in plastic bags full of feathers.

    She was now living in a psychiatric hospital just outside of town. It was a big old ugly building, brooding and ominous. The lands around this old, huge crumbling brick structure were just as dark and ominous. Douglas Fir forests overgrown with blackberry vines and other brambles made entering the forest a painful prospect. Few patients ever left the wards they were housed on to walk the lands that were once park like but now grown desolate with no care.

    She had schizophrenia the psychiatrist had told him and her parents. And she would always have to be on anti-psychotic medication. Upon hearing this he wanted to cry. How had this happened to his little sister? Gena had been a bright fifteen-year old. Her curly long blonde hair and wide blue eyes had her alot of potential boyfriends but she’d shunned them all. Gena wanted to save herself for her one and only. Her parents had hopes she’d go to college and have some fantastic and wonderful future. Then she had started talking to Spirits and Ghosts. She’d stay up nights having long conversations with the Dead. Her parents grew concerned when Gena lost weight and slept little. They were even more concerned when she stopped going to high school and would respond to no one but her brother Danny.

    She told Danny Angels and Spirits came to her and told her all kinds of heavenly secrets. Gena showed him the stuff she wrote of what They told her and the drawings and paintings she made of Them. Danny was amazed at what his little sister wrote and the drawings she made. He believed her, that she was being told these things by Spirits and Angels and he believed what she drew was what she saw.

   He was soon to be off to university and dorm life there but was now terrified to leave Gena behind. She trusted only him and Danny knew she was in trouble. She didn’t eat or sleep; she did not change her clothes or bathe. She stayed in her room or wandered off to be with her Spirits and the Dead. He’d go after her and bring her back. He hated to admit it but his beloved once beautiful baby sister looked like a dirty, unkempt nut case.

    Their parents decided it was time to take Gena to see a doctor. Gena seemed oblivious to what was going on, holding long philosophical conversations with her Spirits and Angels. One sided conversation it seemed to Danny and her parents. Danny could have wept. It looked bad for Gena. The doctor told Gena’s parents she needed a psychiatrist and medication.

    “I knew she had gone crazy.” Her dad said in shame, “Now she needs to see a shrink.”

    “She is still your daughter.” said his wife, but she felt shame too. I am a bad mother. I am a bad mother. She knew she’d be hearing that the rest of her life with a chronically mentally ill daughter.

    “Gena is my sister. I love her, sick or well.” Danny put his arm around Gena where they sat in the back seat of the car.

    Gena stopped talking long enough to her Spirits and leaned against him and sighed. She’s tired, Danny thought, she’s really tired.

   The psychiatrist told them Gena needed to be hospitalized. She needed to be stabilized on medication. And Gena was taken away that day to that dark and awful psychiatric hospital. It looked like a Looney bin. No one ever got well there. No one ever got out alive, Danny thought.

 

    Right away Gena was put on anti-psychotic medication and quickly grew obese, the medicine creating a horrible unnatural hunger. Her Angels and Spirits grew quiet and left her. Gena rapidly grew depressed and agitated. She was given anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications.

    She cried when her brother came to visit. “I am so fat and ugly. I am so stupid I cannot think. I can’t even write or draw anymore.”

    “It’s the medicine. It has made you better, don’t you think?” But Danny knew the answer. Gena hated herself now, being fat and feeling stupid. She wanted to suicide, to kill herself. She didn’t tell those on her treatment team she wanted to commit suicide and asked Danny not to either. He feared for her but felt she was safe in the hospital. He tried desperately to have her parents get her out and get her better private treatment.

    “Gena is doing well there. Her doctors say she is.” Their parents said.

    Danny knew they felt nothing but shame having a chronically mentally ill daughter. It spoke badly of them, they believed.

    “An Angel came back to me Danny.” Gena told him on one of his visits. “He told me how I could escape this place. I need wax and feathers.” Hearing her like her old self brought tears of relief to Danny’s eyes. There was hope for his little sister still.

    Danny brought her feathers and he brought her wax. He secretly brought her a hot plate to use to melt the wax with. She couldn’t have that in her room and if anyone knew she’d be punished and the hot plate taken away. Gena kept that very secret. Danny thought Gena’s schizophrenia was coming back, that the medications were no longer working or maybe she was somehow managing not to take them anymore. But he didn’t say so to anyone. Maybe what Gena was saying about her Angels and Spirits was true, hadn’t he, himself, believed her once? Maybe she wasn’t schizophrenic at all. Maybe she was like those biblical people who could speak with Angels and Spirits easily. So he brought her what she asked him to and it made her happy. And it made him happy to see her so happy again.

     She liked the feathers. She had great bags full in her room. The staff did not think it dangerous to herself or anyone else to have the feathers. Some of the kinder staff brought her feathers also. She thanked them, playing the docile good patient.

    Then late one night with her beautiful Angel assisting her, she got out her hot plate and started melting wax.

    “Place the melted wax on your arms Gena and quickly stick feathers to it while it is still hot. Do this quickly.”

    Gena did and soon had both her arms covered with wax and myriads of feathers. “Now what?” she asked the Angel.

    “The doors are not locked on this ward. You can easily leave and take the elevator down to the first floor and easily walk out of the hospital. I will meet you on the grounds.”

     “Oh yes! Yes!” breathed Gena. Escape was just a heartbeat away.

    Gena did as the Angel said. And it was just as easy as he said. Divine intervention? Did they really not lock the doors of this psyche ward? Gena did not really care. She was soon outside in the dark. The Angel was waiting, a soft luminous Being of Light in the gloomy night.

    “Now what?” Gena asked.

   The Angel smiled, “Fly Gena! Use the wings you have. Recall the lessons given to you over the months. It is a simple thing to fly. Fly away from this awful place. You can do it! Follow me!” The Angel spread his great feather wings and lifted aloft into the night sky.

    Remembering everything she had been taught over the last year by her Angels, Spirits and the Dead, everything she had been taught since the doctors said she had schizophrenia Gena stretched out her arms. Her multi-colored feathers caught the breezy updraft. Then she was aloft, flying up into the dark night sky. She laughed with pure delight. She was flying, just as the Angel of now and those of the past along with the Spirits had told her she could! She was free of the hellish psychiatric hospital, free of all the medications they gave that were only killing her, that had made her fat, making her a living zombie. She was free and fresh again!

 

    “She’s gone from the hospital.” His dad told him over the phone. Danny was sitting in his dorm room at the university he was now attending. “Somehow she got out. There’s nothing on any of the cameras of her escaping.”

    “I can’t imagine how she did it, the hospital being locked and all.” said Danny smiling.

    “The police are out looking for her.” His dad went on.

    “Well, I hope the best happens dad. Keep me informed.” He hung up the phone and turned and smiled at Gena who was sitting on the love seat in his dorm room. She was smiling again, her eyes were bright and full of life again and she had lost a lot of weight.   “All the best will happen, baby sis.” He said smiling at her.

    “Yes it will.” Gena smiled back. And her Angels and Spirits smiled with her.

   

 

Reviews

[Chris38]

What a fantastic story! Well it makes you wonder just how many so called mental patients are not in reality as sane as you and I. I love the idea of being happeir with your illness whatever it might be.

[Star Wolf]

Ohh, I'm so glad things did turn out for the best for Gena after all that hell she went through. Sounds like the 'treatment' mental health gives out, makes you worse not better. I'm glad her Angels and Spirits were real!!! Awesome write!

[Black Cat Fever]

Wow, I'm impressed. I don't think Gena has mental illness at all, I think she's the real deal and the ending says that, too.