They Called Her Crazy

“My hand can go through liquid," she thought, and she dipped her hand in the sink full of bubbles and dishes from the previous night. Her hand slid clean through. The water was warm.

“My hand can go through solids,” she thought, and she slipped her hand through the wall. The wall wasn’t warm or wet. But her hand went through easily, like a knife cutting through flan. She stared at her arm, wrist-deep in the wall, and then carefully pulled it free.

The strange part was that she didn’t find this strange. The weird part was that her brain simply accepted the fact that suddenly she was able to move through barriers that would normally stop anything and anyone.

She tried her trick in different places and found that she was able to move through walls and rocks. Buildings and concrete. At the grocery store, she walked through the cereal display into the headache remedies. At the gas station, she walked through a pump.

There was no reason that this gift, for that is how she saw it, had suddenly fallen on her, been bestowed upon her, awoke within her. She was simply able to do this magic trick for no reason at all. She didn’t say a word to anyone. She didn’t tell her best friend. She didn’t tell her boyfriend.

She wondered if weather changed her abilities. But it didn’t seem to. She passed through a gardening shed in the rain. Would it work if she was distracted? Yes. The only caveat seemed to be that she had to want it to work. She could lean against her sofa and stay put. She could sit in her desk chair and not fall through to the office below. If she decided in her mind to move through a wall or a bush or a pillar in a parking structure, she could.

She only tried out the magic when she was by herself. Moving through a bathroom wall into the janitor’s closet. Moving from her apartment into the one next door, which was empty at the moment, or she might have scared the neighbors.

Her boyfriend wouldn’t have believed her if she’d told him. He didn’t believe her about anything real, while accusing her regularly of things that were untrue. You flirted with that guy, when they left the grocery store, and all she’d said was have a nice day. You’re sleeping with your boss, when she’d had to work late, and there was nothing not even a hint or a whisper with her and the man who could be her grandfather. 

She tried to break up with him, but he said that he’d find her. He’d track her down. She didn’t mean it. She couldn’t mean it. He forgave her, he said. He wouldn’t hold it against her. But he did. 

She walked through the tiled bathroom after he hit her. He’d left the apartment, and she’d locked herself in the bathroom. Sobbing. Only when she was sure he was gone, did she take a shower to wash away the blood, and he’d come back. Pounding on the door. Threatening to break it down.

She took a breath and let it out. She took a breath and that’s how she ended up naked, on a ledge outside her apartment building, shampoo in her hair, water streaming down her body.

She was up on the concrete ledge right outside of her apartment, and the cops were called, and they had to take her down in a cherry picker, the man in the uniform holding a towel around her trembling body, and nobody could explain how she got out there. The window was painted shut. The door was locked from the inside. She tried to explain, but they didn’t believe her.

They called her crazy. She must be crazy. She let them say she was crazy because it meant she didn’t have to go back to him.

They locked her up in an institution, and they didn’t tell him where she was, and since he was only a boyfriend, he had no rights to find out, and since she had no family, there wasn’t anyone looking for her.

They put her on so many drugs she couldn’t keep her head upright. She felt as if she were lolling floating unable to remember her name or where she used to live. Didn’t matter. She’d never go back again. She stopped being able to walk through walls. Too drugged up. Too fuzzy.

But then the thought appeared in the center of her mind like a vision, a message, telling her to throw up the pills. Telling her to clear her head. And she did. She faked the way her eyes would glaze. She faked the lolling, rolling, roiling as if she were on a boat at sea. Nobody seemed to notice. Nobody seemed to care. There were too many people worse off than she was.

And the magic came back.

At night, she wandered through walls when nobody was looking, and she began to amass what she would need to escape. Normal clothes. Some money from the lockers. An ID of one of the orderlies who looked the closest to her, who was the most similar in age.

She hid her treasures on a shelf in a closet that the patients had no access to. But she did. She knew nobody would look behind the box of mothballs.

One night, in the quiet of the ward, when even the nurse at the front station was snoring, she slid on the pilfered jeans and the button-up shirt. She brushed her hair in the mirror and she smiled at a self that was almost her, and would be her again.

When she was ready, finally ready, she easily, gently, silently walked through the wall of her room and into the garden, walked through the bars of the gate and onto the street. She wasn’t sure where she was going. But she knew she would never be caged again.