#alltheknives

The theater doors banged open. Baby looked up with a start from the table where she sat with Rocket, in fact everyone did. It was Blue, and a new girl. It looked like he was showing her around. At first glance she looked young, and not as tall as Sweet Pea or many of the other girls. She held her change of clothes on her arms before her, as Baby once had she remembered. As the dark haired girl looked around at the girls in the theater her expression was odd. Cold, Baby thought and sharp as a flint. It was only then that she noticed the pair of handcuffs clasped around her slender wrists. A police officer followed Blue into the hall. Many of the girls in Lennox had a criminal record, but the majority of them were placed there by family members. It was fairly unusual for a girl to be brought in by the police, and as such it was a cause for gossip. Rocket looked at Baby and raised an eyebrow and an excited murmur went around the room. Blue banged angrily on a nearby desk to put an end to the chatter then turned to the police officer. He seemed to be saying something but Baby couldn’t make it out. Baby watched as the three of them left the hall. To her right Rocket gave a little snort of laughter. “Wow…bet she’s a real basket case…” She said. Baby looked at the girls back. She wasn’t sure why but there was something she found unsettling about her.

~

Alltheknives: It was strange how much more prison-like the Lennox House was in comparison to the actual prison. It was far more grey and desolate, as if one was stripped of their will and purpose as they passed through the doors. Clove supposed she could still hold on to hers, as long as she held on to consciousness. But, given the sheer size of the hypodermic needle they’d jacked her down with hours earlier, that would only be so long.

  Brain dead and moderately cold, Clove was escorted into the gaunt institution. Her wrists had long been bound by cuffs; it’d been a long drive, and an even longer preceding month. Her skin was red and raw underneath, her eyes redder and rawer from sleep deprivation. Coldly, Clove swept the scope of the Lennox House, examining each and every new inmate she was condemned to live with.

  All eyes were on her — what? Had they never seen a child convict before? Clove committed faces to memory; a doe-eyed little blonde thing and her Raggedy-Anne Gang stuck right out. When Clove was able, they were first on her list. And beyond her drugged-out haze, she could hear the exchange taking place. The cop, nightstick and gun thankfully away (for now), warned an orderly of Clove’s apparent dangerousness: “Violent,” he speculated, “danger to others, unable to adapt to social situations…” Clove rolled her eyes at the nonsense he spewed. If she were under any less restraint, she’d slit his throat right then and there for such slander.

  But just like that, Clove was admitted. Committed. She really would’ve preferred the electric chair.

  Hosed down and dressed in a scratchy uniform, Clove had been turned promptly over to teams of disdaining, cautious doctors and psychiatrists. Without even the luxury of a private cell she assimilated - or, at least, as only she could. As her sedative wore off, she found new and interesting ways to seek out sharp things, and dig them into any waiting orderly flesh. A danger to others? She sure as hell would be. If it would get her separatedfrom others. Avoiding the other inpatients was task enough as it was.

  But after a few days, she was exhausted. From work, from observation, from even trying. Plastic knives and straitjackets  were all there was for her. In amongst the other girls of the Lennox House, Clove felt disempowered for the very first time. Without her strength, or her freedom, she was nothing. So in one of the few shifts Clove took out of her straitjacket — in the musty kitchen, shelling peas — she studiously waited for the other girls to turn her back as her fingers crept, inching, toward a cleaver wedged in a chopping board. 

~

Baby tossed another peeled potato into the pot with a splash. She glanced nervously across the table at Clove before averting her eyes again. Nearly a week had passed since she had been brought in to Lennox. It seemed to Baby that since she had been committed she'd done everything in her power to make the orderlies jobs hard. Baby thought back to medication time last Wednesday. Everyday at about three o clock a nurse and a couple of orderlies would come round the day room with a trolley full of little medication cups. Everybody got one, and once you’d swallowed the pills they would make you open your mouth to check. Baby hadn’t seen it happen, but when they got to Clove she had heard a loud yell and looked up with shock. Blood was streaming down CJ’s arm where Clove had stabbed him with a hairpin. It was amazing how much damage she had inflicted with such a tiny weapon. After that she was put in solitary, and the rumors continued to circulate. Some of the girls thought she had killed her parents, others said she was a serial killer who only avoided the chair because of her age. Baby finished peeling another potato. She didn’t really know what to think. In a way she admired her, everybody who came here got broken sooner or later. At least Clove seemed to be putting up a fight. Nonetheless, she couldn’t deny how clearly dangerous the girl was. Maybe it was just all the other girl’s gossip, but When Baby looked into those eyes, there was a tangible air of madness about her. Baby’s train of thought was broken as she spotted Clove’s hand sliding stealthily across the table toward the cleaver in the butchers block. The cooks back was turned. Her heart jumped in her chest, and she reacted almost without thinking; She reached across the table and put her hand on Cloves as it slid toward the cleaver, their eyes met. 

~

Alltheknives: The sudden shock of flesh on flesh caused a jolt in Clove’s movements, for hands were not very kind of late. Her fingers ceased in their dash across the butcher’s block, knowing they’d missed their chance, as her cold eyes shifted up the arm that had apprehended her. 

  That little wisp of a blond girl. Big eyes, dumb expression, would probably take ten-years-with-parole on a triple homicide. Clove was seized with anger, her gaze darting across to the cook, to the other girls, the circular window that beamed out into an empty hall. There were probably orderlies mulling around out there, somewhere, just waiting for an excuse to hammer and chisel into Clove’s frontal lobe.

  Despite her greater impulse to skin the dumb blond with the cleaver, wrist-to-elbow, Clove jerked her hand out and away. “Are you thick or something?” Clove hissed what might have been her first proper words since entering the Lennox House, at least, on a cordial level. Still, they were tinged with malice. “Watch where you put your fingers. You might lose ‘em next time.” For everyone knew, or at least they ought to, if they listened to the wireless, that little girls weren’t to be trusted around sharp knives. They had the tendency to go a little crazy.

  Clove supposed, though, that’d she’d go crazier shelling peas. Her neck ached from craning it, and at its peak, her mind was slowly dissolving, hissing as it sung its last goodbyes. It’d been mere days, and she was breaking. And that nice little knife might just have hacked her way into a cleaner sentence.

~

For a second or two, as Clove fixed her with a look of pure venom, Baby had a terrible feeling she may have made a fatal error. Nonetheless, Clove jerked her hand away and Baby breathed out, none the worse off. She continued peeling, and glanced over her shoulder. The cook didn’t seem to have noticed what had happened. “I’m sorry.” She said, keeping her voice hushed. “I just…I know you hate them. I hate them too. But believe it or not there are worse things they can do to you in here than solitary.” Finishing up with the potatoes, she took an onion from the pile next to her and began to peel it. Her eyes became distant momentarily, as if she were lost in thought, before her gaze met Cloves once more. “Terrible things.” She said.

~

Alltheknives: Clove fell hushed as the cook passed over her shoulder, eyeing her scrupulously. He rifled through her bucket of shelled peas as if he expected to find something; a knife, maybe? But he wouldn’t. Grunting, the gargantuan man sidled away to the other side of the kitchen, as Clove’s fingers slid back to the butcher’s block. And this time, they were undeterred. Hastily Clove dislodged the cleaver, weighed it once, and plummeted it into the bucket where the cook’s hand had been. She covered it over, and swept her eyes up over Baby. 

  “Solitary. Bolts. A good, old-fashioned flogging. Hey, maybe I’ll even get lucky and get the chair.” Clove grinned feebly as she plunged her hand back into her work, idly picking up a few pods of peas. The very tips of her fingers brushed over the cleaver’s handle, and she felt that little rush; the rush of power, deliberation. It was the first decision she’d been able to make for her own, and it was miraculous: whose innards would be served with dinner tonight?

  Baby; now she was a candidate. Little Miss Blink-Twice-And-Get-Away-With-Murder could do with a readjustment. But the more Clove thought about it, the less sense it made. What was one helpless mental patient’s life against another? Baby’d lose her life, and Clove might be lucky to lose her hair at most. No. Baby was a waste of an opportunity, but a welcome distraction from the mundane tasks of food preparation. Clove held on to her knife, and her opportunity. She was going for an orderly. 

~

Baby watched as Clove stowed the cleaver covertly in the bucket, but this time she knew better than to intervene. She’d been lucky enough the first time. Even in the few words they had exchanged, Baby had affirmed that Clove’s view of right and wrong was inventive at best. But presently Baby was saddled with a dilemma. If she told no one about Clove’s concealed weapon, then it could be anyone’s blood on the ward floor later. Then again, if she told a nurse or an orderly about it they’d take it, punish Clove and nothing would change. In Baby’s mind both choices were bad, but she had a feeling that Clove was unlikely to target another patient. Her mind rolled back to an event some weeks before Clove’s arrival; She had heard a crash from the kitchen, and upon investigating had found the cook pinning Rocket down in the larder. If she hadn’t been there…if she hadn’t stopped him….

She picked up her knife again and began to cut her onion into thin slices. I hit the chopping board with more force than was probably necessary. She didn’t know what to do. The scent of the acidic juices wafted upward and pricked at her eyes. “Why are you here Clove?” She asked finally, her voice was low and her eyes didn’t leave her work. 

~

Alltheknives: The sound of her own name was alien in the air. The orderlies very rarely said it; in fact, they said little at all to her, when they were pinning her down. The only other person who made a habit of addressing Clove was Gorski, but even then, she just supposed that the good doctor liked the way it rolled right off her tongue. It was jarring that Baby knew her, probably just in passing. Clove contemplated her answer, and how odd that would sound.

  “Well,” she began on a sigh. “I did ask from laundering, but clearly they’d rather be struck down by food poisoning.” But she couldn’t dodge forever; no newspapers ever came through here, least of all anything recent. Exhaling deeply, Clove slammed down her fistful of peas, and leaned across the table. “I hacked up a couple of kids on a camping trip,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Three boys, two girls, and you couldn’t tell ‘em apart when I was done. Took some trinkets off ‘em, and stole their car. Or so they tell me.”

  She watched Baby closely for any sign of anything; fear, remorse, disgust. heck, even sympathy. She’d seen it all in her parade through the judicial system, but every folk from every opinion was bound to reach the conclusion that Clove was no-holds-barred insane. That to butcher up a bunch of teenagers like that was sick and wrong and inconvenient, and goddamn people she’s just a kid. And kids never went to the chair. “You scared that I’ll hack you up too, soon as your back is turned? One big knife between the shoulder blades?” Clove grinned, and leaned back to her task, eyes still fixed on Baby as the conversation grew thick.

~

As Clove came out with the grisly revelation, Baby held her expression static, making every effort not to give anything away. Clove seemed to relish telling the story. There were other violent patients in Lennox, but they were mostly too drugged or too insane in the first place to translate their impulses into any kind of coherent plan. If she was honest with herself, Baby was scared. She felt an icy bead of sweat trickle down her back under her sweater. She wouldn’t admit that though, least of all to Clove.

 She pushed the sliced onions to one side and took another from the pile. Behind her the cook snorted grossly and spat a glob of phlegm into the sink. Baby’s memory spun backward like a tape recorder to that night, the night before she had been brought here. She had seen it a thousand times, over and over, and despite everything there was no getting away from it. She had shot and killed her innocent ten year old sister, and no way she looked at it would allow her to escape the fact that she had pulled the trigger.

She levelled her gaze at Clove again. Her heart beat like a drum inside her chest. “You’re not the only murderer in here you know.” She said. 

~

Alltheknives: Clove, who had only been idly picking at her work, set her fingers gently still. Her gaze burned with intrigue as it washed over Baby, searching for meaning in her statement. Of course Clove knew she couldn’t be the only killer in the mix, albeit an unconventional one. But Baby — she meant herself. Clove pieced the thought together, and smiled. 

  “So you’ve done the dirty on an innocent life?” She had to admit, she did not spot that plot twist. “Well, how about that. Not as scary as it seems, right? Another life’s another life; you do what you’ve got to.” Clove reached for another handful of peas, touching on her knife once more. It was her little spark of inspiration, a ticket out of the kitchens no matter how she played it. But newer cards were coming up here on the table. “So who’d you do in?” Clove asked casually, as if murder was as natural a pastime as miniature golf. “How many? Weapon of choice? Professor Plum in the library with the revolver?”

~

Clove’s conversational treatment of the subject was uncomfortable to Baby. For a fleeting moment she wondered if the face Clove showed to the world was no more than a façade, if it did in fact conceal a great deal of pain too great to express. She wondered, but was in no way convinced. Maintaining her stoic expression she finished slicing her last onion and pushed it to the side of the chopping board, setting her knife down. She wiped her hands on her rough grey apron. “My little sister.” She said abruptly, her eyes coming up to meet Clove’s. “I shot her.” With that Baby turned, pulling her apron off over her head. Her shift was done. She left the kitchen without looking back, stopping only briefly to sling her apron onto a peg with the others. As soon as the doors had swung shut behind her,  hot tears leaked out of her eyes, she brushed them away quickly. It was nearly dinner time, everybody would be gathered in the hall soon. Clove still had her knife, she thought to herself. Part of her wanted her to have it. Part of her wanted to see Blue’s blood on the floor of the theatre. Her tears stopped flowing. Maybe part of her really was a murderer.

~

Alltheknives: The girls of the institution all ate their grey food together, at grey tables with grey faces. The more dangerous ones sat on the perimeter, where orderlies patrolled. A tray of food was thrust into Clove’s hands, for once unshackled. They were letting her sit where she pleased. Eyes scanning the hall, she spotted the man who had admitted her — Blue, she thought he was — stationed rigidly as he observed Baby. With steps as natural as Clove could manage with the added weight of the cleaver at her thigh, she crossed the hall and cleft her way between the girls, right between Blue and Baby. She had a clear shot at him from here. 

  “Hope you all don’t mind,” said Clove, casting her eyes around the motley gang. They eyed her off with resentment, confusion, and her favorite; fear. She smiled coolly back, digging her spoon into her bland vegetables. “Just seemed like such a cosy little family over here, I wanted to wriggle right on in. I’ve never had sisters before.” With that last, she cast a sideways glance at Baby. All the while, Clove watched Blue as he began to patrol, circling the table. He might have known something was up, because he watched her right back. Steeling herself, Clove slipped her hand under the table as he stopped at the corner of their table. Eyes on her, he whispered to another orderly. Eyes always on her. 

  Clove’d heart picked up. They’d be on her before she even got the chance to draw her knife, and there’d be no blood — just more electricity in her brain. For hours. Never enough to kill her. She panicked. There had to be blood, or they’d never set her free. Her spoon was down and her knife was out before Clove even knew what she was doing, and it was natural. It was natural how she seized Baby by her hair, twisted and pulled her in; it was natural putting the butcher’s knife to her throat and ensnaring her. It was natural blocking out all the background noise, leaning forward to her ear and murmuring, “nothing personal, really. Just in need of a little blood’s all.” If she’d been any more level Clove might have seen the orderlies call to action. 

~

Babys heart jumped into her throat as she saw Clove across the other side of the hall, and it beat faster and faster as she wound her way towards the table where she sat. She set her tray down and Baby turned to Rocket who sat on the other side of her, exchanging a nervous look, half wondering if she should say something. What occurred in the next few seconds happened so quickly that Baby barely had time to realise before it was over.

Clove wrenched a handful of Baby’s hair, pulling her in toward her. She was smaller than Baby, but her strength was incredible. She struggled at first, but feeling the cool sharp surface of the knife touch her throat she froze. None of the other girls at the table dared move, their eyes were wide and terrified. The orderlies, incuding Blue exchanged horrified glances, but nobody dared intervene. Blue offered a hand forward, his feet rooted to the spot. His eyes were wide and imploring. “Clove…” He said quietly “come on now just….just put the knife down. We can talk about this.” He glanced over his shoulder and held his hand up to the other guards, signalling them to stay where they were. “Just tell me what it is you want.” He said.

~

Alltheknives: Uncharacteristically, Clove laughed. The sound travelled down her spine and through her limbs, warming the very tips of her fingers. How nice it felt to not be a faceless entity again. “Now you want to talk?” she asked incredulously, eyes fixed on Blue. Baby, still in her arms, was frozen. Before addressing Blue once more, she informed the girl, “It’s okay to fight, you know. Squirm a little bit…” Clove twisted a lock of blonde hair once more around her fist. “You ain’t going anywhere, sugar. Not for a few. So your fear, I get. But what about the nice men in the pretty coats, huh? Suddenly there’s time for talking when a girl’s not drugged out of her mind?” Grinning manically, Clove challenged Blue with her eyes. A little closer, if you’d be so kind. 

  Whether out of sheer stupidity or bravado, Blue began to take her up on her offer with pure hatred in his eyes; Clove wondered if this was what she looked like to all those kids out in the wilderness that night. Unrelenting. Predatory. Drawing her breath in as Blue tread closer, she prepared to release Babydoll from her choke-hold. 

  “You don’t want to be sedated?” Blue said as he approached. Clvoe watched his eyes skim over her head, make a face at the orderlies. He finally recognized how serious she was. “Why don’t you start by letting innocent girls be? Knife down, Clove.”

  Just a little closer, screamed Clove’s heart. Come on, you bastard, come on… Clove held tight to the knife and braced her legs; she had a participatory audience now, she was sure of it. In a few seconds they’d have her under and all she’d have to show for it would be a few measly drops of whack-job blood —

  There wasn’t a single second left. Blue was only a few feet away, and by god Clove wanted to see him bleed. As he opened his mouth to speak, hands raised defensively, Clove heaved Babydoll from her grasp and catapulted from the table, knife raised, eyes frenzied. But she fell short, by inches; the cleaver managed to find its way into Blue’s shoulder before he caught her, constricted her, and two orderlies tried desperately to pull Clove away in her hysteria. 

  She went kicking and screaming, and hoped she stayed gone. At least she got to hear the bastard scream.

  But Clove didn’t stay gone. For one long week they kept her, blast after blast of electrodes straight to her brain until she was too numb to scream. They used more this time, or so she was sure. But still, never enough to kill her. Later that week she was escorted, shackled, into the day room. It had been deathly quiet to begin with, but now even the sigh of the old building seemed to hold its breath for Clove. Doctor Gorski let Clove from her straitjacket , and urged her toward the table where Babydoll sat. 

  Reluctantly, Clove drew towards it, and sat opposite the girl. There was still blood on her dress collar, devoid of color. Like Clove’s eyes. She rolled them, drawing her arms back around herself, before folding her legs primly under the chair. “Doctor Gorski says I’m to say sorry for threatening you,” she rattled off. She shot a look toward the woman who had refused to lobotomise Clove for whatever reason, before glancing back to Baby. “And for cutting you. There, all better. Should be thankful it was that jackass in white and not you.”

~

The events of that day resounded through Lennox house for a week, and every time Baby thought back to it, she was amazed she had escaped with her life. Clove was put in restraints and confined to solitary for most of the time from then on. Rumors began to circulate that Clove would be lobotomised. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened. Sitting in the theatre, Baby’s eye was drawn to the empty chair in the corner. It used to be occupied by a girl named Evelyn, she had been violent when she first came into the hospital and they had done it to her. ‘Ice-picking’ Rocket called it, and after that, all Evelyn ever did was sit in that chair, and stare into the distance. But now Evelyn’s chair was empty, she had died last month. Baby wondered if it would soon have a new owner. The thought alone made a sick chill run down her spine. 

The door of the theatre swung open and an orderly lead clove inside, holding tight to the back of her straitjacket. So that’s what this was about. He led her to the table and Gorski undid her restraints. Once they had been left in moderate privacy they sat across from one another, and Clove gave her glib apology. To be honest Baby had not expected any, she figured she’d been lucky simply to get away with her life. Nonetheless she was still glad to see they hadn’t carried out that terrible procedure on her, nobody deserved that. Clearly Gorski had stepped in. Baby met Cloves hard gaze. She was unsure of what to say. The red stain on her collar was the only spot of color in the whole room. “You messed Blue up pretty bad.” She said quietly “He’s still in the hospital..” there was a quality to her words that was hard to pin down, but it certainly wasn’t disapproving. 

~

Alltheknives: Nodding, Clove considered this. “He was suspiciously absent from hell on earth this past couple of days,” she said slowly. “Hope the bastard rots. Or at least, his arm does. Better at least have gangrene.” It was perhaps curiouser that the results of Clove’s violent outburst, while in vain, hadn’t so deeply affected Baby as to shell-shock her into reticence; there was something in her tone, how the woman regarded Clove, that had her quizzical.

  Glancing back across the theatre, Clove sought permission from Dr Gorski to leave. Solitary confinement was waiting, somewhere, or perhaps more of the strangely lax European therapy that was not altogether therapeutic. Gorski’s eyes were still fixed on Clove, sternly urging her to stay seated. ‘Communicate,’ her expression said. ‘If not with me, with the girls.’ Clove had no trouble admitting that she’d clammed up in every therapy session; Baby was, truly, the only person she’d deemed a worthy audience for her ramblings.

  It took a long time for Clove to collect her thoughts when her head was still pounding, her limbs still slightly numb. Under her uniform was a patchwork of bruises that she didn’t remember obtaining, and under her skin still crawled the agony of shock therapy. She breathed in shallowly, , and laced her fingers in her lap. “I really wasn’t going to kill you, you know,” Clove told Baby quietly. “Picking off the helpless just ain’t my style. Sure as hell wouldn’t have got me out. But I’m starting to think that if a knife to some sleaze’s shoulder won’t, then nothing will.” Although she smiled at the revelation, Clove’s tone was mirthless. It was flat with the acceptance of reality. “Do people get out of here? I mean — have they ever?”

~

Baby glanced around the room to see if anyone was listening. Gorski had gone back to unpacking her tapes on the stage, she could probably hear them talking but was making an effort to appear occupied. Baby had a great respect for Madame Gorski, she was the only one in this hell hole, as Clove so aptly put it, who seemed to have any genuine good intention for the patients they ‘cared’ for. Baby turned her big eyes back to Clove, the girls dark hair was swept back from her face and on either side of her forehead were two faint red marks. Anyone else might have missed them, but to those who recognised them they were the unmistakable signature of a harsh course of electroshock therapy. Nonetheless, her eyes still retained their spark, it seemed they hadn’t burned all the life out of her yet. It couldn’t be denied that Clove was a dangerous person, but for Baby, seeing her in a straightjacket was like seeing a wolf in a muzzle. It had a unique cruelty to it. “I’ve heard some stories..” She replied quietly. “I know there have been at least three girls who tried to escape…” She looked down into her lap and bit her lip before meeting Clove’s gaze again. “They all died.”

~

Alltheknives: Clove nodded sagely, shaking her hair back from her face. “Not surprising,” she uttered, her train of thought running aloud. “It must be hard to be any kind of stealthy when you’re hearing voices, or what have you. Crazies always were meant for the cuckoo’s nest…” But it begged to question; was Clove? Insanity was relative, in her perception, much so because she was stable enough of mind to recognize it. What the authorities had called insane may not have been so. Clove was always sane, though a different kind of sane to them.

  Collected enough to strategize. To plan, to ruminate, to act far better than some rash hack-and-slash that wouldn’t even get her to a gas chamber. Clove would sorely admit that that stunt had been poorly anticipated, and so far of its mark that it had only made things even worse for her. But that knife may have just hit a different mark far narrower, and far more rewarding, than intended. 

  “I’m in for life, you know,” Clove said casually, glancing about the theatre and its sour inhabitants. “Because they wouldn’t fry a kid, even if she did chop her way through a good few other kids. I’m not even sixteen yet, see, there’s the problem — they think there’s gotta be some room for reform. When, in fact,” sighing, her eyes rolled back to Baby. “There’s nothing really wrong. I’m just some girl, waiting to die. What a place to do it in, huh?” It was true enough, or so Clove thought. She was as normal as she supposed normal to be; law-abiding, except for that one time. Good at algebra. Avid Buffaloes fan. And somehow, on the same plain of normality as this doe-eyed little miss with the bloody collar. There was always room for one more merc in Clove’s one-woman army.

  Aware that Dr Gorski would be having an absolute field day at Clove’s blossoming progress, she kept her peripherals fixed with some intrigue on the psychiatrist. “So, how about you, girlio?” Clove tested, as sweet as sugar in her regard of Baby. “Surely offing your sister’s not enough to put you away, which leads me to believe you’re just as lacking in elbow room as me. Or did you just really go to town on her, and you’re super good at hiding the crazy behind those lustrous eyelashes of yours?”

~

Even the mention of her sister jarred Baby, but she didn’t let it show. Until now she had been holding her cards very close to her chest with Clove. She had discussed the situation of her committal a number of times with madam Gorski and several of the other psychiatrists. They called it ‘a delusion of persecution.’ Baby leaned across the table onto her elbows. She looked Clove straight in the eye, and her hazel stare had a hard quality to it that had not been there before. “My mom was a wonderful person.” She said quietly, her voice had an almost monotonous quality to it. “So was my dad, my real dad that is. He died of a heart attack when I was sixteen. Two years later my mom remarried. At first thing were ok. But then things started to change. He would say things...do things…” Baby blinked, her eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment. “They were only married just over a year before my mom died…but she didn’t just die. He killed her. He just made it look like she was ill.” Madam Gorski glanced backward over her shoulder but didn’t stop what she was doing. Baby’s eyes never left Clove’s. “The night after he funeral her opened will. My mom had left us a lot of money. He wasn’t named on it…everything was left to me and my little sister.” She swallowed. “He attacked me then locked me in my bedroom, I saw him kick my sister into the closet. I knew he was going to burn the house down with us in it. That way he would get everything.” Retelling the story to Clove was different than with the therapists, she felt dead calm. As if it was someone else’s life she were describing. “I climbed out of the window and down into his office where I knew he kept his gun. I took it. When I found him in the hallway I fired two shots at him…but I missed. I killed Grace.” The last word caught in her throat for a moment. It had been the first time she had said her sisters name since her death. Somehow just saying it flushed all those clinically recalled memories back into terrible vivid colour. Most prominently, red. She ground her teeth together inside her mouth and bit her lip. “After that my stepfather had me committed here, he was arranging with Blue to have me lobotomised.” A look that was more a grimace than a smile spread across her face. “But then you stuck a cleaver in his shoulder…”

~

Alltheknives: The picture Baby painted was so tragic, Clove almost wanted to powder her nose and wail about it on Gorski’s stage for an hour or two. It was a Bronte-worthy melodrama that had Clove reeling — not caring, never involved enough to consider the possibility of caring — but enthralled all the same. And Baby drove it home with the intensity behind her eyes, a stare that never left Clove as they spoke. This girl was braver than she made out to be. But whatever resolve she might’ve had was buried with her sister now.

  Clove gave a non-committal shrug and a smile that seemed almost proud, herself resting her elbows on the table, closing quarters. “Well, aren’t I just your magnificent stroke of luck? Ain’t nothing worse than spending your days outta your mind, when your mind was a perfectly fine place to be in the first place. Unless, of course…” with a lame flick of the wrist, Clove gestured to the room at large. “You’re still all good upstairs, and stuck in here for the trouble. Shame, that. Some god-awful murderer man putting you away.”

  If Baby was to be believed, then her stepfather was nothing short of maniacal. He bore no resemblance to Clove’s own father, a stern, proud man whom she’d always just wanted to impress — her father had never gone to such lengths to get Clove out of the way. She wasn’t worth more than the effort it took to sign her over to Blue. That much made her irate. After all the bloody trouble she’d gone to… Clove broke her eye contact with Baby fleetingly to check on Gorski; the doctor was in, apparently. Wrangling up some girl to push through issues she didn’t even have the capacity to comprehend. Still, Clove felt that she was being watched. Perhaps it was just the weight of her query.

  “Are you really going to commit?” she asked Baby in a hushed whisper. “To committing? Wallowing in your own self pity ‘cause you took down one kid by accident? ‘Cause that’s weak.”

~

Clove’s final statement stung painfully. Baby’s initial reaction was anger, indignation. She wanted to turn the table over. Cry. Lash out verbally or physically. But as she thought it over, she realised that she was right. 

We can deny our angels exist, Convince ourselves they can't be real.

Baby remembered her father, her real father. He was tall, and Baby had always taken more after him than her sister. She had his light hair. Her mother always used to say they were both hopeless dreamers. She had spent countless happy hours immersed in the books he had given her, the science fiction comics and boys adventure books he had read as a boy.

But they show up anyway, at strange places and at strange times.

Baby remembered her mother, her soft brown eyes, the way she and Grace were so alike. She had never met a more gentle person in her life. It was her mother who brushed and parted her hair every morning and pulled it into bunches. Perhaps she had been too gentle. Maybe even naïve in her own way.

They can speak through any character we can imagine.

Baby remembered her sister. Grace. As the memories swirled before her eyes they pricked at her like shards of glass, but she didn’t brush them away as she had before. She had just been starting out in life, but in her heart Baby knew Grace’s future would have been extraordinary.

They'll shout through demons if they have to.

They were all dead. But Baby wasn’t. She was alive and conscious, and their memories lived in her. It was as if she could feel them watching her as she sat there, grey and lifeless as the walls that imprisoned her. Where was her imagination? Where was her hope? Where was the precious life lived owed to Grace. She breathed in, and saw Clove watching her with those hard eyes.

Daring us, challenging us to fight.

She smiled. But unlike before, her whole face lit up. “No.” She replied, her voice resolute. “I’m not.”

~

Alltheknives: Of its own accord, Baby’s affirmation had been wishful  Her smile, however, was a beginning. In a place where a girl had no more reason to smile than she did to breathe, really, this small movement of dissent was an outright refusal to comply to the soul-stripping existence of the Lennox House. Perhaps she and Clove truly were a kind of crazy. But it was the better kind. Her mind already sparking with strategy, Clove returned the gesture with a smile of her own. 

  But it was apparent that Gorski had been watching after all, because as Clove constructed her next thought, the doctor’s hand was on her shoulder. Gorski’s thick, throaty accent was urging Clove to the stage in a last-ditch attempt to get the girl to open up, and Clove found herself begrudgingly on her feet. Shrugging free, Clove left Babydoll with a look of new resolve and a, “Don’t go doing anything without me.”

  There were no issues to work through or demons to fight in the theatre.  But for the sake of progress — or, moreover, that a memory seemed a little less than something distant and desperate in light of things — Clove let Doctor Gorski in to the sanctuary she had created herself. The gentle, addled calm of cigarette smoke and warm summer air, the plush back seat of her dad’s LeSabre; some of that tragic psychadelic rock Clove had always hated, its sound drying in her throat as blood dried on her clothes. She’d never felt so free, so at peace as she had that night when the campsite had gone silent. If Clove closed her eyes, and hummed the notes, then freedom seemed as close as that big old machete stuck in the dashboard. But she kept those details to herself.

  Clove kept the stickier, more private details to herself, of course, and let herself grow calm with promise. Such was the change in her that Gorski, bless her poor little soul, thought she’d finally gotten through to the girl that knifed the orderly. That girl was evicted from solitary the very same day, and relocated to the endless rows of communal cots that housed the other crazies. With a permanent smug little smile, Clove was escorted to the bunks flanked by only a single member of staff. She found an empty cot easy enough, but found the reams of platinum hair much easier. Boldly, Clove made herself at home at the end of Babydoll’s bed. 

  “I had myself a little epiphany today,” Clove began, bright as a cloudless day in May. “This place is the absolute pits, I know. But I’m not doing myself any kind of favour by hacking away at the skeezes who run the joint. Sad, but true. So I’m just left counting the days until I’m home free.” Smiling knowingly, Clove twisted her fingers in her lap. “However long that may be.”

~

As Gorski led Clove away from the table, Baby gave her the slightest nod. Their eyes connected, and there was an unspoken moment of understanding between them. Baby felt alive again, as if there was a purpose to her existence. She was going to escape from here. Both of them were. A few minutes later Baby was collected from the hall by CJ, the orderly who had been Clove’s first victim. His arm was still bandaged.

The day, as all days did in Lennox house, passed without considerable distinction. Baby had cleaning duty in the afternoon. As she scrubbed the dull grey floors of the corridors her mind was alive with ideas. She ran through her own mental map of Lennox House, considering all the exits. She thought about guards, gates, locks…weapons. She plunged the brush back into the bucket, the soapy water was cold and unpleasant against her hand. She was willing to defend herself, to fight. Whatever happened, she was getting out of here. She was going to find her stepfather…then she might even have been willing to kill. She tried not to linger on the thought. Either way, she owed it to Grace not to rot in this hole.

The door to the admissions office banged open and shut a little way down the corridor. Baby looked up. A new patient maybe? Picking up the bucket she moved quietly down the corridor and set it down again next to the door. She took out the brush and continued scrubbing, listening carefully by the gap under the door. “I’m afraid so...”A man was saying, his voice calm and rational. “I know it’s a drastic action, but after everything…we cant afford to take anymore chances. Besides I believe it to be in the patients best interests.”

“But with a little more time…” A voice replied that she recognised to be Madam Gorski’s. “This procedure is irreversible and there could be a complete turn around, we haven’t even tried all the medication options yet.”

“Jesus Vera…what do you want? My arms never gonna be the same again! I could have been killed for christ sake!” The sound of that third voice sent a sickly sensation of fear sliding down into Baby’s stomach as if she had swallowed an ice cube. It was Blue. She snatched up the bucket by the handle and walked away quickly down the corridor, the dirty water sloshed from side to side. With Gorski arguing against it they could only be planning to ice-pick someone. It was almost too horrible to think about. She had to tell Clove, and whatever they were going to do, they had better do it fast. 

The evening came round quickly, Baby lay on the hard mattress of her cot, twisting her hair anxiously in her finger. She had to get to Clove, but if she had been put in solitary there was no chance of reaching her. Feeling a weight land on the end of her bed Baby looked up with a start, but then a relieved smile spread across her face. It was Clove. As she recounted her seeming recovery Baby couldn’t help but return her smirk. “It seems like you’ve made a real breakthrough my dear.” Baby said, mimicking Madam Gorski’s thick accent. They shared a grin, but quickly Baby’s smile began to fall and her face became deadly serious. She leaned in a little closer to Clove. “Listen.” She said quietly “I was cleaning outside the office today, I heard some things…Blue’s back. It sounds like they’re planning to…” She swallowed heavily. “Lobotomize someone. I don’t know who but…” Baby looked into Clove’s eyes, and her fear was apparent. 

~

Alltheknives: She should have known. She should have learned. If there was anything Clove was fit to remember, it was that victory was the most powerful feeling of all. And it was only powerful because it was fleeting. It hit you like a bullet to the brain, and for a while you were numb with comfort, with hope. But then it slowly leached away, and you were only left with the grim reality that a good ice-picking was waiting at the end of that dim tunnel. For these moments of adjustment, Clove was frozen with, for the first time in her life…fear. Dying was part of life. This was beyond dying. 

  Slowly, Clove shook her head. “Of course the bastard’d come back for me,” she muttered. Every word hung on the scraps of her breath, every beat of her heart was almost a conscious effort. She felt stifled, trapped — was this what crazy felt like? Eyes wide and frantic, Clove beseeched Babydoll with her gaze. She found her hand shaking — but she knew better than to shoot the messenger, when the messenger could carry her out. “He’s not gonna touch me,” she stated lowly. “I’m not gonna let him. You aren’t gonna let him. He’s not having me, goddamn — I’ll run him through again if I’ve got to.” 

  Her nervous laughter died as it reached the concrete encloses of the room. Girls in varying states of decay, packed in like sardines… Clove realised that any longer in the Lennox House would have her be one of them. Baby, too. How many of these women had been as normal as the two of them until Blue broke them down? How many more would live with him as a constant deathly shadow? This place… that man… that was what drove people insane. 

  “We’re leaving,” Clove said, biting out the quiver in her lip. “Soon. There’s lots to do, but we’ll get it done — how long, do you think?” Her face was steely again, strong. Inside, Clove was screaming. It was stuffy and dark in her mind, with nothing but confusion and urgency to keep her company. But she had Babydoll, didn’t she? The first person Clove had ever willingly relied upon. Things were dire, and she needed every fragment of broken soul to keep herself from cracking. 

~

Baby fixed Clove with the most resolute gaze she could muster, but inside her chest her heart fluttered like a frightened bird. Clove hid it well, regardless of what she was facing, but even seeing the faintest flicker of fear in her was terrifying to Baby ; To her Clove wasn’t so much a person as a distillation, an embodiment of violent and unashamed free will. Yet beneath the purity of that wipe clean steel beat a human heart, just as fearful as her own. But still, a tiny shard of that blade had splintered off, and lodged itself deep into Baby and the way she looked at the world. 

“Listen to me.” Baby said, her voice was flat and sounded alien even to herself. “Nothing’s going to happen to you, or me.” She looked around at the other girls in the ward. “Or any of these girls. Not anymore. We’re gonna escape tonight, but first we’re gonna end this …We’re gonna kill Blue.”

~

Alltheknives: For a woman rocked by crisis after crisis, Baby was surprisingly steady. What was more, she made Clove feel steady, too, instilled her with a confidence she’d not felt since having entered the asylum. It was a courtesy so often unpaid to a child who murdered other children, and a clinically insane one at that. The promise in this unlikely girl’s words was enough to snap Clove back to reality. She nodded solemnly, processing them, allowing them to warm her again. “I like that idea,” muttered Clove. She nodded, her eyes drifting, a smile prying the corner of her lips apart. “I like that idea a lot.”

~

  In moments, Clove was up off the end of the bed, darting between rows of other cots, bounding over some in an effort to reach the heavy door. As far as she could tell, it was their only way out. She reached it was a clatter, her hands falling to the cement on either side of the thing; there was no way it was going to move from the inside. Her fingers curled into a fist, and Clove cursed under her breath. Not even a lock to pick. They were sealed in their tomb until morning. 

  Some of the more together girls had their eyes fixed on Clove as she hastily made her way back to Babydoll, brisk in pace. Stopping a little short, she curled her fingers around the bed rail. “I don’t know about you,” she urged in a hushed whisper, “but I’m not waiting for them to open that door whenever they feel like it. I’m going, and I’m going now.” A slight pause, and Clove straightened herself. She glanced compellingly at Baby. “Be ready.”

  Through the tiny slit in the door, Clove could monitor down the the bends in the hall. Two orderlies stood about five feet down; one of which she knew. The bandage he sported reminded her of how he tasted. Clove watched as they talked briefly between them, laughed even — and then one disappeared down and around the corner. There was only CJ left. Now. Her nimble artist’s hands shooting out, Clove seized the nearest, vaguest inpatient and slammed her head into the wall with a squick.

~

  It was chaos. At first there was screaming from her victim, but it carried through the air like a disease and soon every unstable girl on that side of the room was in an uproar. They made mad grabs for nothing in particular, if only to relieve themselves of the sight of the blood that smeared brightly on the concrete, and all over Clove’s hands. The girl would live, but it was doubtful Clove would, if CJ took any longer. She slipped down the wall and out of the chaos, waiting by the door for it to fall open. Just over the din, she could hear him scrambling for a key. Clove just prayed he was still alone.