:: Lesions ::

Don't lock the door, you say.

In an text message that made my phone jump, and my heart rattle.

Don't lock the door, you say.

But you're the only one doing the locking. You are the paperguard sentinel to your own despair.

***

8.19, a cheerless morning. I have nothing sensible to say to my aunt, whose eyes are burnt to mad ashes. 'We'll keep her in for another week,' the doctor says, not kindly, but with a trenchant nod that bothers on dismissive.

'I'll suck your blood―I'll suck your blood―I'll suck suck suck,' mutters my aunt. She looks at me, and then at the doctor, and then at her husband who is, at the moment, rubbing his left toe against the sole of his right heel with clumsy discomfort. He refuses to look up. 'Let me out,' she sings. A flash of hope―like that of a child, or a lost dog―veers briefly over her face. 'Letmeoutletmeoutletmeout.' She tries to bite her fingers. I gently push her hands down, and she claws at me, just a little bit, and then she looks up at me with pitying defeat. 'Let me out?'

I sigh. 'What can we do?' I ask the doctor.

He wrinkles his nose and shrugs. 'We need to make sure she takes her medication...she's not in a condition to go anywhere.'

My uncle shuffles into the conversation awkwardly. 'This is terrible―more money,' he says in Mandarin. He shakes his head tragically.

The doctor raises an eyebrow; I notice a mole just beneath his right brow bone, not unlike mine. 'There are some rehab centers that I can recommend―I can pass you some brochures or something. This is what your mother needs at the moment.'

'Not my child, not my child,' my aunt calls. She laughs hysterically, and then: 'My son is not so smart, not so good, where is he? You see? He's not here, he's not here, he doesn't say a word to his own mother―' In a sad small voice, rocking with displaced rhythm.

'Just keep quiet, okay, keep quiet,' her husband says, also not unkindly, but with the desperate impatience of crass ignorance.

'May I―see the brochures?' I say finally, as though I'm asking for a shopping catalogue. The doctor nods yes.

'I'll suck your blood, eat your heart, suck suck suck,' says my aunt, jerking her head up and down, up and down―she bares her teeth in a grotesque smile, making a sick, spitting sound.

'Keep quiet,' my uncle says through clenched teeth.

I left to the sound of her singing laughter, laced with the shrill, mangled note of pure insanity. And so the day begins.