Feral / It Was Easier

It was easier, they thought, to pretend the phenomena was a new mental disorder. The hallucinations were the first symptom, they said. If you have experienced hallucinations of a forest, filled with pink light and water dripping off of trees, then you may be a sufferer of this newly discovered condition. It is probably triggered by stress, they said.

Most of those diagnosed with this new condition were those who had existing diagnoses  of Sensory Processing Disorder, autism or ADHD.

After the hallucinations come the identity crisis. The creation of false memories, and the paranoia that something is coming, something is coming soon. The hallucinations would continue. False memories of this great glowing forest, and the belief that you now had special abilities, the ability to do magic.

Don’t worry, they said, we can help you with that. We have set up a special hospital for people with this mysterious new condition. We can study them, and keep them safe. Come and stay with us, they said, at this place- more like a retreat than a hospital, really, where everyone else is going through the same thing, and you won’t feel alone.

And we came. God help us, we came. We arrived at the little hospital- and it was nice, it really was. Most of us arrived with others driving, our caretakers handing us over to someone they thought could take better care. None of them wanted to hurt us. I truly believe that. I truly do.

***


It was easier, they thought, to control us, since we were already broken. Bright lights and loud noises jarred us easily, we could be distracted by pretty patterns and repetitive sounds. They medicated us and put us in neat little rooms and tried to figure out how to stop us from believing we could do magic.
Tilda stayed with me. She didn’t think I could be left on my own, not like that, and she stayed with me a few days to make sure I didn’t cry myself to sleep at the strangeness of it all.

When she left it got much worse. And she did leave. I asked her when she was going to, and she kept saying she wouldn’t. They think that we don’t understand lies, broken promises, betrayal. Even a dog will whine when it’s been abandoned. And we are human beings! Or, we all thought we were. We deserved to be treated with human decency. We were not.

I didn’t want to take my medication, you see. I have never felt that there was anything wrong with my strangeness. So long as you can tell the difference between the voices in your head and the voices in real life you’re all right. The doctor in charge became angry with me. “That one is feral,” he said. “We can’t do anything for them.”

By that time most of us were experiencing the fourth stage off the new condition: the call. We all knew that we were supposed to be somewhere else, doing something else. And it made us restless. People kept trying to break out, run away, get to where we belonged.

They set up a high pitched noise to play through the facility, one that seemed to bother no one but us. It broke our concentration and our spirits.

The one thing that I was able to cling to was a word. “Feral.” That one is feral, I thought, that one is me. They can’t do anything about me.


***


It wasn’t easy, fighting when you cannot stand to be touched. But I got past them.

Bare feet, paper gown, hot cement and then the rain began. At first it was behind my eyes, inside those false memories of glowing forest. But then it was real, real rain splashing down. And I was not alone. Dozens of us had made it out of the hospital. But I was the first.

It’s because I’m Feral, I thought. I’m the fastest and they can’t catch me. Untamed, unbound, unbroken. Un-fucking-dimmed. And they didn’t catch me. They didn’t catch any of us.

The rain was warm, and as night gave way slowly to a bright pink dawn it did not slow. By the time it was light enough to see the streets, they were flooded. Two feet deep at least. We waded onwards, still heeding the call.

Voices called and called, some inarticulate with confusion or delight, and where our mouths failed us our bodies took over, hands and elbows and necks and knees moving in a secret, jittery language that they cannot understand. Even those of them who love us, or claim to. They cannot ever know all that they lack.


***

It was easier, we thought, to let them live with their delusions. When we found the boundary between their world and ours, we did not hesitate long. We crossed back into our world, the one of belonging. The world of the collective, of reason, of things making sense. We don’t have to pretend to be like them anymore. And they don’t have to pretend not to notice our strangeness.

We followed the call to the weak place between universes, and there the rest of us were waiting. Ancient, by our standards, centuries older than any of us, patiently waiting for the children they’d entrusted to this world to ripen and be ready to come home. The seeds they’d planted and then been forced to abandon, finally gathered in. We waited at the boundary, waited for invitation. It is our way.

And then one by one we were called, we changelings, back amongst our own folk, back into the fold. We crafted new names and new, sweeter purposes. I found myself with a sword and shield- but none of iron. We hate iron.

I have gone back to their world, occasionally, but it has such a reek of badness to it I do not want to stay. Tilda thinks I am dead, or still institutionalised. I do not know what the doctors told her. I have no wish to see her or her trite little life again. I am seized by higher purpose.

There is no extraneous ritual here. And no lies. Each of us has left our family names, our given names, our identities from their world. We carry each a single moniker, heavy with meaning, that is both descriptor and title. They write it into our flesh with ink and needle because it is a Truth. And the name on my shoulder is Feral. Because there’s nothing they can do for me, and nothing I need from them.