Essays --

Aneta Luboch A Mental Patient’s Handbook â€Å"You need to take your meds†, the nurse told him. â€Å"I don’t like what they do to me. They make the static stop and everything goes quiet†, Hayden replied. He grabbed his hair in the palms of his hands and made a fist, letting his frustration be visible. They admitted him into the psychiatric hospital just less than a month ago. He was diagnosed with schizoid and hallucinogenic episodes. He started hearing the noises a couple months ago. They were whispers at first, gently scratching against the insides of his brain but they eventually became clearer as if somebody was holding a conversation right in front of him. He could not sleep and his head was like an old radio that never shut off. His eyes had sunk into his skull from lack of sleep to go along with his eyes, discolored mounds of flesh begging for help. One night the voices led him to leave his apartment and wander through town until they finally led him to the scene of rape in progress. The voices had pleaded for his help, leading through a maze all the while telling him which turns to take. He was in an alleyway behind an old apartment complex and had heard the cries of a woman pushed up against the dumpster by a man forcing all his weight up against her. â€Å"What are you doing? Get away from her!† he bellowed, â€Å"Leave her alone!† The man turned around with a grin on his face and his tongue flicking in and out of his mouth, an imitation of a serpent; a real life devil in front of his eyes. He stared at Pierre and barked back, â€Å"Better get out of here or you’ll regret it.† He laughed and a gruesome noise escaped the man’s throat sending chills down Pierre’s spine. He had never seen something such as this man. He was pure evil. Pierre char... ...had been walking around town, found this woman walking all alone, attacked her in the alleyway and then ran off is what the woman recalls. Something still didn’t seem right in the woman’s head but she couldn’t figure out what about the story was bothering her. With the only evidence the police had being a shaky account of what happened that night, a story filled with holes from a woman who still seemed to be suffering from trauma of it all, they had no choice but to drop the charges. They knew the likelihood of him being found guilty in a court law was even less that the likelihood of the existence of demons. Pierre continued hearing the voices and kept having nightmares and clawing at his flesh covering his lungs until he would draw blood. Frustration consumed him. Fear of the unknown was eating him alive. The worst part of it all.. this was only the beginning.