The entire time she was laying, chained to a gurney in the ambulance, Sara kept her eyes shut and bit down on her tongue while the antidote twisted through her. She didn’t notice when they stopped, it was only when the air changed from cold to freezing and the sharp fluorescent lights started digging underneath her eyelids.

The male voices were telling her to stand and the cold scraping of the cuffs painfully rubbed against her wrists as they grabbed her off the gurney. When she got to her feet, her knees gave out, and they had to keep hold of her as they pulled her through a succession of rooms.

First, there was a bathroom where she caught a glimpse of her face. Half of her body had been caked in blackened dried blood that had congealed inside her hair, standing it up on one end. They took her to another room where they forced her to take her clothes off and hosed her down. The water felt like it was tearing her skin off and she was starting to feel her stomach churn.

A cold-eyed blond nurse ushered her into a small square room with a bed and metal toilet after forcing her to change into a pair of thin blue scrubs. “The pills are going to come up, and you’re going to need this.” She handed Sara a paper cup filled with pills. “There’s muscle relaxers in here as well as tranquilizers.

“I’m going to die.” She sat down on the bed with her arms wrapped around her chests. “It’s too much.”

“Well, you’re not going to feel right for a while. It could take a few months to get your head right, but the pain resides after a day or two.”

The woman knelt down to face her.

“What?”

She met Sara’s eyes. “You’re fucked. You’re going to go to prison, and they’re never going to let you out. You might as well accept that now; otherwise, it’s going to get a lot worse.” She stood up.

“I’d never kill her,” shouted Sara.

“You don’t know yourself as well as you think you do.” She handed Sara a cup of water. “Drink the whole thing and take the pills or we’re going to tie you down and give you a shot.”

Sara did just that and laid down on the hard bed. It was a metal frame with a high school gym mat for a mattress, it felt so terrible that when she laid down on it, her back screamed and her entrails threatened to split open her stomach.

The pills slowly crept their way in, infusing her blood and easing the tension. The cramping pain never stopped, though. It stuck with her like her grief, which exploded when what was left of the OxyContin came up. She couldn’t sleep. She knew what would happen if she did. Her mind would torment her with images of her mother and the terrible injustice she was facing.

What did the woman mean when she said that she didn’t know herself as well as she thought? Was there some madness creeping up inside her? Did she hallucinate the monster flying out the window? Maybe she entered a psychiatric state and killed her mother. It made sense. Monsters like that didn’t exist.

It was impossible.

As the hours crept by and Sara sat on the edge of the bed, the guilt started creeping in. She couldn’t trust her own mind, not when she saw things like that creature, staring at her like a snake ready to open its jaws and devour her. Something had made her tear her mother’s throat out.

The police would know. They’d detect pieces of tissue inside her mouth. They’d probably find saliva rimming the wound, and there would, of course, be dental records that could match her teeth to the shape of the bite.

Why did she do that? Was she losing her mind? She had to be. There were times when she’d do nothing but pace around looking for things to clean around the house, desperate to pass the time till her mother got home. Perhaps her mother’s schedule had built up subconscious resentment that caused her to explode. Maybe the nurse was right. She didn’t know herself like she thought she did.

---

She’d never forgive herself for doing it. She felt dirty in her own skin like she could tear it off just to get rid of the pain of what she’d done. It overshadowed the cramps, still writhing around in her body. It kept her staring at the wall, contorted like a pretzel. She didn’t want to move. She didn’t deserve to, and the dread kept her from doing so. It would force her to accept the reality of her own existence. She killed her mother. She wasn’t supposed to exist.

She stayed like that, hour after hour, allowing the sickening sight of her mother’s black, gaping wounds burn itself into the back of her mind. She kept that image there as a form of penance, reaffirming her self-hatred, reminding her of what she’d done. The worse it felt, the better. She deserved every single ounce of pain and a thousand times more.

She built a mental pool of scorching hellfire around herself, consisting of guilt and self-hatred. She wouldn’t allow herself to grieve. Instead, she dove into that pool and did everything she could to torture herself. She killed her mother. She deserved worse than death-no solace, no rest, just torture.

As the hours went by, the tears came and left. Her heart broke a thousand times, and memories of her and her mother crept in.

The string of events passed her by, one by one, each a milestone, marking the maddeningly slow passage of time spent waiting. Soon, the silence became another form of torture. Her mind screamed as she realized she was in a cell, barely small enough for her to pace around and the only thing that could keep her company was her own thoughts. They began to run out, and her mind grew blank as she waited for something, anything to happen.

Nothing did. Every time she heard a noise, the slamming of a door or keys clanking, she jumped up to see who it was, but nobody came. She didn’t know what time it was, whether the night had passed or not. There was no way of knowing how long she’d been there. It could’ve been hours. It could’ve been days.

After an infinite amount of time, a hatch opened up on the door, and a thick hand pushed through a tray of porridge and milk.

“Hey,” she shot up off the bed. “What is going on?” There was no answer, so she took the tray and tried to bend down so she could see through the opening. As soon she took her food, it snapped shut, and she threw the bowl across the room. There was a paper cup of filled with several pills.

She huddled on the bed and tried to close her eyes. The voices started shortly after that. She heard her mother walking in through the front door while she was bending down and pulling out a roasted chicken from the oven. When she turned around, she saw her mother’s neck gaping open, spraying blood all over the carpet.

Other visions were of her in the woods all alone, searching through the brush until she found her mother, pale with maggots eating at her corpse.

Every image cemented her guilt and reaffirmed that she had killed her mother. That certainty grew into a serpent, stronger than the cramps. It had left her eyes raw from crying and her mind dull. It got so bad that she started rocking back and forth. Every time her tailbone rubbed against the mat, a spark lit and spread throughout her body and as she rocked faster and faster, those sparks grew into a blaze of energy that engulfed her body and sent her thrashing and writhing with foam spewing out of her mouth until she blacked out and woke up on the floor.

There was a tray sitting on the door hatch. It was a sandwich wrapped in a thin plastic bag. When she opened it, there was a thick piece of bologna and a slimy piece of cheese crushed in between two slices of thick bread. It went down the drain, but the pills looked tempting. There were two little blues, those would be the tranquilizers and a pink. That was the muscle relaxer. It would ease the rest of the pain, and the drugs would help with her cramps. She grabbed a tiny water bottle sitting next to the sandwich and opened it to take the pills, shivering from whatever caused her to black out.

She put the bottle to her lips. Don’t take those.

She found herself compelled to run over and throw them in the toilet, and fell down on her knees, losing what little was left in her stomach. She was starting to hear voices. She’d been questioning her sanity this whole time. Now, she knew for certain that she was crazy.