Fiction essay
Jason Fernandez
Period 4
9/28/2018
Word count: 1012
Executioner
“How’s she doing?”
“Just fine.” replied the doctor as he stared blankly stared at his clipboard. The papers on it transparent, the letters floating just a smidgen above slips of glassy film,” She is completely immersed in her experience of wonder and excitement.”
“ What are you doing to her?”
“ I am simply going to find the bad parts of this memory, delete them, run it again, and once its perfect I’ll move on to the next one.” A forest flashes across a little screen, the camera like eyes, shooting around taking in as much as possible, then thinking. As time passes ever so slowly, the screen gets dimmer and the image less clear, and less happens.
The doctor has left. She isn’t sure when. She sits up, looks up, and scans all four corners of the room and once again rests her eyes on the little screen. Its bright again, but outside its dark, just how she likes it. She gets up and tries the door, then the other one. Right as she pulls on the door with the little exit sign, and the little letters reading, floor ten room D above it, it pushes back quite forcefully, and she takes a quick step back in order to look casual. The doctor walks in, as they lock eyes she notices the two other men come in. She knows them quite well now and isn’t jumpy with their presence so much anymore.
“Is she done now?” she asks The Doctor blankly. The Doctor replies just as with a tone just as blank
“Just about.”
“Can I see her now?” she says eagerly.
“I can’t risk that.”
She looks stunned up at The Doctor, tears welling in her eyes.
“You can do this, Im her mother and you can’t just take her away, you… you…” Stuttering and sobbing she frantically turns toward the door to the operation room in order to see her daughter one last time. The doctor nods and mumbles something to the two men and gestures toward her, giving them the order to engage.
The Doctor replies with a voice of cold grinding stone, “ She isn’t your daughter anymore, She doesn’t even know you, I’m…” and she can’t hear him anymore through the tears. She cant feel anything.
A man walks up to the large building, stopping just before the glass doors to reach for a key card. His card clearing him through he enters the his place of work. Walking through the halls his anxiety starts to bubble up inside him, muffled by purple haze playing through his head, left over from the night before.
“Morning Doctor.” says the head nurse. She is the kind of woman they put on the adds, just chipper and just delightful.
“And a good morning to you too Denise,” says The Doctor in a groggy but happy voice. The unsettling feeling that comes with the job hardly sits with him for long. The Doctor walks into the patient room to check on the child’s progress and talk to the mother. “How are you Ma’am?” after quite a long pause he gets a reply.
“Is she ok?” she asks with a concerned but almost offencive, defencive voice.
“She’s just fine.” says the doctor as he looks over the information on his clipboard, checking for things that he has checked for so many times that he starts to check out. Lost in thought he is interrupted by the woman awkwardly blurting a question out.
“What are you doing to her,”
“Well the idea is quite simple. I will run through traumatic memories, and then I’ll be able to identify and delete memories of trauma. In reality it’s much more complex and time consuming than that in order to make sure your daughter is safe.” She doesn’t reply and just stares at the little screen watching her daughter play through her eyes. The doctor leaves the room to go review data with some colleagues and have a little lunch break.
“So how where they found again?” Says one of the office ladys a few feet down the table.
“They found them camping in the woods, the mother was rambling about the daughter getting into trouble. They took the daughter here for an evaluation and now a full PTSD fixup.”
“Hmm mysterious.” Says the other office lady in a high pitched voice with some sarcastic humor tucked somewhere in her comment.”
After the lunch ends the doctor pulls one of his closest colleagues aside and whispers to him.
“I’m a little worried about one of my patients, the girl found with her mother more specifically.”
“What concerns you?”
“ Well, its the mother, She.. she doesn’t seem all there.”
“What do you mean?” replies the colleague with a sense of concern and intense interest.
“ Well it’s a lot of little things really, and I guess one big one”
“Well what is it?” his colleague says getting worried and impatient
“ Well first of all she takes these long pauses whenever I speak, and sometimes her replies have nothing to do with what I am talking about. Lastly, when watching her in the room through the cameras I see her stare off without moving, then all of a sudden she’s intently talking to I don’t know who.
“Hmmm, You should look into that.”
“I will.”
She looks around confused, not remembering when they took her back to the viewing room, or why. She looks up at the four corners of the room, this time spotting the artificial eye staring back at her. Frantically moving the chair over she grasps the camera with desperate hands and rips it from the wall. Throwing it through the small panel of glass on the door she reaches through, unlocks the door, and runs.
At the final exit of the hospital She stops to see the doctor standing just far enough away to pose no obstacle. He yells at her.
“Stop running, they will catch you, you have to serve the time for what you did to your daughter.”
She looks at him, her face showing a sadness you can’t mistake.
“My daughter died, I buried her myself.” She turns, and jumps.