Retribution of Madness

By Sharon Ritchie-Brown

Elsie was in her early teens when she was sent to an institution for the criminally insane after her young son was discovered dead by apparent suffocation. Elsie recounts the stories that caused others to be inmates,like Misty who killed her husband with a machete after he asked her to leave the matrimonial home; Doris, an uneducated house housekeeper who worked at the home of Mrs.Sam whose husband became her own husband after Mrs. Sam died; The nurse who oversees the institution and who has a deep and abiding distrust of Elsie; her own mother, whom she believes was wanton and promiscuous. Elsie struggles with reality and tells the story in the first person, leading the reader to have doubts as to her own sanity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sharon Ritchie-Brown
• Release date: Feb 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301553174

Sharon Ritchie-Brown

Sharon Ritchie-Brown is a Caribbean native. She has been living in the United States since 1994. She currently works as an Administrator of a credit union. She has written several unpublished short stories. This is her first novel. Mrs Ritchie-Brown resides in Florida, with her husband and two daughters.

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RETRIBUTION OF MADNESS

by

Sharon Ritchie-Brown

Smashwords Edition

Published on Smashwords by:

Sharon Ritchie-Brown

Retribution of Madness

Copyright 2011 by Sharon Ritchie-Brown

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CONTENTS

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24

CHAPTER 1

I am in an institution for the mentally deprived. I have been in this place for thirty-five years, eight months, two weeks, and four days as of this day, October 8, 1956. The deprivation has been sustained, if not stable. I have my days. Lucidity comes and goes. Happiness lies in the conversations I have with my depravity. One-sided conversations that would make the meaningless listener wonder if he himself were not some unknown being bereft of meaningful thought processes that I, the insane, seem to have.

•

This place is not to be confused with the physical place with its cream walls and dark borders and piss-stenched floors and mattresses. This is a place where I alone exist, where I talk and smile, and listen to nothing, where I scratch myself as whispers crawl over my skin and feel up my pussy until I can’t stand it, and I roll and hit my head mercilessly on the wall and wonder as to the cruelty of the whisper, or the wantonness of that untouched, unhandled—except for the whispers. It is the place I entered first when I was eighteen years old, before I was brought to this place.

Today I am lucid. I am listening to my friend Misty as she describes to me how she came to chop up her husband with a machete and dump his body in a crocus bag. Misty is my only friend. She does not speak to me often, never touches me, does not say encouraging words to me, but when the whispers come, she fans me with the rolled-up newspaper she has been carrying for years—a picture of her dead husband and the newspaper article that made her famous.

And she screams, Die, fuck face Ashton, just fucking die! and those whispers crawl off my back, off my breast, all the length of my body, and just disappear. And I live again.

There are many stories to tell in this place I have come to call home. I have come to know its inhabitants better than I knew my own mother and her dear offspring, my sister. The inhabitants come and go. They go through death; by walking out unhindered never to return; or by loved ones who offer deliverance from the asylum. They come through human neglect, unimaginable tragedies, or a return from a deliverance short-lived. Over thirty years, their stories have become my stories. It is not that I am sane and everyone else is mad. Oh, any decent doctor worth his or her salt would tell you: far from it. But since I am who I am, I take the good with the bad.

•

Fuck face Ashton met Misty when Misty was in her late twenties. Ashton was going to college, and Misty worked as a domestic helper. It was love in the morning for Misty. She liked Ashton and knew that if she did not have him, then her slight existence would be slighter still. He educated himself, and she worked and allowed him to do so.. He taught her social must-dos and must-don’ts. She hoped there would come a day that the life she envisioned for herself was a life of must-dos.

The day came, brash and protected. She threw parties, cooked large meals, entertained his friends, pampered herself, fired the maids, hired new ones, and the days were secure into the twentieth year of their marriage. Then Ashton, educated, searched and found the covers, pulled them off, and Misty lay bare. By the time Ashton was forty, Misty was fifty-six years old. Though he realized that the truth favored neither one of them, he liked and waddled in the offence. She had lied about her age; he had married her because he had thought that she was not only hard-working but loved him enough to give him everything he wanted, too. The fact that her existence was what made him what he was did not enter his mind. The offensive was wonderful; it provided him with excuses he never even thought of, and he played his music and he alone danced.

Then came the comeuppance. It was brutal, and strife settled like cobwebs into their lives. Ashton, virile and beautiful, determined that he had given what he should, and Misty clung to hope for dear life. He found favor in the seekers and the young, and Misty’s heart moved from place to place in restless endeavors.

The morning Ashton died, he had used his heel to erase the line between Misty’s sanity and her love. Ashton simply told Misty that she needed to pack because one of the seekers was moving in. He left, warning her to be out by the time he returned.

Misty drove her brand-new Mercedes Benz to the nearest hardware store and purchased a $15.95 brand-new sharp-like-a-razor machete. She drove home, parked her car, curled up in her bed, and waited for Ashton.

Ha, ha, ha! Misty bellowed. When I chopped him the first time, he said, ‘Oh sweet Jesus, Misty! Jesus Christ, I beg you . . .,’ and I chopped and chopped, and he begged and begged. Misty paused. You know what I liked about that whole episode? The sound of that machete against skin. Nice, nice sound. It was usually at this point that Misty would walk away, and I was left to remember her story by everyone else’s recount.

By the time the police discovered Ashton was missing, Misty had washed away the blood off the walls and used her bare hands to rip away the red brown bloody carpet from the floor. She cut a new piece from an amount she had stored and covered the area, then she moved the king-sized bed over the spot.

Two weeks after Misty reported Ashton missing, his car was found burnt and hollowed about thirty miles from where they lived. Misty was never a suspect for the police. The Simpsons were near gentry, and in these parts of the world, it was not uncommon for a top executive to be attacked and robbed by criminals. Moreover, Mrs. Simpson had seemed too distraught to be questioned. She fainted when police told her that her husband’s car had been found burned and abandoned with no trace of him inside. And she vomited when they told her that in the trunk of the car there was an attaché case with thirty-five thousand dollars in cash still intact inside.

•

It was the gardener who led police to take an interest in Misty. The gardener was not near gentry, and neither were the police. Most of those police officers could not identify with Mrs. Simpson’s space or time. She was in another vestibule, far removed from the space and time they knew. She drove a brand-new Mercedes Benz, lived in a magnificent house, had a gardener and a maid, wore heavy impressive jewelry, and spoke the Queen’s English. The very reason she was not questioned in the beginning was the reason why Sergeant Bishop listened with keen interest as the gardener told him that there was something strange about Mrs. Simpson, that she appeared happy when she thought he was not looking and that she rearranged her room and put her bed in the middle of the twenty-by-twenty bedroom. Also, that long before the police suspected foul play, Mrs. Simpson had been giving away Mr. Simpson’s personal belongings, that she had given him two-dozen shirts, most of them brand new, and six pairs of shoes.

Shortly after that, Mrs. Simpson was arrested and charged with her husband’s murder. This was Laidlaw’s account. There are several other accounts, but that’s for later. For some reason, whenever Misty told her version of the story, it ended when she felt the machete on skin. It never went beyond that; and since I have never uttered a word except to myself in the thirty years I have been here, the validity of Laidlaw’s and others’ accounts went unchecked.

Misty told me this story at least once per month ever since she came to this place.

I remember the first day I saw her. One of the tallest women I had ever seen. One of the ugliest ones too. Yet you could tell she was no ordinary human being. She carried her frame with profound dignity. Dignity was foreign to me; I had never known it, never had it, and did not know if I would recognize it even if I saw it. Yet I clearly saw it that first day I saw Mrs. Simpson. She wrapped herself in it like an armor of shiny zinc, and it radiated and bounced and shone the way zinc does. The doctors and nurses saw it too, and unlike other humans in this place, like Laidlaw and Sam and Dust and me and countless others, Mrs. Misty Simpson was not escorted to her tiny room in this place. She walked to her own room, unpacked her own bags, requested to be left alone while she adjusted to her new space, and the doctors and nurses did just that.

Further, the keepers of this institution carry a perpetual look of either sadness or pity on their faces. The keepers have been keepers for a long time. Mildred, senior matron, a tough-bodied meager woman, has been in this place for more than thirty years. Sadness and pity is all she carries now, yet she became a different person when she spoke to Misty. It was almost as if she had found a peer, articulate, intelligent, witty, and one could argue, un-mad. Never mind that Misty was as mad as I was, as mad as Sam, as mad as all the others in this place. As mad as Dust.

CHAPTER 2

Dust was a handsome mulatto man. He was short and slim, grey brown eyes, big, thick, almost black lips in a brown face. His curly brown hair, was so in need of a cut, it looked like the hair of an old white doll that had been combed defenseless. Dust was a college boy. His father was a doctor and his mother a lecturer at St. James only university, the one Dust attended. Dust came to this place a month short of his twenty-second birthday. Before that he was in another institution, one whose walls were shaped and molded by his parents, an institution in which he had been a prisoner since he was eighteen years old. For that, Dust made them atone for their sins, and now Dust atoned for his. Young lady, you stink badly, please take a bath, he said to me as he sat down on the old couch Misty had now vacated. How did you manage to come to this place anyway? Only rich people can afford this place, and you not rich, so how is it that you’re here? I stared at him, and he stared back. Answer me, gal, and cease acting so strange. How come you can afford to stay in this place? Answer me, how come?

This was Dust, and I wondered whether he was referring to the place we both lived, the place our minds came to know, or that other place where he was king of the hill, rich, smart, and pompous, where he derided poverty, turned up his nose at it, and studied hard in his parents’ guided efforts to keep it at bay.

Dust’s story was all over the newspapers, on the radio, on TV, in the toilet, the kitchen, just everywhere. His father was a famous psychiatrist, an irony matched only by the fact that for years he was the senior medical officer for this place. Dust’s father was a perfectionist/snob who wanted more than just what was best for his son. Bruce wanted everything, and Bruce took everything he wanted. His opinions were predominant at work or play, in his child’s life, and in everybody else’s. He despised his son’s perceived weakness, a perception brought on by the misguided notion that Dust’s mother’s genes were either weak or inferior to his own; and he believed that Dust had inherited most of his mother’s genes and less of his own.

This fact would have been fine if Dust had been born a girl, and better still, had he not been Dust’s father. But this fact was not fine if Dust was to be a man and carry that Henriques name proudly. So by the time Dust was three, Bruce started the painstaking process of reengineering and reorganizing the gene, and in that process, he forgot a most important element, an element he was trained to remember. Dust’s mind had been floating since he was eighteen. At that age, he had never kissed a girl, asked her out, gone to the movies, drank a beer, or used a profanity. His surest company was his parents. He watched movies with them, went to dinner with them, went to parties with them, went to church with them, and kept his frustration at bay.

One morning Dust awoke with a hard-on, backed his fist, and sprayed liquid venom all over his bed. Dust was so terrified he screamed and hurriedly locked his door as his parents ran amok, and the element that his father took care of in other people and not his son floated on a wind and was gone.

Dust’s father did not notice the change in his son, at least not right away. Agatha noticed the changes as they occurred, but said nothing. Agatha was one of those women who put her faith in either the Lord or her husband. Her faith was equally strong in both, but the faith in her husband could not fight her instinct, and it had long since determined that this was not the way. She had prayed and asked God for the day