Home > Bitter Ground : A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel

Bitter Ground : A Northern Michigan Asylum Novel
Author: J.R. Erickson

1

 

 

She’d never intended to go back, to remember, to face it.

Riza had found him in an online forum. JunkyardDog13 had started the group to talk about the asylum. ‘Seeking former patients,’ that kind of thing. The conversation was surface, but now and then he’d drop a seed. ‘Private message me if you were one of the Six.’

Riza rarely spent time in chat rooms, but one evening she’d started searching the Northern Michigan Asylum and the page appeared. Some people shared neutral stories of their time as patients or nurses. They talked about the canteen burgers or the Friday night euchre. But JunkyardDog13’s posts always held an invitation to something more, to something only the Six would understand.

An invitation to a past she’d securely locked away.

Six years of therapy had her so well-adjusted that she fell asleep promptly at ten pm every night and woke up at six am without an alarm. She had a good job, an apartment, and a tidy little life. A notepad on her desk tracked every dime she made, every dime she spent, and every bill she owed. She paid everything a week in advance.

But the night Riza stumbled into the forum, something started turning like an old gear primed with oil and cranked back to life. She’d woken after years of nightly eight-hour uninterrupted slumbers and sat up in bed at midnight, soaked in sweat, the echoey sounds of that long-abandoned asylum ringing in her head.

Riza wouldn’t open that door. She’d visited Amy the next day and got a prescription for sleeping pills. She’d increased her other daily emotional practices, routines that helped her forget and move on. She attended yoga, meditated for a half hour every morning and every evening, and repeated affirmations in the mirror. “I am whole, I am healed.”

Days would go by and then, without a conscious thought, she’d be sitting in the blue glow of the computer screen scrolling through the comments, searching for some identifying clue in the usernames: Lakehouse312, Darkdreams8915, MyChevysBetterthanyourFord1962.

Had she known them? Had they brushed shoulders in the asylum halls, played dominoes, watched television in the community room?

Or worse, had they killed together?

 

 

2

 

 

On her day off, Riza woke thinking of the forum and climbed from bed, starting for her study before her better sense caught up with her.

“No,” she said and turned for the kitchen.

She turned on a CD she listened to daily, sometimes ten or twenty times a day. It included thirty-second blips of inspirational speakers, athletes and gurus saying things like ‘A thousand miles begins with a single step,’ and ‘You’ve got this.’

As the voices played, she washed the dishes, wiped the counters and brewed coffee.

Anyone who peeked in her window would see a woman who had it together. Her apartment was clean, her hair was washed, and not a single old newspaper cluttered a kitchen table or other surface. She’d stopped reading the news as part of her healing. That was something she could admit and people would nod. ‘Me too,’ they’d say, ‘it’s all so disturbing these days. Violence on every page.’

But those weren’t her reasons. Her reasons had to do with urges she’d fought for years to purge from her body. Stories that might pop up and send her reeling back to the girl she’d been, the monster.

“Yoga,” she muttered, sipping her coffee that had already gone cold and scanning the yoga studio’s website for the day’s offerings.

Power at ten, hot power at eleven, cardio yoga at noon.

She wanted to choose a power class, but Amy insisted she’d benefit more from yin classes—the classes that forced her to sit in stillness, to learn to be with discomfort.

“Yeah, right,” Riza mumbled, clicking to add herself to the five o’clock yin class.

 

 

During yoga, Riza lay on her mat gazing at the flickering orange lights that danced across the ceiling, emitted by battery-operated candles. The teacher’s music played from an iPod propped on a shelf in the corner. The song probably had a name like Flutes in a Rainy Forest.

I am whole, I am healed, she repeated in her own head, staying with the breath for twenty seconds and then getting pulled back into her thoughts. Chitta vritti, the teacher called it—the fluctuations of the mind.

“Let’s transition out slowly,” the teacher said, her voice like water flowing through stones. “Roll to one side and find the fetal position. When you’re ready, press up to a comfortable sitting space.”

Riza followed instructions, all the while repeating I am whole, I am healed, sending breath into her belly and feeling it rise and fall beneath her hand.

There was cushion there, a layer of flesh she’d never experienced in the years before her twenties when she’d strolled through life as emaciated as an alley cat with feline leukemia. She’d been as mangy too, but that had been before, and now she had the healthy girth of someone who ate three meals every day. She was still skinny by normal standards, with a flat chest and bony angular limbs, but nothing compared to what she’d once been. Her fingernails and hair had changed too, and her eyes, once hollow and haunted, had cleared. Now they were the unnerving dark brown, bordering black, that caused strangers to do a double-take as if checking to see if she wore creepy contacts.

At home after yoga, she filled a glass of milk and walked straight to her study, where she booted up her desktop computer. Ignoring the voice urging her to stop, she clicked into the forum and read the post that changed everything.

‘Jaws and Sandy fell in the hole. If you’re out there, Alley Cat, you’re in danger.’ The poster was JunkyardDog13.

Riza dropped her glass of milk.

The cold liquid splashed across her pants and she shrieked, jumping away from the screen. Her blue mug banged across the plastic mat beneath her desk.

Riza shoved her pants down and flung them across the room with one foot, continuing to stare at the comment as she wiped at her leg with the napkin she’d intended to set her glass on.

‘Jaws and Sandy fell in the hole.’

That was what they’d called it when one of the doctors died. ‘They fell in the hole.’ Jaws and Sandy were dead. She hadn’t seen them in years, hadn’t heard the nicknames they’d given themselves.

Jaws, chosen for his tendency to bite at you and his little beady eyes like shark eyes. Sandy, because she had the innocent wide-eyed face of the blonde goody-two-shoes from Grease. Riza had been Alley Cat, the name given to her by Jaws, who said she was as mean as an alley cat. Casey got Junkyard Dog because he lost his shit regularly and he loved the pro wrestler who shared the name. The fifth was Ice, because he fished everyone’s ice from their cups and crunched it. He barely ate, but ice was an obsession. Lastly, there’d been Merlin, magic, the one who could see things before they happened, except he hadn’t seen the most important thing of all.

Once upon a time they’d been a family. A family of orphans who’d lived in an asylum that was breathing its final breath.

So many of their antics had been the stuff of kids, but then it had changed.

One night while they’d sat in the old asylum, they’d shared their stories. Why hadn’t they before? Riza didn’t know. Amy would say to protect themselves, to hide the shame and fear, because they could trust no one, but they had trusted one another, relied on one another. Still, when one of the Six came back from a night in the woods with the doctors, they gathered around him or her, but they didn’t prod and demand to know where they’d gone, what had happened to them.

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