from The Scientific Theory of Magic
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HS82BW4
The girl hadn’t spoken for three weeks. She would barely eat, but drank as much as they would give her. It was as though she wanted to wash her insides with as much liquid as possible.
She slept very little, eyes darting side to side like a frightened animal. She cowered when others were close by, and the thought of a roommate caused her to emit the only sound she had made since her last roomate moved out. It was a guttural cry of fear that was low and steady, almost like a siren. She might have been warning others, but what the warning was about, or who it was about, was beyond her keepers.
The hospital was a maximum security psychiatric hospital for those who had committed crimes, violent and/or otherwise, and who needed to be kept away from the general population of the state where the hospital was located. A ‘warehouse of crazies’ was the way many of the workers thought of the place. A haven for the anti-social was the way the administrators thought of it. A DMZ no-man’s land was the way the locals thought of the place. The girl thought the place was hell on Earth.
But it wasn’t the place that had caused her to become silent and afraid. She was, after all, the girl who had committed a violent and horrendous crime against her own family, killing each one of her siblings as well as her parents with an ingenious home-made poison that she administered secretly over a period of several weeks. If she hadn’t been so proud of her accomplishment that she confessed to the authorities and gave them every detail of her crime, including the recipe for the poison, she may have gone undetected. It was her pride, her pesky emotion of pride in her accomplishment, that caused her to be in the psych hospital system in the first place. And eventually to get the female roommate who scared her into becoming the frightened animal she now was.
Pride truly went before her fall, but it was what happened after the fall, in that room with the other female, the one with dark hair, that was what turned her into what she was now; terrified.
Sathwik Thomas
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HS82BW4