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  MERCY

  KC DECKER

  Cover Design by Nautilus Graphic Design

  Copyright © 2020 By KC DECKER

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright

  reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced,

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and

  incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons;

  living or dead, businesses, companies, brands, locales

  or events is entirely coincidental.

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark

  owners of various companies and brands referenced in

  this work of fiction, which have been used without permission.

  The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized,

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  Do not be ashamed of the wars

  your soul has fought

  to save itself.

  Isra Al-Thibeh

  Prologue

  They say, your value doesn’t decrease based on someone’s inability to see your worth, but what if that sentiment was just dried up words? A phrase, delivered before falling to the ground to be stepped on and forgotten about? The truth is, sometimes, someone’s perception of you has the power to change the entire trajectory of your life.

  Perception is critical here. That concept has altered my life in ways I can’t even quantify, much less understand. In my case, my parent’s perception of me reduced my value to nothing. My very name whispered on a breeze, tasted like brimstone in their mouths.

  Suffice it to say, my take on my own situation is quite different than the fanatical religious zealots that brought me into this world, only to discard me at the whim of a ripe old man with too many wives. That’s right, my parents abandoned me as a child because our sect leader convinced them I was evil. Can you begin to understand how that perception may have altered my life?

  Ironically, my name is Mercy, though my parents showed me none. If you buy the nonsense they’re selling, you’d think my very birth foretold of an evil prophesy. You’d believe my tiny infant breaths had cursed the righteous and that my childhood cries bespoke of madness.

  While that telling is all very dramatic and compelling, it’s not the whole story. The truth is, I was almost ten years old before the religious cult began to insist I had been kissed by the devil. At the time, I bought into their snake handling and all the thrashing around on the floor because I was an impressionable kid, and having been born into such rituals, I emphatically drank the Kool-Aid.

  Even back then, I knew there was something wrong with me, though my childhood mind didn’t have even the shakiest grasp of understanding the cause. I simply took the sect leader’s word for it—right along with the blast of spittle from his mouth.

  It’s easy to believe you harbor demons inside if you wake up screaming in terror and hosed down with sweat four nights a week. I was too young to understand the nightmares, so my entire childhood was bloated with the sanctimonious crap fed to The Believers regarding their origin. I knew something ugly lived in me, but their poisonous ideology was just as deadly as the snake venom used to flush out my sickness.

  It’s only upon years and years of reflection that I no longer believe in their staunch conclusions, and now, I certainly question the ritualized manner in which they landed upon them. In a lot of ways, the aforementioned years were akin to jumping from the frying pan into the fire, but again, perception is everything.

  Nowadays, how people perceive me is clouded by a different set of convictions and a whole new doctrine. It’s a different batch of Kool-Aid, but I still have no choice about whether to swallow it or not. Not while I’m here and labeled a Ward of the State.

  I’ve worn all types of labels over the years—non-believer, deranged, orphan…It’s all in my file if you care to understand me better. But the label that seems to have implanted the deepest and garnered the most attention is the one I wear like a Scarlet Letter. It precedes me when I enter a room and is whispered about like a schoolyard crush.

  Paranoid Schizophrenic.

  Chapter 1

  The countdown has begun. The hands of fate will soon shift my circumstances once again. You see, I’m nearly twenty-one years old. That particular age may serve a different milestone for more traditional young adults, but not for me. The legal drinking age and the dizzy haze of alcohol hold absolutely no draw for me. I take enough meds here to keep my ears ringing and maintain a constant high, so at this point, a beer is pretty much child’s play. Amateur hour at best.

  I’ve spent half my life bobbing for air as part of the system, and that cycle has only differed in the length of time spent underwater. I’ve had countless foster families over the years and been welcomed into a variety of living environments. Then, boom, an episode lands me right back here.

  Being juggled by interim parents is difficult, and often a bit of a calculated risk—not just for them, mind you, I’ve had to weigh the risks myself. Does one remain guarded? Or embrace them fully, knowing the tide can shift at any moment?

  Of all my placements, the worst foster families for me have not been the borderline abusive or the neglectful ones. No, the worst placements have been the loving ones—especially the families with their own biological kids.

  You may find that hard to believe, but it’s as true as the psychosis behind these locked unit doors. The loving families have always been the hardest for me. They have been the ones who have damaged me the most. They’ve left the deepest scars—and wounds of the heart don’t ever fully heal. First, they fester. Then, they lie dormant until you cease to acknowledge their existence. Only then do they grow bold and begin to manifest themselves in ways you never see coming.

  Wounds of the heart are vicious, destructive beasts, and unless you can figure out how to excise them from the root, they will continue to feed from their host. They are the worst kind of parasite because they are the ones we unknowingly nurture.

  In order to fully comprehend my bitter sentiment, you would have to understand the blowback from my abandonment. I was discarded by my parents just shy of my eleventh birthday, and every foster parent since has followed suit.

  I’ve been treated like Cinderella in foster homes. I’ve been forced to rub bunion-riddled feet on a nightly basis. I’ve eaten nothing but canned goods for weeks at a time. I’ve been backhanded, tickled inappropriately, screamed at, and ignored. But nothing comes close to the savagery of being loved, and then sent back.

  After the first couple of placements, I got the lay of the land. Rule number one, don’t get too comfortable. I would say after the first six months of being bounced around, I had a steady grasp of how things would play out. In fact, I learned rather quickly that I almost didn’t even need to unpack if there were biological kids involved.

  Like I said, the families with their own homegrown kids were the worst. The fear of my psychosis somehow damaging their perfect, God-given children was always far more compelling than the bouts of love and kindness they ever pointed in my direction. Which brings me to lesson two, fear is always stronger than compassion.

  The grooves worn into my soul from the cyclic nature of being passed back and forth between foster parents and the state psych ward are devastatingly deep. Some would even say, unrecoverable.

  Anyway, I deal
t with that implosion of self-worth for damn-near a decade before my eighteenth birthday threatened to dump me out onto the streets to figure shit out on my own. That thought gnawed through my stomach like an ulcer the whole of my seventeenth year before anyone started whispering about the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act.

  That little bit of legislation allows me to remain in the system under federal funds until I turn twenty-one. The only stipulations being that I complete 80 hours a month either, attending high school, getting a GED, enrolled in a college, university, or vocational school, or by participating in a job training program.

  Those parameters, although well-meaning and I’m sure, quite necessary, always caused me to snicker a little bit behind my hand. To me, 80 hours a month is a lazy show of intent. Someone like me, who’s always searching for ways to validate themselves, tends to be a much higher achiever. I had my high school diploma by the time I was sixteen and a bachelor’s degree in graphic design three years later. Since then, I have bided my federally funded time stacking up post-graduate certifications and doing freelance work because, the truth is, I have nowhere else to go.

  I think it’s safe to say I work very hard at proving to everyone that despite my mental illness and repeated abandonments, I am a high functioning, capable, worthy person. I may not have acquired a whole lot of love outside of these walls, but I do get important doses of it in here.

  The psych ward.

  Day to day life on a locked unit is a little redundant and overly structured, but it’s not too bad. Usually, the day starts with 7:00 am morning checks. I say, usually because this morning was a little different. It started with a shriek that all but dumped everyone from their beds at twenty after six.

  It was Veronica. She is a sweet girl, but she comes up with some extravagant tactics to remove herself from approaching mealtimes. She has been here long enough to have picked up some tricks from the schizophrenics too. Though she has a whole host of legitimate issues, suffering from delusional psychosis is not one of them.

  So, when her screaming at monsters and clawing at the wall had the desired, and entirely pre-meditated effect of bringing the code team in to restrain and sedate her, she effectively opted out of breakfast this morning.

  Veronica is as messed up as a bag of hangers. Not because she is receiving psychiatric care—because we are all here for a reason, but because her OCD requires her to count everything that has to do with eating. How many bites, how many times she chews on each side of her mouth, how many breaths between bites, how many blinks between bites, how many heartbeats between bites, how many times she licks her lips or swallows. She counts ev-er-y thing. Apparently, her ritualistic eating habits ease her anxiety and prevent bad things from happening to her.

  I know how to talk to a schizophrenic in the throes of psychosis, but I have no idea how to talk to someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder. A psychotic episode requires a certain amount of finesse, and it’s always important to validate the person’s feelings while at the same time letting them know you don’t see or hear whatever it is that they are experiencing. With Veronica’s OCD, I can’t bring myself to validate her feelings because I don’t understand how the rituals prevent something bad from happening.

  Zombies, beetles, spiders, demons, voices, cackling laughter—everything sensory I can validate because it is very real to the person in crisis. But I can’t get my head around Veronica’s illness. I like her a lot, and she is one of my best friends, so I say all the same stuff to her as I do to the hallucinating schizophrenics, “I don’t see that, (or understand how counting every fucking thing helps) but I can tell it really bothers you, so I understand it must be very difficult.” It’s a canned response at this point, but I suppose I owe everyone the same level of support.

  Logic doesn’t work on this floor anyway. It’s pointless to reason with the delusional because if someone sees rats pouring in through the window, it’s futile to explain that we are on the 5th floor of a unit without mirrors, shoelaces, or functional windows and that there couldn’t possibly be rats coming in through them. Rationale has no place here; it just doesn’t work. Not for OCD and not for schizophrenia.

  In most cases, though, we schizophrenics are self-actualized enough to know we may see and hear things that others don’t. In fact, not a day goes by that someone doesn’t ask me if something is real. I personally never ask. If something is real to me, it’s real enough. I don’t need anyone else’s input. I may not see the laughing mannequin, or the coyote eating a bloody rabbit in the corner, or the clown skipping down the hall, but I see plenty of my own shit.

  So, turns out, I’m pretty screwed up too. I said Veronica is as messed up as a bag of hangers, but she really isn’t that bad. At least she is nowhere near as bad as the new chick that sings everything. Tracy’s singing voice has a way of crawling up your spine like a cat in the curtains. I never would have guessed that listening to a melodically delivered conversation would be quite so aggravating, but sure enough, it is. In summary, we have all kinds here, folks.

  Anyway, long story short, Veronica will miss breakfast today.

  ***

  It’s Monday, so after breakfast and morning meds, I’m required to meet with my psychiatrist, Dr. Sigmund. Just so you know, the irony of his name is not lost on me, it’s just that I ran out of Freudian jokes five years ago.

  After a few years in and out of his care, I started calling him Dr. Siggy. And now? Now, I just call him, Sig. It’s not out of disrespect though, it’s because he is more like a father to me than a psychiatrist. I quit with the formalities ages ago and have grown rather used to his long-suffering glances.

  Sig has been with me almost since the beginning. I was only at St. Vincent’s Children’s Home for a couple years before my age demanded I spend the time between foster families in the Juvenile Behavioral Unit. The JBU is where Sig became my psychiatrist until the ripe old age of eighteen—or, more specifically, until I was moved to the Adult Behavioral Unit.

  After I left, it wasn’t more than four months before Sig left the JBU in favor of this wing of the state hospital though. I like to think he preferred working the adult unit because he could monitor my care, but he may have just been fed up with the adolescent wing.

  I, for one, broke him in pretty good over there because I was twelve when I was moved from St. Vincent’s. He was prepared for all types of neurology and psychiatric based care, but I spent the duration of our first session balled up on the floor with crippling menstrual cramps. Sadly, the pain wasn’t even what had me in hysterics, it was that I had just gotten my first period and had not one single clue what to do about it.

  Sig had made a run at consoling me and tried explaining that I was a woman now, but I didn’t give a shit about that. At the time, I could not see past the fact that Neil and Benji had laughed at the blood on the back of my sweat pants, and that my uterus was trying to shift itself inside-out.

  Anyway, from 12 to nearly 21 years old, he has been pretty consistent in my life. I always missed him while I was placed in a foster home, but he was always here when they sent me back.

  Chapter 2

  Sometimes I knock on Sig’s door, other times, not so much. I figure we have been at this song and dance for nine years, he should be expecting me on Monday mornings by now.

  When I walk in and plop down on the requisite leather couch, his back is to me, and he is studying his bookshelf. He likes to pretend he reads all those books, but I just think he is an old man that can’t let stuff go. I’m sure the field of psychiatry has evolved in the forty years he’s practiced, but his bookshelf hasn’t.

  “Mercy, good morning,” he says as he turns around. He does a pretty good job of masking his annoyance, but the candy jar from his desk is now poured out on my lap so I can dig out all the cinnamon ones.

  “Morning, Sig. What’s on the agenda today? I haven’t had a med change in a while, maybe it’s time to shuffle things around—you know, keep the nurse
s on their toes.”

  “Why would we do that? You’re on a therapeutic dose, and you haven’t had any hallucinations in months.”

  “But, my mouth is really dry.”

  “Mercy,” he says with fatherly disappointment, as he takes a seat behind his desk, “That’s not a good reason to take you off the Clozapine.”

  “Fine. If my dry mouth is of no consequence, what else should we talk about?”

  I watch him shift around uncomfortably in his seat until my mind starts to wander, and I all but diagnose him with hemorrhoids. After many minutes sifting through the crappy butterscotch candy and patiently awaiting his psychiatric preaching, Sig opens his mouth to say something. Before he even makes a sound, he clamps his mouth shut. This very uncharacteristic gesture gets my attention real quick.

  I still have several months until I turn 21, so it can’t be about my ward of the court status. My gaze lands on him where it stays, no longer super patient, but humoring him just the same. The crease in his forehead makes him look ancient. Shit, I hope his loss for words isn’t because he is about to divulge something horrible about his health.

  “Well, spit it out, we only have an hour,” I say with false bravado. If he is dying. I’ll lose my mind.

  “Mercy—”

  “I…I—”

  “I need to talk to you—” he says gravely. Holy shit, he’s choked up. I think his chin might be quivering, but that could also be a visual side effect of my meds.

  “About something serious.”

  I sweep my lapful of candy to the floor as I sit forward on the edge of the couch. He’s the only person to have ever stuck around. The only constant in my life. Where is this conversation going?

  “The Board of Directors has asked me to resign.”