Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 110492 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110492 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
“Torri, be fair!” Chuck exclaimed. “It wasn’t ‘one little thing’—the police were called out twice and I’ve got a scar on my face where you stabbed me with a fucking butcher knife!”
“For the last time, I didn’t mean to stab you!” Torri cried impatiently. “You woke me up in the middle of a night terror and you looked like him!”
“Like him? You mean the alien overlord who’s coming to take over the Earth? Is that who I looked like?” Chuck snapped.
“Yes, all right?” Torri shouted. “Yes, you looked like the AllFather and that’s why I stabbed you! Are you happy now? Are you?”
A voice in her head whispered that she was going to deeply regret this conversation in the near future, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. The aliens were coming—she knew it the same way she knew her eyes were brown and two plus two equaled four. They were coming and the one person who should have been willing to believe her—to at least listen, no matter how crazy it sounded—was her husband.
Her husband who had put her away—who had locked her up and tossed away the key.
“No.” Chuck’s voice sounded more tired than angry in her ear. “No, Torri, I’m not happy,” he said. “What would make me happy is if I could have my wife back. The wife I used to know—not the one who started blanking out at work and screaming the house down at night and sleeping with a knife under her pillow. I want the wife who didn’t believe in conspiracy theories, like that aliens are coming to take over the Earth and enslave us all. Can you find her somewhere? Can you bring my wife back—the one…that one I used to know?”
His voice broke on the last word and Torri felt like something was breaking inside her as well.
“It’s not a conspiracy theory,” she whispered. “It’s the Seeing Dreams. I can’t help what they show me, Chuck. My Nana had them too and they’re always, always right. Can’t you even try to believe me?”
There was heavy breathing on the other end of the line for a moment. Torri had never seen her husband cry—Chuck was a man’s man who didn’t believe in showing much emotion. But she thought he might be crying now—or at least coming as close to it as he ever had.
“Chuck?” she whispered, gripping the phone receiver so tightly she could hear its plastic casing creak. “Chuck, I’m really sorry. I wish I could tell you, it’s not true, but I just can’t. I wish—”
There was a click and the line went dead—he had hung up on her.
“Chuck? Chuck?”
Torri couldn’t believe it—couldn’t believe that he had cut her off like that. She pulled the heavy, old-fashioned receiver away from her ear and looked at it, as though she could somehow see through the tiny holes all the way to the other side where her husband was.
“Ms. Morrison, please hand me the phone,” the nurse behind the plastic window said.
“Call him back,” Torri said numbly.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. Please give me the phone now,” the nurse insisted.
“But…but that ended badly,” Torri protested. “I shouldn’t have yelled at him, shouldn’t have tried to—” She cut herself off abruptly but the thought went on in her head.
Shouldn’t have tried to convince him about the aliens and the AllFather coming for the Earth. Shouldn’t have asked him to stretch his imagination even one little bit because Chuck doesn’t have an imagination. To him I just sound crazy.
“I’m sorry, but other patients are waiting to use the phone,” the nurse said sternly, even though there was nobody else at the nurse’s station. “Please hand me back the receiver, Ms. Morrison, or I’m afraid I’ll have to revoke your phone privileges for the foreseeable future.”
“But—” Torri started, and then realized it was no good. Even if she got them to call Chuck back for her, he wasn’t going to take the call. He might never take a call from her again and he was her only way out of here. Her only way out and she had pissed him off and made him cry. Chuck hated to get emotional—he would hate her for making him get that way.
She had probably just ruined any chance she had of getting out of here in the foreseeable future.
“Ms. Morrison?” The nurse’s voice had grown sharp.
Numbly, Torri handed back the phone.
What else could she do?
Four
After break time, Torri had one-on-one therapy with Dr. Burrows.
Burrows was the psychiatrist who had been assigned specially to her, but he was also the head of the entire unit. He was a skinny man with thinning black hair and bulging, china-blue eyes who always wore a long white lab coat with his name embroidered on the pocket.
“Ah, Torri, come have a seat,” he said, when she entered his office after a perfunctory knock. “I understand you’ve been having a rough day today.”