Flash fiction - Sanatorium, 1972

The ladies over at Studio 30+ gave us homework along with the prompts this week. It was to write and then wait. Sit back, read, re-read, let it stew and check it again the next day. I wrote Sanatorium, 1972 yesterday and it was good practice to come back to it today. I made some vocabulary changes. Reading it out loud was great. I don't do it enough, so thanks for that ladies.

The prompts this week come from Opal Reflections and the poem Pre-Dawn Reflections. They were "taught by my example" and/or "echoes". It should be obvious which I used! Thanks for reading.

Sanatorium, 1972

Isabella Snow thought she had them fooled: the memories, the trauma, the extreme mood swings and the night terrors. Famous painter turned poet with the fading white scars up her arms; she who had checked in over a month ago, hours before her deadline, clutching a yellowing photo of her father and a bottle of gin, no shoes. The first therapist, a fan, wanted to talk of her portraits, especially ‘Broken’. She hurled a vase at him. The second asked about her childhood. She spilled over herself, tripping on lost memories that made no sense with what the world actually knew. He gave her more pills, just sugar. The third therapist opened with, “I hated your last anthology.” Isabella smiled inside and cowered in her chair. ‘Echoes’ had been a roaring success, but she knew it was full of rainbows, shredded ropes of hope for the mindless to cling to. Here was what she really needed in order to write again. Pain. “Tell me,” she whispered back and prepared to really break herself open.  

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