A dark, gloomy, damp fortress stood at the bottom and behind of a mountain, which overlooked the friendly peaceful town. The shadow of the mountain made sure the sun could never reach it, the mountain almost functioned like an arch, the way it actually had mossy dripping stalactites. The top of the massive fortress was endlessly wet, sometimes the ceilings for the rooms would leak. The thing that makes it LOOK depressing is it’s stone and plaster covered, dark gray walls which blended in perfectly with the shadow hanging over it, causing it to be totally invisible. No one in the town was aware of it’s existence except for their, now, deceased ancestors. You couldn’t find it even if you knew where it was, you could chase all around the mountain, look high and low but you’d never be able to find it unless you were escorted or...stolen. I live in the same room as a stranger but I’ve come to think of her as my big sister. She’s so cool, emotionless, confident, smart, sometimes I think she knows everything, and she’s pretty strong too! She’s got a few scars around her arms, legs, and one awesome looking one on her cheek, she says it’s not something to be proud of and that they make her hideous. I told her multiple times that they look like dramatic battle wounds and make her mysterious, she tries to smile but can only chuckle a little. But she’s told ME some things too. She said this place isn’t some foster home but a… “loonie bin”, whatever that means. And that we’re here because they want to examine our brains with some kinda torture, or how we’re apparently here because we’re not like other people. Sounds interesting to me, makes me feel special and important.

My name’s Cecilia and my ‘sister’ is Louise, her nickname for me is “Cilly”, the C pronounced like an S. I call HER “Lu” but most often I just call her “Big sis”. Lu tends to call me naive when I tell her my own perspective on things, it makes her...chuckle. I can tell that She’s laughing on the inside but I’ve never seen her truly happy, like it’s an emotion she simply wasn’t born with. I’ve asked her about it before and she just looks at me while she rubs her arms like they’re cold, it’s not a dark stare nor a scowl, she just simply stares at me silently. Every now and then Lu seems to change, when the guards take her out of the room and take her away until she’s out of sight then comes back, she has a different face on, she still has her freckles, small non-smiling mouth, and big scar on her left cheek but something’s different. She could be really, really nice, as opposed to her usual dark tone, a smile, though it came as more of an attempt. Her eyes glimmered like she was super excited about something and she’d hug me and ruffle my, already messy, knotted, and dirty hair and ask me questions about what we’d done to pass time the last few days. I was confused, always. Other times she’d come back and her eyes would be blank and hateful, she had the same look as someone who was about to kill somebody and enjoy it. She’d have fits, thrash around in the room, scream like something had stabbed her recently. And sometimes when she has that hateful look in her eyes she’ll hit me, just for ‘looking at her funny’, it’d leave a mark but after a while, my face grew numb and I’d just cover up my cheek with my hand. But I never once cried, I’m not sure why though, Lu’s told me before that whoever hit me wasn’t her. It’s when I show her the bruise that she ‘takes back control’, she’s tried explaining before;
“I have other people inside me, inside my mind.”
“Well...can’t we just open up your head and take them out?” She chuckled at the thought.
“It doesn’t work that way, cilly. They have names and live in my brain, they take apart things and turn them around to suit their fancy.” Lu did her best to keep a straight face, she had to simplify it to a child’s understanding, my eyes gleamed as my face lit up.
“Like decorative rearranging! I bet you have fun parties up there!” She looked down, her hand over her mouth as she slowly kneeled down from cracking up. It was only when she took a breath that she managed to speak properly.
“Sure. They take turns putting up one decoration at a time and each time one of them adds something new to the wall, they get to do whatever they want, they ‘take control’.”

She said ‘the torturers’ take her away to clean up the mess her ‘mind people’ make. Torturers is her own nickname for the doctors, I think it’s creative, from the room I can’t see what she’s talking about precisely. I don’t have much in-tell on ‘torture’, the big, rusty, metal bars keep me from looking and I can’t leave the room because the chains on my ankle won’t let me. We have a toilet close to the corner of the room and I’ve counted a total of 3 little spiders and 5 big ones that crawl up the walls and around my bed. I’ve given them all names, they’re my friends when I’m lonely in the room without Lu, the guards keep us in our rooms to protect us. It makes me feel safe, when they need to take us out, there’s this little hole on our chains and the guards come into our rooms with this little metal odd-shaped rod with ridged at the end to go into the hole that seems to fit it perfectly. None of them have ever taken ME out of the room so I’ve had the chain on for……. I can’t remember but, my ankle is always red with a big scar that goes all the way around, I’d chosen a long time ago to just ignore any pain that I felt and eventually, over time, it just stopped hurting. Lu says it’s a dead limb now and that it should be amputated because of it’s color and how different it looked toward my other foot. Swollen, blotchy blue with some yellow outlines. I’d tell her it’s fine by lifting my leg and thus, the foot along with it but it didn’t move with the leg nor the other lively foot. My chained foot dangled like the limb of a rag doll that had lost all it’s bean-stuffing in that part. At night, the spiders would rest themselves either on one of my arms, the small pillow or inside my loose chain, they were nice to me, I always gave them the last few crumbs of my leftover stale bread. I constantly fell asleep to the whining sad groans of our neighbors.

The next day, I woke up to Lu who was distraught about something, she was shaking the bars anxiously as she seemed to be pleading with someone. I turned over and rubbed my eyes to see she was begging a guard for something.
“PLEASE, PLEASE DON’T TAKE HER!! SHE’S TOO YOUNG!!!” A tear streamed down her face, this wasn’t the Lu I was used to.
“She needs to be examined, no child ought to be frolicking and giggling in her cell, there’s something wrong with her and we’ll find it!”
“NO!! I WON’T LET YOU!!!” The guard unlocked the cell door and Lu quickly came up from behind him and shot her sharp nails into his throat, she naws on her long nails all day long, I don’t so that’s why they’re 2 inches long. When I looked closer I saw that they were really sharp, nice one. But what did the guard want with me anyway? Maybe to do what Lu said I should and have my left foot amputated but...it was her idea!

The guard’s neck now had a gaping bloody hole as he laid on the floor in a growing red puddle. Lu didn’t even notice me standing beside my bed, several spiders along my crossed arms. Lu got on her knees and grabbed a ring from the guards belt which a bunch of those metal rods with the ridges and took a couple off. She stuck one of them in the hole in her chain and it popped off then she turned around, shock spread across her face which then dulled to a disappointed sigh with a look of boredom mixed with concerned as she walked over to me calmly. I didn’t flinch and I think she was expecting me to then knelt down with a different metal rod in hand then put it in the hole of my chain and said something that shocked me greatly. “I’m really sorry you had to see that...cecelia.” For some reason it gave me mixed feelings about her for that short time but I still had confidence in her, though I don’t think she had much in me. It was only when she unlatched the chain that I saw just how awful my foot looked. Whenever I saw someone walking normally on both feet, I always thought they had some sort of talent for it when I would limp, they would walk, when I hopped, they would run. I was disgusted by one of my own body parts and it made me a little ashamed that I was so stubborn as to not listen to my big sis about something like this. “Ready to get that former foot taken off?” Lu asked, seeming to have predicted my reaction to having my chain clicked off. I nodded slowly then she picked me up and we ran out of the cell, she hopped over the dying guard and shut the door behind us then put another rusty rod in the little hole on the door and turned it, there was a click sound then she put me on her back like a piggy back ride and started running down the wide, dark hallway, the opposite direction from the way the guards take her. Lu said we were going to the infirmary, I didn’t know what that was entirely but she said it was a place where the doc’s would fix all the problems with a person’s body on the outside. Something that caught my eye was the walls of the hallway, there were more doors, it showed, through the rusty bars, the people that made the groaning noises at night. They looked unhappy and had more cuts on their arms and legs than Lu only they didn’t have a cool battle scar on their faces, but they also had a bunch of bruises and a few big bumps that oozed some kinda odd liquid, it was green for some reason which I thought meant they had lizard blood. Others had some bite marks along one of their arms, a few were still bleeding meaning they were fresh. Were they biting themselves, this is getting creepy. “Lu...I don’t like it here, it’s scary.” “Just close your eyes, I won’t let them hurt you.” The lights above were dirty, dusty, cracked, dim, and flickering, every light we passed was like this and even with my eyes closed, I still shook a little with each flick. I felt one of the greatest sighs of relief when Lu said “we’re here.” She set me down and I felt a surge of pain shoot through me, I flinched. When I opened my eyes, they bulged with surprise and worry especially when I turned around and saw Lu putting a chair underneath the knobs and making a barricade while she mumbled stuff. “No doubt the cameras have seen us, I’ll just make the cut then we can get outta here!” She said then turned back to me and saw what I was seeing:
There were stretchers, the sheets were torn and had a moldy brownish outline, tattered, dirty, some of them had broken wheels.
The floors were dusty and the cold cement was heavily cracked, some weeds were growing in between some of them.
The stone brick walls were chipping, some were loose, they were wet looking(must’ve been the constant rain). The ceiling was all stone but some of the rainwater managed through and dripped heavily, creating puddles everywhere that had a brown stain outline. No matter how much it dripped, the puddle never got bigger other than it’s usual 1ft by 1ft. Lu started to walk me toward one of the corners which seemed to be the cleanest, there were a few funny looking toys next to the bed. Lu picked me up by the armpits and put me on the bed then told me to lay down, I did as she said then she went over to a cabinet that was above and pulled out a flask with some odd green liquid. “Close your eyes again.” She told me, I did so and after that I only heard the clicking of something plastic then something pointy was stuck into my thigh, the rest is a blurr.



By the time I woke up, I was, once again, in Lu’s arms and she was running down a thin hallway again. We passed a bunch of windows and I noticed we were really high up. I never knew the building went up this high then there was one big metal door coming up, it wasn’t locked as Lu opened it. We found ourselves on the wet roof, looking down to see a stone and gravel sidewalk far down at the bottom. Then big sister turned to me, I was still woozy from the pointy thingy that was put in my leg, she smiled at me, it was the first time I’d seen her smile as she held me tight. “Now then, at the bottom, there’s a new invisible bouncy house, technology has gotten pretty advanced while we were in the asylu-house. So they recently invented invisible play things and if we jump onto there, we’ll be the coolest kids in the village. We’ll be praised and loved and cherished and taken care of in a comfy mansion. We’ll land straight into a better place, ok?” I nodded excitedly and happily then I started getting a little nervous once we got to the edge meanwhile, Lu’s smile got bigger, that made me happy. We started to lean more and more forward until finally...we dived. It was a long way down we were head first and the whole time, my life was flashing before my eyes.



My name is Cecelia Rexand, I am five years old, I have long light brown hair and blue eyes. My friends are Max, alex, marion, sharon, and carrie, who are all spiders that crawled out of our toilet. I have an older sister, Louise axson, she's fifteen and has always looked after me, I can’t remember my parents or if I even had any, Lu, the nickname I gave my big sister tells me that I can have her parents. She may not look happy when we’re together but I know she is. I’ve gotten smarter the past few years but it was only THIS year that I started to really understand a few things. We live in an insane asylum, the groans I’d hear at night were because of all the patients that were in so much pain from the experiments they went through, when Lu said they were looking at other people’s brains, she was being literal, and Lu…. My big sister Lu developed multiple personality disorder as a way of coping. My arachnid(I know some big words as well from the bits that I’d hear the doctors say) companions were all poisonous, brown recluse’ and black widows mostly. And now, well, there’s no bouncy house at the bottom. We’re going to die and then go to heaven, Lu isn’t very direct but I know she wants to preserve what innocence I have so I’d have some hope for a vaguely normal childhood. But now that’s gonna end, our heads will squash like melons and our bodies will fall apart. Little does big sister know, I’ve already given up hope and so...I’m always and will stay thankful to her.
Goodbye, sincerely,
Cecelia and Louise