Kankakee State Hospital, Kankakee, Illinois, 6:55 a.m.
The fierceness of the stench was distracting. It plucked and snapped its way through her heightened sense with a raw willpower of its own. It wasn’t the norm. It was something new. A stink that rose above everything else. It was the smell of someone’s insides turned out. It clung to the air with stubborn determination. Jane Jones found herself strangely fascinated with it.
She sat perched on the edge of her narrow bed. She picked at a frayed thread on the coarse linen with her thumbnail, calculating the distance in her head.
“One hundred feet,” she said. Her left leg bounced as she concentrated, hammering the sole of her rubber shoe into the linoleum. It was important she got this right. It would prove she was one of them. It would confirm she was special.
“One hundred and twenty-seven to be precise. What floor?”
Jane cocked her head in the direction of the ceiling. “Eight?”
“Good.”
“It smells like shit up there. Like, literal shit. A lot of it.” Jane stifled a gag. “What is going on?”
She glanced at the dull-red metal door that separated her from the world outside. It added only a hint of color to the otherwise blanched walls of the room. She related to that door. She was a blink of light in a growing sea of shadow. She couldn’t allow that light to be suffocated and extinguished. Just like time would eventually do to that door.
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Catherine Ann 