Sorrow Like The Taste of Rain Version I Draft I

“I love the way your voice can hold sorrow like the taste of rain.”
Laurell K. Hamilton, Cerulean Sins.

They hanged me on my sixteenth birthday. I could feel the soft, south wind blowing through my auburn curls that I was supposed to keep hidden under my bonnet but never did. The emerald leaked out of my eyes with the force of lightening and the slow viscosity of rain water. My mind darted about like the sunlight dancing through the leaves of the trees. My spirit ricocheted back and forth to the rhythm of my body swinging back and forth from the noose in the wind. I smelled the earth around me with such a power that can only be described as vengeance. The aroma of damp soil filled my nostrils. I could feel the dirt on my feet even though they hung far above the ground. They hanged me on my sixteenth birthday, May 1, 1648.
“Juliana, my name is Dr. Barrerra. I’m going to be your psychologist during your stay here at Ridgeview Institute. I hear you’ve been refusing to eat, is that true?” She stared at me with solid brown eyes. I could tell they were guarded eyes, eyes that were trained to filter out emotional response. They were strange eyes. Human eyes were usually the betrayers of the soul. If Dr. Barrerra had a soul you surely wouldn’t be able to tell by her eyes. On top of that, her eyes didn’t match her face. Dr. Barrerra had the face of a young woman. Her makeup was a combination of conservative with a slight edge of experimental. Light on the eyeliner, heavy on the eye shadow that was in the same color family as her pants suite and heavy on the lipstick. She had the makeup of a woman younger than 40 but the trained emotionless eyes of an old woman who was no longer shocked by things. She had the hair of a young woman, long enough to make a statement of youth but short enough to be conservative. Spiral ringlets framed her face, and it was obvious that blonde was not her natural hair color.
I stared into those emotionless eyes and shrugged my shoulders. Dr. Barrerra tapped her legal pad with her blue pen. “Julianna, you are ware that if you refuse to eat you are then required to drink the equivalent in Ensure.” I stared at the poster on the wall next to the chair she was sitting in. I recognized it because it was a reproduction of one of the handouts the nurses give out. It had about a hundred smiley faces with different expressions, with each expression written underneath it. They gave it to us because an answer of “I don’t know” to the question, “how do you feel?” was clinically unacceptable. It was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. And I hated it.
I looked back at Dr. Barrerra’s solid eyes. She tapped her pen on her legal pad. She seemed to think that doing that would extract and answer from me. If that’s what she thought, then she had another thing coming. I knew from her eyes that she didn’t care whether or not I gave an answer. So I didn’t give her one. “Julianna, by now you should be aware that if you refuse three meals in a row, if you refuse Ensure, we are compelled to insert a feeding tube. You are not allowed to refuse an NG tube either by law or by the fact that you are a minor.” She tapped her pen again. If she tapped it one more time I was going to have to deck her and take the pen. I kicked the chair with the heels of my combat boots and pulled my legs up to sit Indian style in the chair. I picked at the frayed rips in my jeans. I kept my eyes on what I was doing but answered her. “I don’t need an NG tube. You know that, and I know that. So cut the anorexic minor bullshit because both of us know that doesn’t apply to me. Both of us know that’s not why I’m here. So cut the crap before I take that pen and shove it up your ass.”
If I’d rattled her, her face did not betray it. Her face betrayed nothing. She looked down at the open file folder in her lap. “You may not have been admitted for an eating disorder, but your case file says that you have a history of both anorexia and bulimia dating back several years. You’ve refused meals. You’ve refused Ensure. It’s part of my job to notice that.” I stared at her coldly. “It’s part of your job to learn how to count too, right? I haven’t refused three meals in a row. I haven’t refused enough food for you to stick a tube down through my nose that I’ll just cough up in the shower anyway.”
Dr. Barrerra stared at my file. “Juliana, I’ve noticed that you’ve left out a lot of vital personal information.” I picked at the frayed rips in my jeans. “You say my name a lot. Having a hard time concentrating, Miranda?” Dr. Barrera suddenly averted my gaze, but only for a half second. “Giving me a hard time is not going to make me go away, Julianna. Repetition of your name is a method of disrupting your disassociation. It’s part of being mindful.” I moved a stray hair out of my face. “Being mindful? I thought it was called self actualization.” “Either way, you’re going to have to finish filling out these forms. Your time is up.” She reached in her bag and pulled out a stack of paper, which she put on the table before getting up and leaving.
It began with the snows of New England. It began with drifts that were often invisible, with drifts that were deeper than they appeared, if you were lucky enough to see them. When the sky was sunless, it was impossible to see where the white earth ended and where the sky began. Mamma often said that her soul was like the snow covered earth and Papa’s was like the winter sky, so melded together that not even God could put it asunder. Perhaps it was the loss of such a sky, the sleep of the sun, that made my mother pass on to me the secrets of her heart.
“Annie,” she would say to me as she spun at her wheel and I knitted by the fire, “I gave you a good Christian name and a good Christian father to protect you from the ever watching eye of the Church. We must not forget the Old Ways. The Old Ways must remain fresh in our hearts as we hide ourselves among those who wish us dead.”