One midwinter night the warm pitying foehn winds came from over the mountains to collapse upon the shin-deep snows of the institution grounds, wherein his ward Joseph woke to an inscription on his left eye. Though his head pulsed, pounded, and his eyelids quivered with pain, no surgeon or assailant hovered over him. So he watched with complete bewilderment as a miniscule shimmering line dragged itself across his vision, expanding into a sickle shape, the curvature of which hardened to create a triangle and continued on in a radial pattern of like-triangles, until all he could see was an image resembling the fortification plan of a prison keep or citadel. He stirred from his bed, careful not to disturb the other twenty-nine juveniles asleep in their rows, to look out of the steel-mesh covered window. The grounds of the surrounding campus were shadowed by the clouded moonless night, further obscured by the citadel of his eye. The only lights to be seen were faint singular shafts coming from the staff-room windows of the other buildings, illuminating patches of snow but doing nothing to dispel his vision. Joseph held his breath hoping his mind and body would correct themselves, shake off any lingering smoke of dream or delusion. This afforded him nothing but stray rasps in panting, and still the citadel-shape persisted. As he looked about the hall he thought he could see a hexagonal light source coming through a different window, so he went lightly across the linoleum floor to slide the sill open to its three inch limit. To his surprise a damp warm gust blew his hair back. He closed his eyes and listened, felt, the fierce howling of the wind that had been blowing since before his waking, rattling the windowpanes and the illuminated tips of tree branches. To his surprise the incised geometry began to fade in sections, as a rake gently levels sand, until he could once again see the smooth familiar darkness behind his eyelids. He opened them and peered with hesitant relief at the austere midnight landscape and sky, at the traces of wind inscribing their own patterns in the snow, retracing, then obliterating in the hurried warmth of a deviant season (the temperature would rise forty-one degrees by the next day) which some called midwinter spring. One could trust the weather as intermittently as Joseph trusted his mind. Once, but not since, he saw himself hanging by a noose from a tree in his family’s backyard and, after telling his mother, he was sent to this place, stripped of his belongings, his head shaved, his body hosed and scrubbed down with brooms. Again he looked out the window, toward the north, where somewhere in that stretch of darkness loomed the imposing four-storey redbrick building, fortress-like, that housed administration. It was once the only building on campus, the single home for them, the “feeble-minded”, but the campus had been long in growing. There was evidence of expansion all across the grounds, half-built structures that would one day contain even more residents, though with the construction staid by the recent freezing temperatures, they currently looked ripped apart and abandoned. Would the foehn, the chinook, winds remain for hours or days, the other adolescent workers might wonder. Would they be able to contribute to the industry, or would their plans be dashed, the winds disappearing back into the cold just as they approached the worksites? ‘I wonder when I will be able to leave this place?’ Joseph thought. ‘Preferably before the expansion claims even the town.’ He snuck back to his bed and under the still warm blanket, raising himself up some so his shoulders and head could rest on the wall. This pushed the bed out a few inches from the wall causing the pillow to sag down into the gap; he could not get back to sleep. At first it had been the ocular phenomena that had frightened him but now it was the comfort he found in things returning to normal, the safety he felt in an environment that he typically detested. His senses focused on the sounds in the room beyond his shallow breath: squeaks from the bed-coils as the sleepers turned (or from running mice), a bedpan’s metallic slosh and thud on the floor, individual snores and whispers; all assured him of the others’ locations and his own place in the hall. He turned toward the citrusy must of Elias, who was heavily perspiring from medication or nervousness or both, and wrapped his arm around his slight, naked body, tracing his sharp clavicle and neck hollow with his index finger. Elias responded by quivering and staying Joseph’s hand, gently interlocking their fingers. This embrace further calmed Joseph, yet reminded him of the baseline anxiety he had (‘stupidly’) forgotten about, the fact that Rowley, the overnight attendant, would enter the hall for bed checks every two hours (it was supposed to be every hour, but the man was lazy). But dependable Elias would be keeping the time, he who so little slept, and Joseph allowed himself to relax. Now that everything had gone quiet and measureless in the dark again he no longer felt as if he were in a locked room, the confinement of which contributed to the unknowable center of his infernal anxiety, which sought to break free from everything by expanding ever outwards into the wild, forbidden, and sometimes terrifying regions of his imagination. Instead it now seemed like he was sinking deeply into an alluring pool of thoughtfulness and dream, where he reflected that all the hard days of his life (he was approaching his eighteenth year) would soon hold the promise of graduation and freedom. He had almost drifted off to sleep when the lights suddenly came on. Bolting upright, he yelped internally, though careful not to make a peep, his eyes opened to the room in complete darkness. Perhaps it was an electrical surge, or someone had brushed up against the switch while sleepwalking. As if in response to his confusion, light flooded the room once more, then darkness came just as quickly. ‘Who is flicking the damned switch like that?’ As the lights began to flicker steadily he pushed aside the blanket and almost rose to confront whomever was goofing off when the nature of the flashing room caught his attention. The walls and floors were white as usual, but the windows had disappeared along with the laundry baskets, cubby holes, and the pale coverlet he still grasped was no longer patterned with stripes and stylized pine trees. Finally he noticed the undeniably impossible, that Elias was no longer visible though his scent remained, and the other sleepers had absconded as well. Joseph breathed deeply and reached over, where in light and dark he could still feel Elias’s invisible body. Then the flashing stopped, the extremity of the dark eased, and he was simply looking upon Elias’s delicate and androgynous face again, just visible by the light coming from underneath the far door and the faint moonlight that must have found an opening in the clouds. “You’re handsy tonight,” Elias whispered with no evidence of panic, “restless in general. Is it the weather? These sudden changes always give me migraines. Blurs my vision.” Joseph mumbled an incoherent response, confused by his ordeals. Elias sighed, spoke. “No, I know what’s troubling you. I can feel how rapid your heartbeat is. This chinook … You might think it’s a good time to escape. But I told you that I won’t go in winter. Not again.” A year ago, Elias had been sitting in the broom closet with the attendant about to open it when, with the bedpan, one as heavy as a cauldron, Anil snuck behind the attendant and knocked him in the head. Elias became too frightened to turn the handle himself, Anil had to open the door for him, and they quickly searched the attendant’s uniform for the keys. It was winter, night, the others asleep, and after they locked the attendant in the broom closet they secured their coats and boots then ran outside through the snowy fields. The temperature was inconsistent enough to weaken the ice on the river, and Anil fell through an opening there. Elias was able to haul him out, Anil’s clothing soaked through, and though they continued on close together with the single flashlight, they became separated in the dark woods. Anil called out but both boys were horribly disoriented. Elias made it through the woods, he thought Anil would find his way eventually as he just had to keep moving downhill until the forest broke to reveal the road, so Elias pressed on. There were no cars on the road to hail; Elias couldn’t decide if that was lucky or unlucky, as in the end he figured it was smarter to follow alongside the road only by the forest border, in case any staff or police vehicles were sent out. The forest border curved away from the road eventually, so he had to walk quite a distance from it until he could safely cut through the fields, where he would be out of even distant sight. “… If Anil had just kept going downhill we would have seen each other at some point along the way …” “I know the story, Elly,” Joseph interrupted. “There’s no need to worry about …” “But they called him repentant!” Elias seethed under his usual composure. That very same attendant they’d knocked out told Elias that Anil had been found dead, covered in snow, his body stuck rigidly kneeling, as if atoning for the escape, his sins, in his final act. “Hush, Elias, someone will hear us.” “But I never spoke above a whisper.” A length of silence unfurled between them. “I wasn’t thinking about escaping,” Joseph said as he touched Elias’s cheek. “I woke … to some sort of illusion.” Elias turned away. “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “A migraine and your wild imagination. I don’t quite understand it either, but I used to frighten myself with the floaters in my eyes.” He shook his head. “Promise me you won’t go loony in this place.” “I’m sure I dreamt it,” Joseph reassured him. They could hear footsteps slowly approaching the sleep hall, the light quivering beneath the door. The boys stared at each other in fright. “It must be Rowley,” whispered Elias as he sat up in shock. “He must be early. I would never lose count like this.” “What does that matter now?” Joseph hissed. “Go! Go!” Elias leapt out of the bed and grabbed his nightshirt, hurrying towards his own bed, his silhouette merging with the shadowy walls, after two hobbled pauses where his knees nearly struck the corners of the steel bed-frames. If any of the juveniles were found sharing a bed, let alone in the nude, the attendants would immediately lock them each in an isolation room, with the possibility of increasing their medication or reassigning them to separate wards. They had even demoted previous offenders to so-called low-grade wards, where it was said the residents were monstrously brainless, violent, and filthy. The door opened and Rowley leaned against the jamb, the amber light from behind him intermingled with the white shaft of his flashlight into the room, much to the chagrin of the closest sleepers who groaned from the interruption. “No complaining, you little pissants,” Rowley’s twangy voice came before walking down the rows. “Now, is everyone in bed? Anyone need the toilet? I don’t want any more accidents, you hear?” Joseph felt a hot rush of blood. ‘My nightshirt! Where is it? Did Elias take both by mistake? It’s not even under the bed here.’ He had no more time to search as Rowley was nearing so he pulled the blankets up past his chin and tried his best to hide his shape within the folded layers, gripping them with fingers and toes, since Rowley sometimes liked to rip the blankets off of the chosen. Luckily Rowley approached another boy two beds away. ‘He’s taking the mute to the washroom!’

Ian MacClayn‘s fiction has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review.