Free Reflex by Steven Gould

Davy took one look in the mirror, then turned away.
    The gown nearly defeated him. It was disposable paper, but the fibers running through it made it hard to tear and, even though he managed the ties in back, the chains prevented him from just taking it off. Finally he summoned the strength to rip out the shoulders, allowing him to pull it off the chains. He wadded it up and stuffed it in the small plastic trash basket.
    He didn't know if they had a camera in the room. He pulled the shower curtain closed and, with the water full in his face, let himself cry. He did his best to keep it quiet and to hide the tears with the running water, but he didn't stop until it abated several minutes later.
    There was a bottle of squeeze soap in the shower and he scrubbed himself again and again, until his skin hurt. He knew he'd gotten all of it, but he still didn't feel clean.
    He got soap on the bottle and it slipped through his fingers, falling to the bottom of the tub. He groaned as he picked it up, then stared at it. He turned his back on the shower and squirted soap underneath the manacle padding on his left arm, twisting it to distribute the soap all around his wrist.
    He pulled and twisted, trying to relax his hand as the manacle rode up the base of his thumb. The padding compressed to a degree, but the manacle stopped short right below the accumulated bulge of knuckles at the base of his fingers—but it had slid a lot farther than he'd expected. He wondered what would happen if he soaped both wrists, then jumped.
    He looked down. The restraints on his ankles weren't going to fit over his foot, no matter how much soap he used. He sighed and rinsed the soap out from under the manacle padding.
    Drying off, he looked in the steel mirror over the sink and shuddered. The scar on his chest, a semicircular curve starting an inch below his collar bone, had the red, raw look of still-healing tissue. A smaller straight version, healed to the same degree, was midway up the left side of his neck. He wanted to claw through the skin and yank it out, whatever they'd put in there, but judging by the scar, part of it was very close to the jugular.
    He looked up at his eyes. The scars were awful in and of themselves and also in what they concealed, but what he saw in his eyes was even more terrible, more frightening. He had to look away and it was beyond his strength, just then, to look back.
    When he returned from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel, he found a pair of what looked like hospital scrubs on the bed. He held them up and found that the outside pants seams were Velcroed from cuff to waist and he could actually put them on despite the chains. On the short-sleeved shirt the Velcro was on the side seams from the waist to the underarm side of the sleeve. He could pull them on over his head and seal the sides.
    He liked wearing pants again, but thinking about the forethought his keepers had put into this bothered him. It looked like they didn't expect to take off the chains anytime soon.
    The room stank, and his mess and footprints were still on the floor. Like in the shower, he washed the floor several times more than necessary.
    It's not the mess you're trying to erase, is it, Davy? No matter how many times you wash the floor, it won't undo it. It happened.
    And it's probably going to happen again.
     

SEVEN
"This isn't exactly what we had in mind, you know."
     
    Millie armed Sojee with a stack of flyers and the stapler, then dropped her on Columbia, near Christ House.
    "I'll make the rounds," Sojee told her. "I'll call you if I hear something."
    Millie gave her some change. "Call me around five, even if you don't hear anything, okay?"
    Sojee's lips smacked several times and she finally said, "Well, okay. About five."
    Millie had the taxi drop her back on the street in front of Interrobang. She walked slowly down the street and around the corner, back toward what she was coming to think of as the "departure zone"—the place where Brian Cox