Free Insanity by Susan Vaught

wrist and listening to the sound of my own sobs.
    The bells were still ringing.

    Leslie wept as she held my bracelet out of the way and bandaged my wrist.
    It was too much for her, losing Miss Sally and me in the same night. She told me so—two or three times—and she never seemed to hear me when I said I was sorry. She kept looking at the pink slip on the bench beside me and shaking her head, saying it wasn’t right. The ghosts in her braids kept smiling at me, and I tried not to look at them. The line between real and not real wasn’t so clear to me yet.
    I wasn’t sure if it ever would be again.
    Through the open door of the nurse’s station, I saw thegurney go by with its pitiful cargo, the sheet pulled tight and tucked over Miss Sally’s head and feet.
    “The bells rang from the time she died until the minute I found you,” Leslie said. “Two solid hours. Where did you go, girl? And where you goin’ now, without this job?”
    “I don’t know,” I admitted, tears slipping down my cheeks. Had I really dreamed about a field with singers and lovers and a handsome guy with the blackest eyes I’d ever seen?
    I couldn’t quite settle on my memories. They kept changing. One second, Levi’s appearance and Decker Greenway’s meeting up with Miss Sally seemed solid and right and real. The next, I lost the details, and everything turned to black fog and haunting songs.
    “Something happened to you,” Leslie said. “I know it did.” She pulled me to her and kissed my forehead. “Let me take you home with me. See to you ’til you come back to yourself.”
    My heart leaped at this suggestion, but my bracelet tingled above the thorn wounds, and the beads started to burn.
    Going with Leslie wouldn’t be right, maybe not for me, or not for her—but the bracelet was giving me a clear message, so I hugged her, and I said no, and she cried.
    My last night as a Lincoln employee felt like both the worst and best moment of my life.
    I gave Leslie my badge and keys and left the geriatric ward without waiting for Security like I was supposed to do. I didn’t travel in the normal way, though. I moved ... to the left a bit. Somehow. I stepped to the side of what was supposed to be andwhat had always been, moving into the world that ran just under-neath and beside the one I had grown up knowing.
    Doors unlocked when I touched them. Nobody noticed that but me. And nobody even glanced in my direction when I crossed the campus to Tower Cottage, pressed my palm against the griffin door knocker, walked inside, and climbed up the stairs toward the painted sky. If I kept going up, I knew I could walk into somewhere else. But I didn’t, because Levi had told me that the other side wasn’t safe for me. Going there once had already changed me in ways I didn’t understand. So I stopped at the bells and sat staring out at Never, Kentucky, until night went away and sunlight covered my cheeks with warmth.
    Time passed, but it passed outside of me. I had no more part in it. I didn’t know how or why, but I knew I was separate from time now, still human, still myself, but more ... aware. I couldn’t put it into words, but I knew that going to the other side had awakened something deep inside me, some kind of power. I couldn’t describe it except to say that I was living outside everything I had ever known.
    Ten hours or ten months or ten years might have passed before I came down from the tower. I hadn’t changed on the outside, but other things had. I walked back to the geriatric ward, enjoying the spring flowers and budding trees. Inside, I noticed new paint and different light fixtures. The clothing room sign was gone. A new-looking white plaque read PATIENT BELONGINGS.
    The doors didn’t have locks anymore. Instead there were little boxes with red lights that scanned bar codes on badges to letpeople through. The lights turned off when I touched them, and the doors opened. Nobody paid me any attention as I made my way to where