The Dirty One: Part 2 by Jana Gifford

Editors' Note: This is the second part of "The Dirty One." If you missed Part 1 , click here.

Two days later they told me that my husband, Fred, also did not exist. That’s when I rose up out of my bed and lost it. I yanked an IV needle out of my arm, hearing it rip my skin, and sank the long silver thing into Dr. Madison’s left temple. He had white hair and grey whiskers from an incomplete aging process.

 But I let him know, standing there, screaming on my bed, how I thought a child must have felt after being left outside in the yard too long, then pouring himself down a forgotten, bottomless well. I was powerless to save him, to save myself, or to save Dr. Madison. Blood trickled around his black-rimmed eyeglasses. I stepped on these glasses and he did not stare at me anymore.

At trial, in the Judge’s oak-built courtroom, attorneys drank water from two little silver pitchers in paper cups and wanted to know why I lived in an abandoned old house, anyway. I told them the truth: my mother raised me in that house, until she and the angry man she slept with left. I couldn’t go with them, so I stayed at the house, eating tomatoes and some peppers out of the garden and playing with sticks until Fred came into my life, into my forest, and we had a child.

 “Faida,” the lawyer said, in sharp black suit, “you are ill.”

Then he went off on a long speech I didn’t understand, so I shut him up by wailing one word: Jason. He looked around. But I didn’t say anything more until they shackled me in a pure white asylum. No dirty leaves were there, no cleaning up after Jason’s bath, no holding Fred’s hand any more. Why was it so clean there?

A gnarled old woman listened to this tale with pity in her watery blue eyes. She reached out a gentle hand to stroke mine during socialization time. “You are the dirty one,” she said. I cried on her shoulder.

Someday I will wash my hands and go find Jason’s body. His presence haunts my dreams, and I know he existed.  The only way to heal the way things truly are is to prove that I have changed myself. When I am released, I will look in the well for him. But for now, Jason does not exist.

About Jana Gifford:

I am on the Dean’s List at Ashford University. During quiet times, I enjoy reading about psychology and mysterious happenings.

Currently, I am crafting a graphic novel called The Involuntary Vow of Silence, which is coming in June from iUniverse. Also, I am collaborating with a film director from The Art Institute in Portland on a certain script. Slake your thirst for perspective at www.janagifford.blogspot.com

The Dirty One: Part 1 by Jana Gifford

I am one of the gifted ones. I cry at night because I see things as they really are. I want my pain to go away. There is only one way: I must change myself.

My child’s presence still lingers here, though others have said he did not exist. But I know my five-year-old existed, because I know how he died…

Jason was playing in a well. Neighbors said to me—told the cops even, when I called them—that for over six years I have gone out to the dirty, empty well behind Fred’s and my house, and pretended to drink from it. That is, until Jason died.

I thought it would be obscene to go drink from a body of water in which my child had perished. I heard him screaming, and I thought he was in the woods playing with fireflies (he liked to pretend he was a fairy combing his blond hair with sticks he found in the leaves). I ran out there to comfort him from crying. I found my son hanging on the edge of the well, drinking with only his lips. He told me that he screamed when he saw his face shining on the top of this pool. “Why is it there, Mommy?” He asked. Then he waved, and fell in.

I was devastated that he fell in head first, for the well was narrow, and I didn’t clean it or use the water. The tarp that hung over it was gone, blown away with the wind. I had to run 300 hundred yards from the porch to the boy’s place of drowning.

But the paramedics took me away, instead of exhuming the body, the one I couldn’t find with a long stick even after I had reached in and tried to pull him out. I was screaming and spitting foam nearly, so they loaded me up and told me the well was empty of the water I claimed Jason drowned in. But they did a search of the woods and my house. I guess they got discouraged when they found no toys or clothes belonging to a child, only a bottle of antidepressants on the shelf above the fridge.

Later, when I lay calm and dressed in white with blue dots against my will, I told them I loved Jason. I didn’t know what was happening to me. Why had the doctors kidnapped me? Why had they made this long list of orders? Why had they used the word “hallucination?”

Editors' Note: Read "The Dirty One: Part 2" next Thursday, Feb. 3.

About Jana Gifford:

I am on the Dean’s List at Ashford University. During quiet times, I enjoy reading about psychology and mysterious happenings.

Currently, I am crafting a graphic novel called The Involuntary Vow of Silence, which is coming in June from iUniverse. Also, I am collaborating with a film director from The Art Institute in Portland on a certain script. Slake your thirst for perspective at www.janagifford.blogspot.com

The Diry One by Jana Gifford

Read "The Dirty One" by Jana Gifford, a murderous tale in two parts. Part One premieres tomorrow.