She was running for her life.
Cindy, age five years and four months, was being chased around the house by her mother, who was holding a butcher’s knife.
“Come here or I’ll stab you!” Lori shouted. “I’ll throw this knife and it will get you right between the shoulder blades!”
Cindy didn’t know what to do. She believed most of the things Lori said. But Lori had also not lived up to her word a lot of the time. Lori had told Cindy that she would be in an institution if she didn’t stop “stimming”. It was a word Lori had gotten from one of the books she read. Lori had told Cindy that it was a book about Cindy and everything Cindy said and did. But some of the things in that book that Lori had read here weren’t things Cindy had said or done. Like the hurting other people, or not feeling for other people. Or the showing signs of not being able to grow into a grownup. Apparently, Cindy would be a big baby even when she was grown. Maybe Cindy had showed signs of being “retarded” or “arrested”. Cindy wasn’t sure. All she knew was that if she had shown signs of those things, that was very bad. It was her fault. And maybe she didn’t know that she had shown those signs. Maybe she was “insane”, like her mother said. Insane people, her mother had told her, don’t remember what they say or do. Her mother would often tell her to sane up.
What was insane? Cindy had heard people calling each other insane casually. It meant silly. But when her mother used it, it meant so much more. It was a bad thing. Insane was something you didn’t want anything to do with if you knew what was good for you. And if you were insane, well, you carried that insanity everywhere, because it was you. It meant you were trouble. It meant you were to be avoided. And what did her mother say about being avoided? She said that if Cindy didn’t sane up, people would avoid her.
Cindy was now backed up against the wall. Her mother gripped the butcher’s knife harder. Cindy screamed. She knew she wasn’t allowed to scream, or the neighbors would call the cops and take her to an institution. At least that was what her mother said. But Cindy would rather be in an institution than be dead. Or hurt.
Just then, predictably, Lori snarled, “If you scream the police will take you to an institution. It’s better you let me give you a little cut. It will hurt, but it’s a treatment for your condition. It is better than the police taking you to an institution and them hurting you there. They’ll give you electric shocks, Cindy. And those hurt even more than what I’m about to do to you. They might tie you to a bed and rape you. Do you know what that is? If you don’t, let me just tell you that it will hurt.”
Cindy stared, too startled and interested in a morbid way to what her mother was saying to scream.
“They’ll give you medicine that hurts. They’ll tell you hurtful things. They’ll put you in a room with someone who might hurt you.”
Cindy didn’t know what to believe, what to ask, what to say, what to do. Should she take her mother’s word for it, or go with her instincts and SCREAM? She decided to scream. She would go to the institution, and be hurt by these strangers, later, but it was better than being hurt now. But then, she wanted to make her mother happy.
Lori advanced on her. Lori was too busy walking forward to step sideways and block Cindy from slipping sideways away from the spot she’d been backed into. Cindy would run and scream. She would worry about her mother later. She would comfort her later, feel remorse later, worry about being a good person who made her mother, whom she loved, happy, later.
Across the threshold from the living room into the kitchen. Big mistake. Her mother grabbed a bunch of knives out of a drawer and started throwing them at Cindy. Cindy heard one whiz by her head. She saw one embedding itself in a nearby wall. She headed for the door leading outside. Then a deep, piercing, stabbing pain in her back. She tried to keep running but it hurt. She fell. She had an odd feeling in her back. Like something deep had been penetrated that shouldn’t have been.
Lori advanced. Then– smash! Splatter.
Her head felt like it had been broken. Lori had just smashed a bottle of wine over her head. She had an unpleasant feeling right behind and even inside her face. Kind of like the feeling she’d had when she had inhaled some water in the swimming pool last summer. But there was also a pain further back in her head that was kind of like when she’d gotten in a too-hot shower last week and scalding water had rained down on her head.
It was pain; that was all she knew.
Then there was just blackness.
Cindy’s story is the story of all the autistic children who didn’t make it to the camp because their families murdered them.
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