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As usual, I felt I was in a pressure cooker. Fisting hands in my lap and grinding teeth to quell my nerves, I blew. “What do you want me to say? I’ll say it. Just let me out of here. I didn’t do anything wrong.” My body trembled as I tried holding my tongue and myself together.
A slick bend tugged on the doctor’s mouth. “Let’s revisit the police report and your call to 911, shall we?”
I didn’t want to go there.
“You cite dagger-like beaks and hewing of bones.”
I grimaced, feeling as if I was living in the movie Ground Hog Day. The doctor kept resurrecting that night, breaking it down piece by shockable piece. A part of me still and always would believe it was real. It was too monstrous not to be.
“Perhaps, you’re misconstruing the deed itself. Isn’t it feasible you acquired a knife of some caliber and stashed it in your room? And when your abusive father came in, it was you, not a mob of murdering birds.”
“No— I didn’t stab him.” Blood simmered through my veins because that scenario was a guillotine hanging over my head. It hadn’t been the first time he’d insinuated I’d killed my father. And it won’t be the last. The police were nosing around because there hadn’t been any sighting or any communication from him.
I leapt from the chair, stacking my hands on his desk I stared down at the doctor. “No, it’s not feasible. There wasn’t and isn’t a shred of evidence, or are you forgetting that?” I pictured myself slapping the bigheaded grin off his face.
“You had an accomplice.”
Did he want me to go postal? He was throwing out a hooked worm in hopes of reeling me in. I wasn’t biting.
How many times had we revisited that call, those reports? Damned if I do and damned if I don’t. My God, I’d prayed and prayed and wished upon a star that I’d never made that call. I wanted a redo. I wanted it never to have happened. Why’d I get utterly brainless and spread it thick like peanut butter? Gunky peanut butter that got jammed and I choked on it.
The doctor relished narrating those initial testimonies of mine. Hadn’t I still been under the influence? Under the influence of replaying that catastrophe. Over and over, a skipping record. I temporarily went mental. The screams. The smell. The birds were a product of my vivid imagination. That’s what the doctors drilled into my brain. Random portions had been chiseled away with handy-dandy drugs and therapy sessions. The hallucinations were waning.
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