Mentally Incarcerated and Otherwise Locked Up
© KJ Hannah Greenberg

It had long since ceased to be novel for Charles, the “scaly lad,” to read Dr. Hichkins’ publications. Not only did the psychologist limit the young chimera’s access to select districts, within the doctor’s universe of treaties, but it was also the case that Charles wanted to peruse the prose of the woman with whom he was, at least cognitively, smitten. Charles really would have preferred to read Doris ’ work.

The young beast sighed as he looked through the window, across the commons, toward the mailbox where he had once made his home. That postal carton graced the yard of the cottage where his beloved human rested a burgeoning belly.

Near Charles’ cage, seated on a plush chair, Wilson , the father of Doris’ unborn child, yakked about the path he and his companions had traveled across the dunes of the Dasht-e Kavir Desert . As for the challenges presented by that terrain’s night winds, ergs and sand seas, experientially illiterate Wilson said nothing. Charles snorted and wondered aloud why he was the creature regarded as mythical.

Had Doris, instead of Wilson , benefited from such a lavish expedition, she would have typed up volumes about the land’s rose and silver silicon and about its tempestuous heat and cold. She would not have slid into egocentric rantings, as had Wilson , but would have

Jailed, within her journals, wilderness image colored with such vivid verbal hues that their likenesses would have screamed to become communicated mentations. Only Doris could transform a Middle Eastern wasteland into a sumptuous word painting. Hichkins’ son, Wilson, on the other hand, was challenged when attempting rhetorical connect-the-dots.

Such ambitions of Charles’ were moot. Both he and Doris, respectively, were imprisoned. Though Charles had successfully evaded Dr Hichkins’ embrace by keeping his earth-bound hidihole cloistered (albeit his arboreal habitat had been divulged to the hamlet’s residents), Charles had, in the end, been snagged. Analogously, for a similar span Doris had successfully kept her condition a secret from her mother, despite the fact that her tastes in foodstuffs had become weird. Thereafter, she, too, had been caught.

To wit, Dr. Hichkins had tied the chimera’s wings with high performance, non-asbestos silk, a fiber which resists shrinkage as well as cracks. Unceremoniously, Hichkins had stuffed Charles into a confine once belonging to Wilson ’s hamster. Similarly, Mom had used high performance, non-reflexive guilt, which resists witty repartees or other snarky counterarguments, to secure her daughter into their home’s guestroom. Mom had likewise cut off Doris ’ access to the Internet.

Meanwhile, Dr. Hichkins was healing from the second and third degree burns that resulted from his assault on Charles. Correspondingly, Mom was mending from the rhetorical fires that resulted from her emotional mugging of Doris .

In the interim, Wilson seemed oblivious to the plight of either soul. He did nothing to free the wee, reptilian creature or his pregnant girlfriend. Rather, when Wilson was bored, which was often, given his limited intellectual prowess, he tugged on the nostril piercings by which the immature multi-headed brute was affixed to the hamster wheel or tugged, via old-fashioned epistles, on the emotional piercings by which the immature scholar was affixed to Wilson ’s toy of a heart.

The restraining cords, which tickled and hurt Charles, remained resilient to any flame the dragon-like creature could make. The restraining words, which only hurt Doris , prolonged her newfound inability to deconstruct double binds, despite her record aptitude in verbal swordplay, suasory kung-fu, and dialectical, high speed combat.

Even such torment wearied Wilson . He sought fresh diversion in the filled undergarments of Beatrice, a casual friend of unborn child’s mother. When that pastime, too, became stale, Wilson asked Hichkins’ to observe Hichkins’ experiments on Jessica, Charles’ lone clutchmate.

Although Jessica was insatiable, willingly to literally devour Wilson ’s father’s troublesome clients, Hichkins had no qualms about experimenting on Jessica’s hide, eyesight and larynx. Hichkins was so obsessed with understanding how the critter functioned that he allowed indifferent to wall him from the young chimera’s palpable anguish.

Eventually, Jessica lost her tolerance. As she untied her brother’s tethers, after bathing Hichkins with fire, she commented that individuals of Hichkins’ ilk lack the ability to comprehend that no chimera is possessed by any mood disorder. The psychologist’s claims were entirely fluff and nonsense, according to Jessica’s best research. It was not his painful pokings and proddings as much as his questionable science that at last drove her to give up her role as subject.

Wilson called an ambulance. Jessica reconnected Doris to the World Wide Web.

Charles, too weak for flight, wobbled around Hichkins’ library. He groomed all manners of eolian debris from his wings and strutted about some more. Doris , too hormonal to care, groomed all manners of intellectual flotsam and jetsam from her email box and returned to her rhetorical investigations.