I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg (Read in 2014)

“'You are not so stupid and neither am I,‘ Furii said earnestly, trying to speak across the widening space. ‘There are many secrets to come and you know it. You are not parting with food that sustained you—all the secrets and the secret powers—and no other nourishment has yet appeared to replace it. This is the hardest time of all, harder than even your sickness was before you came here. At least that had a meaning for you, as awful as the meaning was sometimes. You will have to trust me enough to take on faith that the new food, when it comes, will be richer.”

“ She believed that she and a certain few others were not of the same nganon as the rest of Earth’s people. At first Deborah had thought that it was only she who was set apart from human kind, but others of the un-dead on D ward seemed to be tainted as she was. All of her life, herself and all her possessions had been imbued with her essence, the poisonous nganon. She had never lent her clothes or books or pencils, or let anyone touch any of her things, and she had often borrowed or stolen from other children at school or camp, delighting, until their stolen nganon wore off them, in the health and purity and grace of the possessions.”

“Deborah looked from the god and saw Carla still crying. It was part of the Deceit, it seemed, to believe that one knew the code, that after years of suffering to find a way to outguess it, the final step gave way and there was the old chaos, anarchy, and laughter.”

“Perhaps it might be the one about seeing—that even when seeing every line and plane and color of a thing, if there was no meaning, the sight was irrelevant and one was just as well blind; that perhaps even the famous third dimension is only meaning, the gift which translates a bunch of planes into a box or a madonna or a Dr. Halle with antiseptic bottle.”

“'What?’ Dr. Halle turned. Deborah looked at him in horror. Her words to Yr had pierced the barriers of the earth’s hearing. The clamor from the Collect built higher until it was an overwhelming roar and the gray vision went red. Without warning the full PUnishment fell like an executioner’s hand and the testimony of light, space, time, gravity, and the five senses became meaningless. Heat froze and light hurled tactile stabbing rays. She had no sense of where her body was; there was no up or down, no location or distance, no chain of cause and effect…”

“When the lawgivers of D ward discovered that its patients were not so safe as they had thought, they swept the ward up and down with reforms to widen still further the distance between themselves and the patients. The fork that had been introduced on “D” a year before was now rescinded. The Age of Metal gave way to the Age of Wood and fire prevailed only within the precincts of the nursing station, the modern era. In the [P]leistocene beyond, Pithecanthropus erectus shambled and muttered gibberish, ate with its fingers, and wet on the floor.”

“'Recreat,‘ Deborah said. ‘Recreat xangoran, temr e xangoranan. Naza e fango xangoranan. Inai dum. Agaei dum.’ (Remember me. Remember me in anger, frear me in bitter anger. Hear-draze my teeth in bitterest anger. The signal glance drops. The Game’—Agaei mena the tearing of flesh with teeth as torture—’is over.‘)”

“’No.‘ She tried to tell Furii, but the walls began bleeding and sweating, and the ceiling developed a large tumor which began to separate itself from its surface.

“‘Can you hear me?’ Furii asked.

“Deborah tried to say what she felt, but she could only gesture the Yri gesture for insanity: flattened hands thrust toward one another but unable to meet.
”

“In the bathroom: ‘Blau—are you in there?’

“‘Here is cutucu.’ (The second degree of being hidden.) As she struggled to translate, finding it almost impossible to span the light years of distance between herself and them, the confusion of tongues only alienated her further.”

“The volcano’s fear-rage would still come and throw her against a wall with the force of its eruption, or send her running down the hall until she was stopped by a closed door or a wall. She was in pack every day, sometimes twice, and once tightened in, she would let the fight explode and overcome her as violently as it would. Yet … yet they were all kinder, all the nurses and attendants, joking even, and giving little gifts of themselves.”

“'Well, we’ll give it a try.‘ She saw in his face that the burns were worse than he had remembered. When he was through, he said, ‘I tried to go easy. I hope it didn’t hurt too much.‘

“‘Don’t worry,‘ Deborah said, and rose the tremendous distance from the falling Anterrabae to be capable of a smile. ‘Someday, maybe it will.’”

“All Deborah heard were the sounds of her own gasps of exhaustion as she climbed an Everest that was to everyone else an easy and a level plain.”

“She yearned to play with all the toys of the earth, while Yr and the world’s darker parts fought it out inside her. To Earth’s usages and people she felt she could never come, but to the material things there was new access and freedom and great reward. A new patient asked her what she was, meaning her religion, and she found herself answering, ‘A Newtonian.’”

“[…] Deborah began to feel the mood was less about Carmen’s suicide than an argument between the cynicism that was in each of them and the blind, small longing to fight.”

“It was B ward’s nerve; a desperate hope that the false ‘fine-fine’ might see them through if only they acted long enough and tried to make it be the truth. Was it as frightening a clutching at convention on the outside?”

“One day, coming from an exhausting session with Furii, Deborah saw a knot of people in the hall, and coming closer she saw that they were writhing, slow motion, like creatures under water. At the center of the knot, all but hidden by it, was Miss Coral. Because Deborah’s loyalty had not shifted with her commitment to the world, she had to choke back a guffaw. The bed-flinging genius of fulcrum, weight, and thrust was at it again! Deborah wondered how she had gotten off the ward. She was standing almost still in the middle of the melee, taking on five attendants by drawing them into battle with each other. Her rant was a low mutter, like an engine, full of long sibilances and obscenity. Deborah passed by and tossed a ‘Hell, Miss coral,’ more for the attendants than for the lady herself. Miss Coral removed her concentration from her war and smiled to Deborah.”

“[In the courthouse building] she found others takign their high-school educations at one gulp—a group of hard-handed day laborers who sweated and grunted over their papers as if they were blocks of grnite. She was surprised and then humbled that they, too, though not prisoners or insane, had somehow missed beats in the rhythm of the world, and now were sharers with her in this necessary thing.”

“On the field the boys were running with the late-afternoon magic of their ten-foot shadows. They seemed so young and strong and golden in the late sun. It had taken afll of her capacities, every drop of her will, to come as far as they had come laughing and easy. The wall between them was still there and it would always be there. She could see through it now, to where the world offered its immense beauty, but she would burn away all her strength just staying alive.”

“She looked again at the faces on the ward. Her presence was making them struggle with Maybes. Suddenly she realized that she was a Doris Rivera, a living symbol of hope and failure and the terror they all felt of their own resiliency and hers, reeling punch-drunk from beating after beating, yet, at the secret bell, up again for more.”