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Show veins and head like cold war strategies. No one know3about them; no one cared to know. It is a habit of institutions to layer drugs like decades and to medicate symptoms. Her whole world had been built around the institution. She did not know or understand what it was to hear, to see, to move about unassisted. A slight girl of fourteen, walking into her first real classroom and, when seated, banging her head at precisely ten second intervals to achieve a sensation of what it is to "hurt." Hands and faces she had felt and smelled and listened to and long periods of sitting and rocking she had known, with a small cotton restraint tying her hands behind her- Small wonder that her first teacher, there, had towered over her, shoved her head under the cold water faucet during tantrums, and managed to teach her her first signs. Her pills had increased and multiplied yearly. And each day, for two small hours, she had been marched to the battle front to perform her feats of free will and then had been returned to the ward beds with her comraa.es, drooling in rows of warehouse invisibility. Her teacher had placed a phonic ear around her middle and touched the ear mold to her ear- There was a scream of rage when she realized it would remain there longer than she wanted it to. She threw it and cracked it on the wall. Her teacher strapped it around her middle. It flew into the window and shattered the glass. Her teacher tied it around her middle. The belts flew by her and out the door. Her teacher placed it around her middle. She hurled it across the room, hitting the other presence she had sensed - an administrator, unuseJto direct contact with any of his wards. And finally, she came into our room at seventeen, walking in on the arm of her teacher. A child bizarre enough to have been seen in nightmares for a long time after she had gone. A child of medical impossibilities, menstrual periods, which only added another burden to the drugging and the chemical and emotional mannerisms. My aides look at each other in disbelief. One of them finally -3- |
