Voices— A Short Story

When I woke up, there was a voice in my mind, urging me to kill the nurse.

The voice rasped and crackled and urged me to decapitate her, suffocate her, drive the needle into her neck and release air to create an embolism.

I didn’t even know what my name was. I didn’t know what an air embolism was. But the voice told me how to give her one.

The nurse was explaining that I had been found by the river, unconscious. My ID named me Katrina Thompson. The ID showed a serious face with olive skin and black, chin-length hair. They’d shaved my hair off to operate on me, the nurse explained. I looked down at my arm. The color seemed to match, but I didn’t know the woman on the plastic card. The voice rasped in my head that I could probably make enough water in the hospital room sink to drown the nurse.

I didn’t. Instead I asked her if it was normal to hear a voice in my head after waking up from brain surgery. She looked at me askance. “You’d better ask the doctor.”

The voice told me to kill the doctor, as soon as she entered the room. It told me to punch the doctor in the throat or preferably, use the nurse’s head to bash the doctor’s head into the wall. I ignored the voice and watched the doctor’s mouth turn into a frown as she checked me out, finally pronouncing everything normal.

They discharged me two weeks later. A taxi took me to the address on my ID. The voice suggested I take out my shoelace, loop it around the driver’s neck, and pull until he died. Instead I handed over a $20 bill and thanked him.

I had a keycard with my apartment number to get in the front door of the apartment building. On my floor, there was a dad with a stroller and a toddler. His stomach stuck out over his belt and the voice told me to slash it and let him bleed out. I avoided looking at the toddler, afraid of what the voice would say. The man nodded to me before entering his apartment. I gritted my teeth.

My apartment was clean and empty. It looked like the apartment from a catalogue. There were no picture frames on the walls and no dirty clothes in the hamper. Boring looking white shirts and pencil skirts hung in the closet and the blankets on the bed were pulled tight, without a single dent from someone sitting to slip on their shoes. Generic magazines were fanned out along the coffee table. One had a huge O in the corner and a woman on the front. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and slammed it into the magazine, down into the wood below, before the voice could tell me to. It was strangely silent, only present as the occasional crackle echoing through my head.

A passwordless laptop sat on the desk, some nameless mountains on the default background. I searched for “I hear voices” because I couldn’t bear to write “I hear voices that tell me to kill people”. The first word of every result said “schizophrenia.” I heard a chuckle and the voice rasped, “You aren’t crazy.” It was the first time the voice had spoken to me without telling me to kill someone.

I searched for schizophrenia doctors and called until I found one with an opening the next day. I saw nineteen people between my apartment and the psychiatrist’s office. Stabbing, throttling, punching in the short ribs, setting on fire, and pushing into a garbage truck compactor numbered among the fates crackling through my head. I gritted my teeth and looked past them. If the secretary found me rude, at least I wasn’t stabbing him in the eye with his scissors.

I told the therapist I hear voices, but I didn’t tell him how the voices wanted me to cut his lips off before slitting his throat. The therapist asked me if the voices were new, or if I’d had them all my life. I had to tell him that apart from the name Katrina and some picture on an ID, I didn’t know anything about myself. Maybe I had these voices my whole life. Maybe it was some side effect of an accident.

The doctor prescribed me some pills and sent me on my way, assuring me the bill would make it to my apartment. I didn’t know how much it would cost, but I had found a healthy stack of $100 bills in my closet drawer that morning, so I wasn’t worried.

I picked up the pills from the pharmacist on the way home. Luckily for her, I decided not to stab her in the eyes with my fingers or light her hair on fire. I took the first pills right there in the office. The pharmacist gave me a wary look. She knew what the pills were for. I tried to give her a reassuring smile, but my reflection in the mirror showed a pained grimace on my face. I gave up and left.

I did not push the old man in front of the bus on the way home. I did not steal the police officer’s gun and shoot him with it. Everyone in my path survived, as I got home safely.

I gave the pills a week. I didn’t dare leave my apartment, afraid the voice would still be there. I ordered take out and left the money outside my door. I listened, making sure no one was in the hallway, before picking up the pizza boxes and Styrofoam containers. I didn’t watch TV. I had already cut out all the faces from the magazines and I read around the holes.

I had a follow-up with my psychiatrist a week later. I opened my door with trepidation. No one was in the hall. I held my breath as the elevator doors opened in the lobby. No one was there either, though I could see people walking past outside. A glance in the lobby mirror reminded me of my clenched jaw and short black hair growing in on my scalp. I took a deep breath and left the building.

My eyes were lowered at first and I bumped into someone as I shuffled out onto the sidewalk. “Watch where you’re going asshole,” he yelled at my down-turned face and I looked up in anger. I pulled the man to the ground and punched him in the face with a fast jab. I pulled a knife out of my bag that I didn’t even remember packing, and pushed it through the softness of his gut, over and over again until blood foamed from his mouth and my white shirt was soaked in red.

The voice shouted with glee in my head.

I stumbled back from the body, back into my apartment building lobby, my blood soaked hands pressed to my eyes, making sure I couldn’t see anyone. The voice congratulated me, its raspy voice telling me what a good girl I was.

I could hear sirens. They would call me crazy. They would give me the same pills the psychiatrist had prescribed me. They’d lock me in a bed and make me look at doctor after doctor as they came to assess me. The voice would never leave me alone.

“I’m crazy,” I whispered.

“You’re not crazy,” the voice laughed back. “You’re not any crazier than I am.”

I looked down at the knife in my hands. It glistened with gore. Before the voice could tell me to stop, I raised it and slashed my own throat. Police officers rushed into my quickly darkening view. And for once, the voice was silent.

* * *

“This one was schizophrenic, heard voices” said the intern on autopsy duty. “Killed an innocent man before killing herself.”

“Damn. She still has blood under her fingernails. That always grosses me out,” said another intern. A round section of skull sat next to the body where they’d removed the brain. Doctors were competing to see who would get to study it.

“Why don’t they just lock up the crazies, you know, before they hurt someone?”

“Yeah, what happened to those old mental hospitals any- wait, what is that?” the intern suddenly exclaimed, pulling something out with surgical tweezers.

“What the…” the other intern muttered, studying the small round sticker-like device they’d found on the side of the skull.

“Is that…is that a microphone?” the first intern asked. They both looked down at the woman in horror. He washed off the blood, then lifted the mini-microphone up to his ear with shaking hands. He pressed it into his ear and heard a faint, but rasping voice.

“You should stab your friend right now. Or you could bash his head in with that chair, whatever you prefer,” it said, static crackling over the line.