I Think You Should See Someone
This flash fiction piece obliquely explores the alienation felt when experiencing mental illness/during periods of mental ill health.
Jenna Burns
—a man who calls you sweetheart with a thick syrup that coats the back of your teeth. When you try to get rid of it, it thickens into sludge, turns gritty. You’ll spend hours picking that word out.
You’re at a restaurant that’s so far from your scene, you might as well be in Antarctica. You feel like you are literally in Antarctica because it is, in fact, baltic; the heating must be on the blink, or maybe that’s just the style here: we’ll drape a napkin in your lap, really hammer home your fear of intimacy, all while you freeze your tits off.
It’s easier to look down at your meal than to keep looking him in the eye. Spaghetti carbonara. The sauce has congealed. You imagine it for a moment, frozen like this, white museum placard propped up by the bowl: God loves a trier.
Sweetheart Man is droning on. He’s got garlic bread stuck in his teeth. He’s not noticed anything.
I can’t, you think, keep doing this.
“Look, I’m not being rude,” you say rudely, “but can’t you hear that?”
His smile shifts. Christ, you’d have preferred the leer to this: sympathy as fake as candy floss, aw, the poor wee lassie.
“Well,” he says, so bloody reasonable that you picture what it’d be like to fly over the table and punch him, “y’know, with these kind of things…” He trails off like a teacher, like he’s just waiting to give you a gold star for filling in the blanks.
You grip your fork. Don’t you say it, don’t you bloody—
“It’s more a case of mind over matter,” he finishes. Scrapes his plate clean and tilts his head, all-knowing. “Don’t you think?”
…
—the guy you picked just because he offered the first appointment free. That, and in his picture online he had that posh gilded notebook you wanted last Christmas, and you thought surely someone who owns that knows what he’s doing.
He’s got it sat open on his knee right now. You don’t think he realises that you can read upside down. You hope he doesn’t realise, because all he’s done is scribble some swirls around the margins. They’re decent as far as swirls go, but that’s not the point.
“Uh-huh,” he says placidly. “Mm-hmm. Oh, aye. I see.”
You don’t ask him, But do you see?
…
—your mother.
No. Best not.
…
—a girl you vaguely know from the train, who glanced up, caught your eye, held it, and you thought, maybe, maybe—
“I get it,” she says when you, wine drunk and fleetingly brave, tilt her into the couch, whispering, But do you—? Do you—? “No, listen, I really get it.”
She tastes of the wine: sharp tang then sweet. You could spend your whole life just cataloguing what she tastes like.
“Hey,” she says, but you don’t think you’ve spoken. Her hand, warm, pressed just below your clavicle. “Shh.”
You wake up to her considering you, eyes glittering in the dark. Considering as in weighing you up, as in are you worth it? Feel an abrupt sinking, a black hole, and you knew all along that this wouldn’t last, but can’t I just have this, can’t I just…
“Listen,” she says, “I think you should—”
Jenna Burns
Jenna’s writing inspirations include Pat Barker, Sarah Waters and Mary Renault. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in New Flash Fiction Review and Causeway/Cabhsair: A Magazine of Irish and Scottish writing. She is currently working on her debut novel.