Eve

The Patient: "The White Room" They tell her it's Tuesday, but the days bleed like bruises—purple, yellow, black. Eve can no longer tell which colour today is. The walls are too white. Not sterile-white. Hungry-white. They throb with silence, swallowing even her breath. She traces the cracks in the tile with her fingers, pretending they're veins—her own, maybe the asylum’s. When she whispers into the corner, the room hums back. “Did you take your pill today, Eve?” Dr. Karrin always smiles too wide, like her mouth’s not built for it. Eve nods. She hides the pills under her tongue, waits until no one's watching, then presses them into the cracks. The tile is hungry too. They think she’s mad. She knows the truth. It started when the mirrors stopped showing her reflection. Not just blank—wrong. A different woman stood there. Pale. Wide-eyed. Lips stitched with wire. Eve screamed, but no one else could see her. That was three weeks before she was locked away. The new patient across the hall scratches at her door until her fingers bleed. She doesn’t talk, just stares at Eve through the slot. Last night, Eve saw her mouth a word—“Soon.” In the dark, things come. Not footsteps—wet dragging. They slip through the vents, whisper from the ceiling. “You’re not Eve,” they tell her, breath like rot. “You’re what’s left.” She tried to carve it out once, the thing in her chest. Used a rusted spoon smuggled from the cafeteria. They found her soaked in red and laughing. “There was something under my ribs,” she said. “It had eyes.” Now she waits. The walls are watching. The cracks widen. Tonight, she sees the stitched-mouth woman sitting in her bed. Not in a mirror—in the room. She leans close. Wire glints between her teeth. She opens her mouth. So does Eve The screaming doesn’t stop until the orderlies come. But the mouth on the bed doesn’t close. Not ever again.