Written by Sumitra Singam
The schizophrenogenic mother is held to be emotionally distant, yet intrusive and
demanding, and is thought to be the cause of the psychosis in the child.
The doctor says the olanzapine should be working by now, though empirically, many
people do take months to recover. The graph of my son’s healing is a jagged one,
shark-toothed. He has hit me, in the belief that I am poisoning him, sucking out his
soul with a Byson machine, which the doctor tells me is a neologism. The medicine
seemed necessary, but it has made him a dripping, wretched slug emerging
crepuscular and ravenous. The heaving scales flash three-digit numbers that make a
lie of my years of driving him to swim meets, the memory of his rippling scapulae so
mixed with the tang of chlorine, with his dazzling smile on so many joyous podiums.
My bloated, lost son says to dustbin his goal of university, that it will likely be full of
deers with antenna antlers sent by the FBI. He says this at odd hours, with a
Lucozade-bright light in his eyes. The doctor says this is a persecutory delusion. And
this phrase lodges in my oesophagus as an undigested bolus. I am lonely, a caged,
pacing tigress; his days and nights are full with his imaginary antagonists. I brine his
dreams, leave them Tupperwared in the deep freeze for a time when motion is
possible. For now, our world is one of frozen hypervigilance, sudden flashes of
violence. My bruises are the stigmata of his need, of whatever deficit my inadequate
knitting wove into the fabric of his brain. For now, I must be the mirror of his mind, so
that I may shatter for him to be remade, shining and silver and whole.
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Sumitra Singam is a Malaysian-Indian-Australian coconut who writes in Naarm/Melbourne. She travelled through many spaces, both beautiful and traumatic to get there and writes to make sense of her experiences. Her work has been published widely, nominated for a number of Best Of anthologies, and was selected for Best Microfictions 2024. She works as a psychiatrist and trauma therapist and runs workshops on how to write trauma safely. She’ll be the one in the kitchen making chai (where’s your cardamom?). You can find her and her other publication credits on twitter: @pleomorphic2.