HALLOWEEN WEEK 2025
First-Place Winner
BY JEN FRANKEL
Copyright is held by the author.
Dear Doctor,
When I came to you the first time, it was because I thought I was in crisis. When I came to you for the first time, I was under the impression that my life was over, well, except for the final trumpet, if you know what I mean. In retrospect, I think I was actually just angry. Do you remember? I know you half-listened, and I remember the clack-clacking of the keys of your laptop as you took real-time notes on my condition.
Made me want to pull out my own laptop and call up my technical survey of the excavation. I was so proud of the work I was doing. Do you remember that? Six years to find the site, following clues in scholarly articles and dusty civic archives. Two more to get the permits. And then, barely a day after uncovering our first artifact, the stop work order from the municipal government.
It wasn’t enough that I’d found something old, something precious, something historic. After days of conversations with low-level civil servants unable to help or even engage in a useful way, the bureaucrat I finally tracked down told me my discovery was intriguing. Intriguing, but not historically relevant to the current administration’s priorities. How’s that for a disconnect? An administration bound to last a few years, half a decade at most, willing to entirely de-prioritize a dig that would uncover hundreds of years of history in favour of a new parking structure.
I don’t think you understood how hard it was for me to make it to your office that first time. When I told you about the panic attack I’d had getting onto a city bus, you told me we would work on my phobia with some exposure therapy. As if I was afraid of transit, not experiencing deep emotional upset.
Even though I couldn’t really justify the expense, I took an Uber home that day, and back to you the next week for our follow-up appointment, if just to shut you up about my fear of transfers and how I needed to confront my inability to deal with strangers. You dug in deep with that one, didn’t you, what, targeting my very obvious introversion? That was a good insight, that I’m not good with people, that my particular obsessions actually benefit from loving my own company more than seeking companionship. Where I’d always counted that as a plus, something that enriched my work and made it possible to spend so much time alone on excavations and explorations, you made me see that trait as a lack in me. Something inadequate.
Then, of course, you told me that you could fix me. Not just fix what I was experiencing, dig me out of the hole I’d fallen down since the excavation was shut down. You could fix me in ways I didn’t even know I was broken, you said. Make me a better, healthy everything. I was vulnerable and desperate enough to say, OK. Do it.
Only I wasn’t broken, was I? It was the second of two binary choices you presented to me. Ellen, either you can be alone and lonely, as good as buried in your ancient burial sites, or you can foster actual human relationships and be a human yourself. Broken, or fixed. No leeway, no in between. Just one, or the other.
***
You know what the hook was, the hook that set the bait, the bait that pulled me in? You appealed to my practicality. You gave me a way to look forward for the future when it felt like mine was hopeless. You gave me a plan.
I’m a concrete thinker, a boots on the ground type if you will, someone who knows how to manipulate objects much more easily than thoughts. Was it insight into my character of the sort you seldom showed afterwards, or was it just a lucky guess, the way you spoke to me that day? The way you made getting past my depression into a this then that proposition, a clear A then B. I understand that kind of thinking. It makes sense. You can map it out, flowchart it.
I put myself in your hands, because I believed you were just as straightforward as you pretended. As straightforward as I am.
Let me tell you what it was like to admit myself to the psychiatric ward of your hospital.
Oddly, I felt hopeful, even a little giddy. It wasn’t that I connected so well with you that I trusted that you really could put me back together. Hell, I didn’t even believe what you’d told me about being broken. When you work reconstructing sherds of pottery as a significant part of your daily life, you know that a little glue and elbow grease can make something beautiful out of a pile of fragments. If you’d explained it to me that way, or asked me to clarify what I did, maybe I’d have come to that deduction on my own. Instead, you corrected my correct usage of the word “sherd,” and I didn’t have the strength to define it for you.
Yes, I was despondent, but there was a reason for that. I showed you the notice from the city I’d received after my conversation with the man from City Planning. The one that seemed to demonstrate that nothing I said had made any impression on him whatsoever. I had accomplished nothing, no softening of the city’s position or timeline. The dig had until the end of the month, a bare three weeks, before they shut us down and paved over my site forever.
So I allowed you to talk me into a two day admission. Just 48 hours, from six am Saturday morning until six am Monday, so I wouldn’t miss a moment of my time on the site. You’d come in, even though you usually weren’t scheduled on weekends, and be there for me every moment. You’d make me strong enough to decide what to do next, how to get my site back.
But that wasn’t what you really intended, was it? I know people like you in my field too, you know. People who speak with the authority of a thousand ancient mountaintop deities, pulling you down into their bullshit as if their words were quicksand. Or a glacial crevasse treacherously camouflaged by snow. Or a riptide.
You glibly ignored my expressions of fear, then left me to fall into a series of panic attacks while the weekend skeleton nursing staff either ignored me or drugged me at your direction. Not just with those standard pams: diazepam, flurazepam, lorazepam. Other drugs too that you knew wouldn’t be out of my system when you released me. You were starting me on a get-well regimen, you said, but you wouldn’t explain what you were giving me or why.
On Monday morning at six am, when the nurse buzzed me out of the locked ward and back onto Earth One, I was groggy, exhausted, and barely able to cogitate. I took an Uber — again, despite the cost, because now you actually had instilled in me a fear of transit—only to find the dig entirely shut down and myself personally barred from access.
Because you had called the city. And my department. And my primary financier. To explain my breakdown, to caution them about my delusions. To hint, because apparently you didn’t quite cross the line between patient confidentiality and duty to warn, that I might be dangerous to others, or at the very least to myself. I hear you discussed optics: “What if she hurts herself on your site? I’m not saying she will, but I would be remiss if I didn’t advise you of the possibility.”
***
Can you blame me for falling apart? It’s not enough that you didn’t make an effort to listen to me. It’s not enough that you behaved in an entirely condescending manner, or that you refused to consider what I wanted for my own treatment. I was not part of the process at all.
Because I was trusting and open to the possibility you would be able to help me, I told you that the only thing that kept me going through the long, lean years was that I knew in my heart I had something to offer the world, that I was a special and worthwhile person, with a unique vision and ability to sort through the excavated spoils of centuries to create an explicable narrative of the past.
And you told me that I was not allowed to be proud of myself, that I was banned from feeling any sort of comfort in any personal trait — whether it be looks, intelligence, or a vague feeling of being “unique.” You mocked my distress, treating me as if my bursting into tears was deliberately manipulative instead of the sign of a woman falling to pieces in front of you. You told me I had no right to expect I could make any lasting difference to anyone, not myself, and not even you.
Not only did you treat me with disrespect, minimizing my viewpoint feelings, but you managed to single-handedly destroy the sole touchstone that had allowed me to keep a hold of my sanity and my hope since I was a child: the belief that what made me different was valuable and valid. You told me, and these were your exact words, “You’re not special. You have to fully appreciate and understand that if you want to get better. You need to accept your own human ordinariness.”
Because that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it, Doctor? You have to be superior, even if that requires beating down every ego that comes into your presence, if it means you must undermine every intelligence, and chip away at every iota of self-worth that dares make itself known to you. At every one of our meetings, you arrived with an agenda and interpreted whatever I said in light of how it aligned with that you wanted to make me do. To make me into. You have one idea of what a healthy, sane person should look like, one idea of the path to good mental health, and all of your patients are forced onto it, no matter how inappropriate to their own particular situation or damaging to their personality. You have your pat theories and your pamphlets, your steps to wellness, and your own ego won’t permit a deviation from the program. All you want to do is bury all resistance so that your own concept can take seed.
You think you’re a gardener, Doctor, but you’re a fucking gravedigger.
I read once that the best way to hurt a child who has nothing is to give them something broken. I am so angry as I write this I don’t know where to start. I hate you, I hate your attitude toward me, and I hate that I have come to believe that you will never change no matter what anyone says or what damage you do.
Instead of a compassionate, healing experience, you introduced me to the deepest hell of my life. You stole something from me that I had had since I was a child and gave it back to me broken. You made any hint of validation I had received in my life seem like a fluke instead of my due as a hard-working professional.
You have no right to do what you did. My anger burns, melts me from the inside, makes me feverish and frantic when I need to be calm. The purest part of me is tainted and broken, and you did it. You did what no other person in my life, no matter how abusive or neglectful, was able to do no matter how hard they tried. And to have such damage take place under the auspices of a professional dedicated to improving mental health? I think I understand far too well the kind of ego and arrogance that makes you capable of committing such an act, as well as the utter ignorance of your own culpability in my pain, but I do not forgive you.
And now, if I’ve estimated correctly, the light on your little flashlight should be starting to flicker on and off, and on and off again. How long before the battery dies completely? Did I calculate right, because there are so many variables at play here, not just the series of black and white assumptions I excel at parsing. How long before the drugs wore off? Were you lucid quickly, or did it take longer for you to wake, assess your situation, then find the flashlight and letter in the dark than I guessed? Have I timed your reading speed correctly? I had the opportunity so many times to watch you scanning the notes from my file — but then, were you really reading, really digesting what was there? Or were you just giving my life history a cursory glance, more to pinpoint a vulnerability or two than for the sake of understanding? Words can be arrows, darts, sharp pointed weapons. Tranquilizers can be weapons too, whether delivered by dart or in a little paper cup in a nurse’s cold hand.
Have you read this far? Are you paying attention now? Oh dear Doctor, I wish I could say I cared. But I don’t need to know that you’re listening, that you’re hearing me. My actions are speaking to you, whether you understand or not. You can’t escape the consequences of my actions, if you want the absolute truth. You wanted me to dig deep, isn’t that what you said, over and over again? Well, I did. I dug deep beyond the strata I’d excavated before you tore my career and my future away. I dug deep into the matrix of unbroken ground, travelling back in time with every shovelful of dirt, into a place in the set past from which there is no escape.
You are benefitting from my efforts, although I doubt you’ll feel grateful. I buried you very, very deep. If you’re hearing noises now, or feeling vibrations, that’s the cement mixer coming to bury you even deeper. The city’s new parking garage will be your very own sepulchre, not that anyone but I will know.
How did I do, Doc, with excavating my soul for you? Did you get what you wanted from my pain, from my vulnerability? Do you at least appreciate the suitability of the monument that will be erected over your resting place, a parking garage, a fitting analogue to the hospital ward where you’d convinced me to warehouse myself, just long enough to ruin my life?
I’m sorry. It seems our time is up.
***
Jen Frankel is the author of the vegan zombie comedy Undead Redhead as well as the Blood & Magic series. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines.
