ᴾʰᵒᵇᵒᵖʰᵒᵇⁱᵃ [ᴶᵃˢᵒⁿ ᴳʳᵃᶜᵉ]

α.

α. Agetophobia - Fear of Insanity
Change by Tracy Chapman

-rewritten 1/4/22-

IT wasn't unusual for little girls like her, little girls ostracized by the people who should have loved them the most, to feel lonely. It wasn't unusual for little girls like her, little girls who had been isolated for weeks at a time and who couldn't remember a single 'I love you,' to feel different. It wasn't unusual for little girls like Aza-Everett Malin to be afraid.

She was afraid of the demons that haunted her, and not just late at night when the only noise was the ticking analog clock on her bedside table; her fears snaked their way to the front of her mind, taunting her – what if there was someone in the shadows of the corner of her room; what if a monster lurked under her bed? What if the branch tapping against her window was actually the sharp claws of a monster that only wished to terrorize little girls like Aza-Everett Malin.

She was afraid of the shadows that swirled and the walls that pulsed with deformed faces, their malicious laughter seeping into her ears and freezing her spine. Aza was afraid of the hallucinations her fear created – the ones that were impossible to discern from the reality she thought she knew so well.

Little girls, like Aza-Everett Malin, were hospitalized. The adults around her knew she was haunted by demons; they had known ever since she insisted that there really were basketball-sized arachnids creeping towards the door of her second-grade classroom on their spindly legs, clicking their foaming pincers like a steady metronome only she and Timmy could head.

Aza insisted that she, too, saw the deformed faces in the wall: the ones that pulsed in and out of existence, wearing wicked grins on their melted faces as though about to push free from the concrete. Aza insisted that Michael Valentine wasn't imagining it: there really was a hideously painted clown around the corner of the hallway, one that called towards the children in a voice that crackled as though coming towards a radio.

After cases and cases of the children in her classes seeing their worst fears manifested, the common denominator soon became little Aza-Everett Malin, with russet-colored eyes her classmates swore danced with their greatest fears. Spindly-legged spiders, deformed faces and melted clowns shone in her irises, with a color her teachers had never seen before.

Michael, Suzie, Timmy and even quiet little Asha Jacon all claimed Aza had seen their fears too, and only after they shared their nightmares with her. It was only after they shared their fears that they began to manifest. It was Aza; all Aza.

Her teachers thought she was crazy. Little Aza-Everett Malin – with hair so dark it seemed to shine with a deep blue hue under the fluorescent lights – was the reason her classmates' imaginations ran wild. Aza-Everett Malin, with a hooked nose that certainly wasn't her mother's, was hallucinating: and it was because of this that she encouraged them to see their worst fears in broad daylight.

Her mother agreed. Natalia Malin agreed, refusing to meet her daughter's russet eyes that danced in the light. The ones that showed only horrific images of the young girl's father: his cruel smile that had seemed so beautiful, his own russet eyes with just the same power, his high cheekbones that cast harsh shadows upon his face. Natalia Malin agreed and sent her daughter away, more than happy to push Aza-Everett Malin and those hideous, disgusting, brutal, beautifully-horrific russet eyes out of her life.

And so, Aza-Everett was sent away, to a hospital where her nails were kept short to the tips of her fingers, where she wasn't allowed to tie up her hair and where eyes watched her like a hawk even when she did the simplest of taste, like color in a picture with a dull sky-blue colored pencil.

She was there for years, growing under the lens of a microscope – told constantly that she was hallucinating – and reminded that the things she saw, the spindly-spiders, deformed clowns and pulsing faces were merely figments of her imagination. Dr. Green told her every day: the fears that crept in her head at night were just that, fears, and they were perfectly harmless.

But they were wrong. Her doctors were wrong because, to Aza-Everett Malin, fears like that weren't harmless. They were her burden, a curse that would haunt her for years to come. Fear was her burden to carry, like the sky on her shoulders. Because to people like Aza-Everett Malin, the slithering snake-woman around the corner, wasn't merely a figment of her imagination: it was a monster looking to kill people like her. The man with ram-horns that gave her a lollipop with a wide, toothy grin wasn't merely a trick of the light. It was a monster, hiding amongst mortals, biding its time to hurt girls like little Aza-Everett Malin, who so self-consciously wore sunglasses to conceal her eyes.

They were wrong because people like little Aza-Everett Malin, who swore up and down that she wasn't trying to hurt anyone even before she hit her growth spurts, didn't belong anywhere: save one small valley beside the Long Island Sound, where people could do miraculous things.

She belonged with the girl who could make even a tattered, neon-orange shirt look runway ready, with the girls who swore off all boys, with the grey-eyed girl whose tongue danced with fully-formed plans, with the boy who looked youthful and young with every additional year, with the girl who won every competition she entered, with the girl who could beat anyone in a sword-fight, and with the girl who was unnaturally lucky.

Aza belonged with the boy who could manage even the most difficult pegasi; she belonged with the boy who could shoot a bullseye, blind, from three-hundred meters, with the girl who could open any lock just by pressing a palm to it, with the girl who grew flowers as her bare feet touched the earth, and with the boy who could even the scales of fate.

She belonged with people like her: the boy who could cause any person to fall asleep with only a light touch, with the girl that exuded a red mist to do her bidding, with the boy who disappeared in the dark, with the boy who could drive people mad: Aza belonged with the boy who could control the sea.

And so, little Aza-Everett Malin learned her place amongst the outcasts, but she never truly accepted it.

Aza-Everett Malin, with the kindest smile anyone had seen, was haunted. And she would never truly recover.