Sydney | Photos by Sean Smuda; Postwork by Cassie Barden
Like the other patients, Sydney isn't supposed to be here. The nurses' shoes squeak along with their carts -- one with water, the other with narcotics -- all in small paper cups like the ones at fast food joints for ketchup and mayonnaise. They offer. She accepts. She does the trick with the under-the-tongue business. Fools them like the fools they are. Easier for her so-called rescuers to wrongfully commit her to a hospital than to prison. No law library here, no appeals. For Sydney, her fortune turns around, here at this hospital. When the television goes to static, she hides out in the supply closet living off of IV bags. In only the light from underneath the door she strings together stripes of gauze to clothe herself. Too much attention with only a skirt on. She sews dental floss with a bent syringe. This tedium gives her time to think, to obsess. She plays the memory of her accident that brought her here on repeat. All of it -- the strobe of emergency flashers, the disco ball of passing headlights on shattered glass, the Jaws of Life melting through the body of the car, the agents masquerading as her rescuers in medic jumpsuits. She laughed to herself, crouched while stitching, not for the wrecked past but instead for tomorrow morning's sunshine spilling over her face. The security glass and steel door frame would be no match for a pneumatic rib-stretcher with thousands of pounds of pressure per inch. Sydney gets the escape right this time.