First came electric therapy, designed by men to **** her memory. The currents coursed through her veins. They tried to burn her true love from her brain. Synapses flared and flamed singeing away nearly everything she dared to feel almost nothing was left but a name, an impression. Session after session sparks cut through her skull and tore through her mind.
All she had to do to escape was to lie, and say she no longer felt that way. However, in her slurred and slow mental state all that she could do was whisper her lovers name. Iris sweet Iris the flower of her love, whose touch sent shivers swimming through her body. Iris the unforgettable, desirable, and unregrettable; even in the hours of her darkest pain she would never wish to forget that wonderful name. A name attached to such pleasurable memories. Iris whose lips tasted like strawberries and mouth would moan musically with her satisfaction. Touching each other under the starlit sky, bare breast against bare breast, licking each other from back to thigh until their passions exploded and they came together in exhaustion. No matter how much their love cost them, the jobs it lost them, the family they had to leave behind, it was all worth it. The love they had was special. Men would glance and stare; Sick with desire and envy, but they didn’t care.
The Doctors tried to destroy their love but failed, because buried deep within the burnt flesh, on some deep genetic level the feelings still remained. Night after night she quietly sobbed Iris’s name. Her vision and memories were faded and degraded by the shocks administered. Sometimes after the doctors left and she was by herself, she would search her mind trying to find her own name. Corner to corner each crevice and crack, each hidden corridor in her mind was faded, and the only name she could find was Iris’s. Other evenings when no one was watching the orderlies would sneak into her room to tease and taunt her. They would scar her body with their fevered kisses, violating her womanhood with their vile flesh protruding and extending into her. Her eyes would close. Her body would tense, and her mind would vacate her skull, while holding on to only one thing, Iris.
When the merciless administering of electrical current to her brain failed to achieve any notable degree of success, the butcher came. They called him Doctor Slade, A specialist. They brought her to his table in a white room that was sterile and scentless. Her body was strapped to a cold metal table and she was sedated. Slade sliced through the skin on her skull, cracked the bone and opened her up, exposing her mind to the all those in attendance. Then when he was finished, he walked away a proud master mutilator. The nurse, whose white uniform was now splattered and sprayed with blood and bits of brain matter, hauled her back to her room.
In her room she sat dripping drool from her swollen lips. Her vacant eyes stared out at the blank wall registering nothing at all. The bandages on her skull concealed small patches of blonde hair matted with clots of blood. Her drawers reeked of ***** matter because she had soiled herself. Nothing remained except a shell.
Somewhere far away Iris screamed the forgotten name. In her dreams she cradled her lover’s fragile frame, but never saw or touched her lovers face. Iris scribed their love in journal after journal, sketching out in deep determined details their five years together. She wrote of each high and low from the first time they met in the College courtyard till they day they were separated permanently.
Years passed. Iris’s body weakened from despair and began to waste away. Her flesh sagged from her bones bunching into wrinkles with brown speckles and spots parading all over her skin. Memories got lost in the fog of her mind until one day she could no longer recall her lover’s name. Shortly thereafter Iris faded away as well. Her body remained unsoiled by shame, for their love had been a thing of poetry, epic, and beyond belief, a guard against the unjustified onslaught of social madness, a sweet relief no matter how brief.
I wrote this a year before season 2 of American Horror Story aired. In that season they have a story line that is similar to what I wrote. However, this particular story was inspired by scenes from "V is For Vendetta" and a documentary I watched on an old Irish mental hospital.