Written by Sailor Rose
I’m sure if I dropped myself off the window ledge and down to the garden below, I would break my legs and bleed out onto the pavement. That’s if the window would open at all. I pick and pick at the window putty so I can at least push the glass out first to see how far it falls but every week, when it’s just about done, I wake to find the sill squishy and full. I’d like to slide out the window and fall down to the pavement below but I think I’d break my legs. I think my shins would splinter and my toes would feel numb and I’d hate to be in that garden anyway. It smells too much like sweet things, like honey and jasmine, and syrup and perfume, with too many golden colours squished among the green. I’d like to be in the garden only to not be in this room. But when I pick at the putty it comes back squishy, and the window won’t open any higher to let me fall into the sweet-smelling garden so I’m stuck in the room with the bed and the door.
The door has no putty to pick but there’s a handle and I do love that handle. It sits proud from the wall. And the door and when I shake it, it moves, it moves because I’m shaking it. But not enough, it doesn’t move enough. Oh, how I hate that handle, almost as much as the window with its endless putty. But—the door, it has cracked! It’s opened and closed before I can get to it and she’s here, the one that comes every day. The one that comes every day to try and kill me before I can eat myself thin and bury myself in the garden. She’s watching me. I wedge my arm through the window, and it’s painting a red cuff on my arm, and I can feel the brick, course beneath my fingertips, and I think I can push my head through too but it’s just my nose touching the outside air and the window is trying to guillotine my skull from the temple down. Like I said, it’s a stupid window and the She has pulled me from it and I’m sitting on the bed. It’s standing in front of the window now, it’s hands on its hips, as if the window doesn’t lead to the aniseed-sweet garden. It would—she would put her thigh through the window too, let her ankle dangle and reach, if the door didn’t move for her, if the window putty holding the pane in place kept coming back. She would long for the garden too if she were being kept in a room, if she were being poisoned. But not me, I’m lucky. This room is all mine and this bed is mine and the door, the door, I do like it closed, I never want to leave through the door, and the window is lovely, it has a beautiful crack for fresh breeze and, oh, that lovely garden! The She moves closer. Such a sweet thing she is. She holds out a paper cup with the pills so I slip myself beneath the bed because she’s trying to kill me again and that stupid window wants me dead too.
17th May 2026, 09:02
Patient – Emilla Steart
Nurse – Katie Mullins
Upon entering the room, Emilla was watching the garden through the window again. She moved towards the door at first but once it closed, she returned to the window. She put an arm out the window, and her knee, before trying to stick her head out as well, while repetitively screaming ‘The murderer has come for me’. I removed Emilla from the window and guided her to the bed while she threw her arms to try and hit me. Once seated she called me a ‘fucking pussy ass bitch face murdering motherfuckering witch’, crossed her arms and started humming ‘Material Girl’ to herself. While I prepared her medication she said, ‘You know you’re my favourite to trust’ and made a heart shape with her hands at me. When I gave her the medication she said, ‘The putty! The putty loves this stuff!’, threw the pills out the window, started crying and screamed ‘you bitch witch! You bitch witch!’, dragged all the covers off the bed and hid beneath it with them.
Now, the only reason I’m in this room is because I wanted to see what was inside of it. I’m in a museum you see, it has so many rooms, so many rooms. I was looking through the rooms when I found this one and I wanted to see what was inside. And inside I found the garden, and it was actually inside then, not just through the window, and it smelled much better, like the rain, and like the sky and like the grass. It was a very nice room. And I lived in the garden for years and years and years. I lived there with all of the ants, and they loved that I lived in the room and we would always talk, and the ants, they had such nice manners.
18th May 2026, 16:32
Patient – Emilla Steart
Nurse – Katie Mullins
Hanema Steart phoned this afternoon for a progress report. She was very vocal about the expectations of her daughter’s improvement not being met since she was admitted. She expected Emilla to be progressing and is very upset that she appears to be digressing. I’ve told her that schizophrenia cases are unpredictable and often incurable. I’m concerned that Hanema may become aggressive regarding this matter.
She’s taken my teeth away. Did you know that? She stole every last one of them while I was sleeping and she’s hidden them in the walls. But I’ll get them back. They’re my teeth, and the walls, they don’t care, they don’t care for teeth, and they’ll give them back if I ask nicely, and I do, I do ask nicely, I have exceptional manners. And the bed! You know the bed, the one that is sometimes mine and is always in the room? This room used to be a bookshop actually. I lived in the bookshop with my cat. It was one of those bookshops that sat on top of a hill in England, and me and my dog used to just love living in the old bookshop at the bottom of the hill in England. My dog still lives with me but we don’t live in the bookshop anymore, we live in the walls. With my teeth. My teeth! My teeth are in the walls!
19th May 2026, 03:14
Patient – Emilla Steart
Nurse – Katie Mullins
After receiving noise complaints for Emilla’s room, I arrived to find that Emilla had barricaded the door with her bed. I dialled in a code amber before proceeding. Inside the room Emilla had managed to tear a wooden bed slat loose and was using it rip the plaster from the bedroom walls. She was screaming ‘My dog, my dog, he can’t breathe in the walls! Where are they, my dogs are scared of the plaster!’ The intervention team arrived as Emilla began to rip electrical cords from the walls, screaming ‘My veins! How did the witch steal my veins when I keep them under my pillow?’.
I’m very lucky that I’m a doctor otherwise I wouldn’t have realised that my veins were in the walls. She mustn’t have known that I was a doctor before, but now she knows so she’s moved me into my office. My office has a window, a bed, a door. It’s really quite lucky that I’m trained as a doctor otherwise, I might not have recognised my veins. I told her I’m a doctor so she made sure that I was taken to my office straight away because, as a doctor, I need an office. It’s a great office. My office has a window, a bed, a door. It’s amazing that I’m a doctor so I sit on the floor and begin work. It looks like there is significant bruising around the knuckles, a very fresh kind of purple, a purple that would look pretty if it were a bruise. And the fingers, the fingers, they’re not straight and there’s five of them and at least three appear to be broken. I bend them and probe them; I turn the hand over. Time for the X-ray! I make sure the hand is in the right position and I take the images. The hand moves so I have to take them again. Finally, the scans come back, and we have a diagnosis. I take them to the nurse, she’s standing in the corner waiting, and I tell her the diagnosis because she needs to go tell the patient now. I tell her, I say that there are three broken fingers in three broken places and that the colour purple isn’t just pretty, it’s actually a bruise and it’s turning black quickly. If they want it to heal straight, it will need to be rebroken.
19th May 2026, 13:46
Patient – Emilla Steart
Nurse – Katie Mullins
I went to check on Emilla in her new room. She was sitting quietly on the floor looking at something so I went to check that nothing had been left in the room before she had been transferred in. She showed no signs of knowing I had entered. When I got closer, I saw that she was playing with her own hand which was severely deformed, with heavy bruising and cuts. She sat quietly, poking it with her other hand and nodding continually. I dialled a code blue and waited to the side while I watched her sit. Before the medical staff arrived, Emilla came to me and said ‘You need to tell him to be more careful with car doors. And you need to tell her that the bones have to be rebroken. They need to heal properly.’ Before I could get a safe hold on her, Emilla started to hit the wall with her broken hand. When I restrained her, she said ‘Stop crying, it needs to be a clean break. You call yourself a nurse?’ Emilla was crying, I was not.
Emilla, Emilla, Emilla, Emilla, Emilla. What does that mean? What does that mean?
20th May 2026, 09:08
Patient – Emilla Steart
Nurse – Katie Mullins
Hanema Steart phoned again this morning. She wants her other daughter, Agnes, to visit Emilla. I have advised against the visit as Emilla is too unpredictable and volatile for visitors in her current state. I asked Emilla if she wanted Agnes to visit and Emilla replied, ‘The Queen? Is she going to try to kill me too?’ Agnes is scheduled to visit at 14:00 on Tuesday. I’ve requested for Emilla’s room repair to be rushed to try and restore some routine for Emilla before Agnes arrives.
The Queen! She’s coming to the hotel and she wants to visit me! I didn’t really know that queens visited hotels but I suppose they have to stay somewhere when they travel and, of course, she would stay at my hotel. I am the King after all, so why wouldn’t my wife want to visit me at our Airbnb? She’s always working so hard, and she deserves a break, especially on our anniversary. I know she hates being a lawyer, but I wouldn’t be able to run my bookshop if she wasn’t a lawyer. It’s a shame she won’t be here on Tuesday to meet the Queen. I’ve always wanted to meet the Queen. She was always so beautiful, but never quite as beautiful as my sister, Agnes.
21st May 2026, 09:10
Patient – Emilla Steart
Nurse – Katie Mullins
Emilla has been returned to her room. She spent most of the session doing push ups and sit ups while singing ‘Military Girl’ instead of ‘Material Girl’. When I gave her her medication she said, ‘Ah! My vitamins. Thank you kindly soldier, I do detest the scurvy’ before downing them all in one go. She winked at me and did two more sit ups before she heard a bird in the garden and started shouting at me ‘Get in the garden, you bitch ass hoe!’ while trying to shift the window higher with her shoulder.
I’m sitting in my room and I’m wearing my pretty dress today, the one that I never get to wear, the one with the blue ribbons. It’s because the Queen is coming. But when the door opens, it’s not the queen, it’s Agnes. And a man comes in behind her carrying a chair for her to sit in. Agnes sits in front of me, the man goes to stand in front of the door and the She stands against the wall and watches us.
‘Hey Emi, how are you?’
I must be Emi. Of course, I am. I’m Emilla. Emilla, Emilla, Emilla, Emilla, Emi.
‘Yes, good. Although the Queen was meant to visit and she didn’t. But I’m glad that you’re here instead.’
Agnes smiles at me and I remember that I’m the older sister and that she’s only fourteen and that her face is still round and soft.
‘I’m sorry the Queen didn’t visit Emi, I’m sure she’s very busy. I’m glad to be seeing you too. Have you been enjoying the garden view room?’
Garden view room. Those cost extra because most of the rooms in the institution are internal.
‘It’s smells very sweet, like eating a spoon of honey,’ I hear myself say.
‘Oh. Too sweet then,’ she says, nodding knowingly.
She’s wearing a dress too but hers is purple and it has little bows instead of ribbons.
‘Mum said you hurt your hand again.’ She’s looking at her shoes and not at me. Her feet touch the floor. Did they touch the floor before I came to this room?
‘I didn’t hurt it,’ I say. Looking at the deep black of the bruising, I know it’s definitely hurt but I don’t remember hurting it. I look up and find Agnes frowning at me. ‘Well, I didn’t … I mean to say that I didn’t know I had hurt it. I don’t know how I got hurt. I didn’t mean for it to happen.’
‘Okay,’ she says, still staring at my hand.
I tuck it into the folds of my dress, replacing purple bruise with bluebell blue.
‘How is … how is school?’ School is correct, I think. Mum goes to work, Agnes goes to school and Higgins does neither. I think Agnes is talking but Higgins does neither. Higgins doesn’t go to school, and he doesn’t work and he doesn’t go to school and he doesn’t work and–
‘Emi?’
‘Yes?’
He’s still living with mum and Agnes, and Agnes, and Higgins is still there and, and–
‘Where’s the Queen? I need to speak with her, I need a favour. Is she coming? Tell her it’s the hotel with the window. The window and the door and the bed. That’s the one she needs to find. You’ll tell me when the Queen is here? Is that her? Excuse me, excuse me, I need a favour please, your majesty. No! Please don’t go, don’t go, just one favour, please Your Majesty just one, one favour, one favour, please.’
22nd May 2026, 14:00
Patient – Emilla Steart
Nurse – Katie Mullins
Agnes visited today. Emilla was surprising coherent in the beginning. She recognised her sister and her own name and was able to hold a civil conversation for about five minutes. When she asked her sister about school, she became distracted, then irritated and irrational. She tried to grab her sister, convinced that Agnes was the Queen and started begging her for a favour. Agnes was removed from the room before Emilla sat herself in the corner and began to sob hysterically. She kept saying ‘He’s going to kill her. He’s going to kill her just like he tried to kill me.’ I tried to ask her who she was talking about but Emilla did not respond.
I am Emilla. I have a sister named Agnes. I know a man named Higgins. He lives at my house with my sister and my mother. He broke more than my hand. He’s going to kill us all.
Author Bio:
Sailor Rose (she/her) is an emerging Australian author who is currently completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Queensland University of Technology. She adores reading fantasy and queer romance novels and loves to write both creative non-fiction and fiction pieces. Her short story ‘Triple Infatuation’ was published by Glass Magazine and won their Winter Edition Writing Prize. Her travel memoir ‘The Editorial Expectations of the Modern Traveller’ and her poem ‘Signet’ were published on ScratchThat Magazine’s website and her short fiction piece ‘My Cousins Grew Up in the Trees’ was published in their ‘Timestamp’ print issue. Sailor was a member of ScratchThat’s 2026 editorial board in semester one and is currently Head of Art. In her writing, she intends to create beautiful worlds for people to become immersed in, filled with characters that occupy both the hearts and minds of her readers. As long as she has a cup of tea, she’s ready to write.