Slade House

by David Mitchell

don’t feel well knitted today,

Mum’s eyes have tiny red veins like rivers photographed from very high up.

Mrs. Marconi says talking’s like ping-pong: you take turns.

Valium rubs out speech marks and pops thought-bubbles.

“Do you ever think you might be a different species of human, knitted out of raw DNA in a laboratory like in The Island of Doctor Moreau, and then turned loose to see if you can pass yourself off as normal or not?”

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat inside a box you can never ever open.

once you’ve been a psychiatric patient, no one ever gives you the benefit of the doubt again. Easier to fix a bad credit rating than a bad credibility rating.