Read Online I Never Promised You A Rose Garden by Joanne Greenberg - Free Book Online Page A

reality had become its very cruelty, for it was like the world, whose promises were all lies and whose advantages and privileges were, in the end, evil andagony. A sweetness turned into a need, the need into a force, the force into total tyranny.
    “And it has a language of its own?” the doctor asked, remembering the alluring words and the withdrawal that came after them.
    “Yes,” Deborah said. “It is a secret language, and there is a Latinated cover-language that I use sometimes—but that’s only a screen really, a fake.”
    “You can’t use the real one all the time?”
    Deborah laughed because it was an absurd question. “It would be like powering a firefly with lightning bolts.”
    “Yet you sound quite competent in English.”
    “English is for the world—for getting disappointed by and getting hated in. Yri is for saying what is to be said.”
    “You do your drawing with which language—I mean when you think of it, is it in English or Eerie?”
    “Yri.”
    “I beg your pardon,” the doctor said. “I am perhaps a little jealous since you use your language to communicate with yourself and not with us of the world.”
    “I do my art in both languages,” Deborah said, but she did not miss the threat of the doctor, and the claim she was putting on the communication.
    “Our time is over,” the doctor said gently. “You have done well to tell me about the secret world. I want you to go back and tell those gods and Collect and Censor that I will not be cowed by them and that neither of us is going to stop working because of their power.”
    The first secret had been given, but the day was still there when Deborah and the attendant went back through it to the hospital. No lightning or growl from Yr. The last ward door was locked behind her, and they were beginning to serve lunch. There had been a change of head nurses on the ward, and the new one was giving metal spoons instead of wooden ones. There were two missing in the count. As the search grew more earnest, Doris, a new girl, began to laugh. “Keep calm,everybody! Keep calm!” For Deborah, those were the last clear Earth-words for a while; there was a pleat in time.
    Ward D’s administrator was saying, “What are you feeling like?” Deborah couldn’t speak without great difficulty, so she drew with her hands—a surging. She had trouble seeing.
    “You look pretty frightened,” he said.
    The surge began to make noise also. After a while the voice came through again. “Do you know what a cold-sheet pack is? I’m going to have one set up for you. It’s kind of uncomfortable at first, but when you’re in it a while, it may calm you down. It doesn’t hurt—don’t worry.”
    Watch out for those words … they are the same words. What comes after those words is deceit, and … The stroke from the tumor made her writhe on the floor. A bursting vein of terror released itself and then there was the darkness, even beyond the power of Yr.
    The consciousness that came after a time was blunt. She became aware that she was lying on a bed with an icy wet sheet stretched under her bare body. Another was thrown over her and it was also pulled tight. Then she found herself being rolled back and forth between the sheets while others were wound about her body. Then came restraints, tightening, forcing her breath out, and pushing her deep into the bed. She did not stay for the completion of whatever was being done….
    Sometime later Deborah came free of the Pit with perceptions as clear as morning. She was still wrapped and bound tightly in the pack, but her own heat had warmed the sheets until they seemed the temperature of her own exertions. All the anguish and fighting only served to heat the cocoon; the heat, to wear her out. She moved her head a little, tiring from the effort. It was all she could move.
    After a while someone came in. “How are you feeling?”
    “Yes …” Her voice sounded surprised. “How long have I been here?”
    “About