I’ve been trying to get back into writing, so I’ve started today by making up a prompt based on a sane patient in a Victorian asylum. Hope this becomes a daily habit.
Note- This story is unedited, unpolished, and inaccurate, it was written in one go and regardless of the worth or value of the story, it’s put me back into the long held off and dreaded writing mood:
I wore the radical bicycle riding clothes of the time, to be free to roam the city at the speed I wanted to and at the leisure I needed from an overtly strict society. That’s where I found myself, fully free even if for a short ride around blocks of staring, shocked, and disapproving eyes. I worked in my father’s pharmacy (he had passed away recent enough that the memory way fresh but long enough that I was out of the year long mourning) and would bicycle on that high wheel to all the errands running a shop requires. I was quite a sight.
At my shop (for I inherited the shop and was allowed to work, not being married), I experimented in the basement lab to invent better products for the average ailment and rare remedies for the devastatingly ill. This is how I came to know poisons. This is how a man murdered his wealth-backed wife. This is how I almost solved the murder and was convicted instead.
I immediately became curious of the death the moment I heard the murmured gossip from my loyal costumers (and had it confirmed by the local paper, if that is reliable). Knowing the funeral director and fearing that a misused product from my shop led to the unfortunate death, for the recent widower was a customer of mine, I examined the body. This is a very long story forced short and it is quite a pity that I am not able to explain how my thought process lead me to do such a daring and impulsive act as to examine the body of a mere acquaintance. But I had to know the cause. Knowing poisons (as I stated for a reason before) and experimenting on a few rats and meat samples from the local butcher myself, I knew the harm they caused even in the smallest dosages in the daily care products and medicines sold at my and other pharmacies. A popular ingredient is arsenic, which in a lady’s skin care product gave the favored translucent pale white look women desired to have (or believed to have desired). My skin was of a darker hue, but I had enough European heritage in me to not cause too much of a scandal in society. Not too much of a scandal compared to the other things I did, such as ride in bloomers or own a shop as a woman, at least.
I collected samples of tissue from the deceased (with the director turning a blind eye for me, what a dear) both inside and out (don’t fear, the corpse was patched up and presentable when I finished, and besides, the dead don’t usually mind) for further testing in my lab. What I found after performing the Marsh test was high levels of arsenic fit to do away an army. This was no accident from the products I attempt to make healthier and safer (if not, I am certain to put a skull on the label for caution), this was murder.
A longer story even shorter as the doctors are soon to arrive,
I went to the police with my findings and explained how I knew all I told. Instead of listening to my suspicions and taking my careful findings and my years of experience in the local pharmacy they were familiar of, they deemed me insane. Insane. An Insane woman who sliced a body she had no right to. I admit, maybe it wasn’t legal and maybe I should have gone about my suspicions in a better way, but in the excitement of a mystery I had just begun, I couldn’t help it. I thought I could help. And I could have solved it, I know I could. If only they took my… no, if only I, independently, continued research and investigated on my own. I could have proved it.
Waiting in my cell (for this is truly a prison in all sense of the term, for the wrongly kept sane and for the wrongly treated insane), I know that even if I finished the case I so foolishly took on, it would make no difference. I was more of a threat than a help to those who run the show, so lock her in the asylum and forget her there.
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