Lunar Tic - FridayFlash

I'd waged a hunger strike in order to secure a clock for my room. I claimed it as a basic human rite to know what time it is. The cunning bastards ensured it wasn't a twenty-four hour one, so I'm still none the wiser.

Lacking for any windows and with the electric light on all the time, eternally I have no idea whether it is day or night beyond my four walls.

Meal times are no help in apportioning the day, since I am provided with just two servings instead of the customary three. Unlike the old days, there is no porridge or toast to delineate breaking of the night-time fast. So now I don't even know when I'm supposed to be asleep. How's that supposed to help my prognosis?

Room temperature is maintained at a constant, so there's no call for soups to warm up cold days and salads in the height of summer. Now, an unremitting diet of charred meat on the bone twice a day. No accompanying vegetables. No cutlery even to eat it with. "We don't want you to stab yourself do we?"

When they installed the clock, they asked me if I wanted a calendar for my wall. "No bare flesh though" they smirked. I replied I had no need of one. For each day bleeds one into the other. I simply need to know when day is and when night is.

My body is simply bereft of cues for its own inner rhythms. As was intended.

Though they give me pills to take, these fail to provide me with any inkling as to my place within the cycle. I forced myself to stay up through seven double revolutions of my clock without sleep. Scratching each completed period on to the wall. In that time I'd received ten doses. I flushed them down my toilet.

My mother had a phobia of snakes. Not the creatures themselves, but of how they moved. My Shrink frottaged himself almost to orgasm when I threw him that titbit. But I remember that it meant as a child we could only visit the reptile house in the zoo, on the day when they turned the temperature down to ensure there was no snakes in their sinuous motion.

And now the doctors are doing the same to me.

They don't want me to know when the moon is out, let alone what phase it's in.

They mock me with their cooked meats.

They want to deprive me of all my senses, but I will recover them and go hunting once again.

While mother confronted her fears in the artificially stilled reptile house, I was off peering through the bars of the wolf enclosure. Longingly.