It’s 3:20 a.m. and Jocelyn Richards* and I are meeting for coffee in an abandoned shipyard — her choice. I’m nursing my cold-brew, wondering if she’s going to show, when there’s movement out of the corner of my eye, and there she is — hiding in the shadows.

Dressed casually in a tattered sweatshirt, the hood pulled up to match her hooded eyes, Jocelyn has made it apparent why she’s so successful in her field: you never see her coming. Her face is natural, her fingernails bare except for neat crescents of blood, blurring, as she nervously drums the splintered shipping container we sit on. She’s jittery, even though I’m the only one with coffee!

“Thanks so much for meeting me,” I say. “Can I just start by saying how refreshing it is to see a woman in this business?”

Jocelyn offers a terse reply. A grunt, actually. She’s not the chattiest, but, hey, it’s her actions, not her words, that brought me to our shipyard meeting this morning.

“When you’ve kidnapped your latest victim and you bring them home, tie them up, and pull the burlap sack off their head. Are they surprised to see a woman standing in front of them? Do you ever feel like they’re holding their breath, waiting for a man to enter the basement?”

“Maybe,” says Jocelyn, as she starts to file her incisors with a nail file. In a career like hers, looks are everything. Like most women in demanding positions, Jocelyn’s appearance determines how seriously people take her: it decides whether or not a victim will scream when they see her coming; whether or not she’ll get the leading role in someone’s nightmare; and whether or not her legacy will live on in campfire ghost stories and Lifetime dramas.

“In your position, the element of surprise is so important for your success. You have to surprise your victims, keep them on their toes, trick them into your van, but tell me: what do you do to surprise yourself? How do you surprise…you?”

I search her face, waiting for an answer. In a career so focused on other people, Jocelyn probably needs self-care more than anyone.

Jocelyn picks at the shipping box, wedging splinters of wood under her short nails. She stares at me with cold, hard eyes, probably impressed with how good of a question I just asked. “I surprise myself…with who I choose next.”

“I love it,” I say. And I really do. How great to have so much autonomy over where your job takes you.

I sat down with the most successful female serial killer in the business to talk clear skin, carbs, and creating success in a male-dominated field.
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“Do you ever think about taking a break from it all—the hours, the stress, the constant travel—to start a family? I can’t even imagine what it’s like dating in your field. I mean, where do you even meet someone?” I say. Family hasn’t come up yet, but it’s well-known that behind every successful woman is an overbearing mother asking for grandkids.

“I have kids. Or, I should say, had,” she growls, her breath sultry with the potent smell of meat. There’s a small red speck on Jocelyn’s chin, perhaps a droplet of blood from a long workday.

“You have something on your chin,” I say, pointing to the speck. She raises her fingers to wipe it away and, just like that, I feel like an old friend: one girlfriend helping another, like we’re drunk at the bathroom sinks together, saving each other from wardrobe emergencies. She licks the blood off her finger with a swipe of her tongue and a smile, her sharp incisors winking. A smile meant for me—her ally.

Now that we’re so close, I think it’s time to address the elephant in the room. I’ve been dying to ask, and it’s clear that Jocelyn has been dying to answer.

“How often do you think about the wage gap in your career? How do feel knowing that there’s a man out there doing the same thing as you, but still getting feared more from his victims?” I ask, my felt-point pen poised above my Moleskin. But the only answer I get is silence.

I look up from my pad and just like that, she’s gone. She’s disappeared into the shadows of the dockyard, leaving me with chills and a lingering disappointment that #MeToo didn’t come up more in the interview.

*the subject’s name has been changed to protect her identity

Nine years ago, when I was hospitalized at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York City, I learned the hard way that psychiatric institutions are not like the glamorous and horrible places that populate literature and film. They are sad, tedious boxes where people sit around watching the National Geographic channel and doing crossword puzzles.

Being in a psych ward is boring. Knock-out, drag-down dull. The endless waiting and watching. The dumb activities. Even while at the end of your rope, you are cosmically bored. I remember thinking, “This is not like fucking Girl, Interrupted. No one is doing my nails in solidarity. We haven’t run off to the secret bowling alley.” That I had a well-developed fantasy about what my hospital experience would be like is disturbing in its own right, but there you have it.

When I was hospitalized, I brought a backpack of books with me, like I was going to catch up on my reading (I didn’t). One of the books I packed was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper — a classic story of how a woman descends into psychosis as the result of ineffective and abusive medical treatment.

Being in a psych ward is boring. Knock-out, drag-down dull.
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Today, when I teach the text in my literature class, “Representations of Mental Illness,” I emphasize the connections between the narrator’s madness and the patriarchal culture that oppressed her. However, even all these years later, I waver in my interpretation of the final scene, where the narrator’s husband/physician faints at the sight of her crawling around the room she has been convalescing in:

‘What is the matter?’ he cried. ‘For God’s sake, what are you doing!’

I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.

‘I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane! And I’ve pulled off most of the paper so you can’t put me back in!’

Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

The two questions I always ask myself are: Does the narrator, in her final moments of unabashed madness, gain a terrible power? Or is she hopelessly powerless?

These two questions are at the core of the debate regarding using the psychiatric institution (or the haunted asylum) as a locus of entertainment during the Halloween season. In particular, Knott’s Berry Farm recently came under scrutiny for its show “Fear VR 5150,” and the project was cancelled after protesters called it unethical. Six Flags Great Adventure was also criticized for its use of wandering “mental patients” in the Halloween Fright Fest extravaganza. Due to pressure from mental health advocacy groups such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Six Flags eventually replaced the “maniacal inmates” with zombies.

As a person who has been institutionalized, I am surprisingly okay with this kind of entertainment.

In his elegant New York Times article, “Mental Illness is Not a Horror Show,” Andrew Solomon writes:

“I was saddened to see painful lived experiences transmogrified into spooky entertainment. I was also unnerved to consider that I was someone else’s idea of a ghoul, a figure more or less interchangeable with a zombie . . . I think of the effect these attractions would have not only on people without mental illnesses, who might be inspired to patronize, shun, or even harm those of us who do have them, but also on the large portion of the American population who battle these challenges daily. Will they be more hesitant to come out about a psychiatric diagnosis? Will they be less likely to check themselves in for care?”

I understand Solomon’s concerns about the use of mental patients as entertainment in immersive horror experiences. Our treatment of the mentally ill is shameful; many people with mental health issues don’t get treatment, end up homeless, and are seen as threats to public safety. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, more than 124,000 of the 610,000 homeless people in America suffer from a mental illness. An estimated 2–15% of people diagnosed with major depression die by suicide. These problems are not entertaining.

And the stigma surrounding them is very real; it’s so real that I’m terrified to even publicly out myself as a former (and let’s not kid ourselves — maybe future) mental patient, because I might be discriminated against at work. That my work as a writer and educator is focused on mental health and literature about mental illness hasn’t really assuaged my anxiety. I have inside knowledge of a place no one wants to be inside.

Our treatment of the mentally ill is shameful.
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But despite very much understanding the concerns that many like Solomon and other mental health advocates share about immersive horror experiences like “Fear VR 5150,” I want to share a perhaps unorthodox way of thinking about these “performances.” I’ve written about how watching horror movies helps me with my anxiety disorder because it feels soothing to confront unspeakable things that are not ordinary, everyday stressors. This leads me to wonder if there is something curative in the power of spectacle. More specifically: Is it possible to get something out of the asylum simulacrum if you’ve actually been a patient in a real one?

Shortly after my hospitalization, I went to a performance of “Sleep No More.” This immersive theater experience spans multiple levels in a Manhattan warehouse converted into what the New York Times described as “a 1930s pleasure palace called the McKittrick . . . what might have happened had Stanley Kubrick . . . been asked to design the Haunted Mansion at Disney World, with that little old box maker Joseph Cornell as a consultant.” Attendants are given masks and encouraged to meander through the intricately detailed scenarios. While you grow increasingly disoriented, dancers and actors perform fragmented bits of Macbeth. You are encouraged to touch everything, go rifling around in drawers, and aggressively inhabit this alternative space.

The floor that contained a reproduction of a Victorian-ish psychiatric ward was the most compelling, and I spent at least an hour wandering through the elaborate, constructed fantasy world of this mental hospital. I lovingly caressed each half-filled filthy claw-foot bathtub. I sat in an old dentist’s chair and stared at a single, dangling lightbulb. I cut off a lock of hair and placed it in an envelope (as per the doctor’s orders). I pored through the patient paperwork. Facing my past in this immersive, explorative theater experience was both life changing and therapeutic. I felt liberated.

Institutions Don’t Help The Mentally Ill

Perhaps what happened to me at “Sleep No More” was that I experienced a cathartic event. Catharsis, which was originally theorized by Aristotle, relates to how viewing tragic theater can provide the audience with an emotional release from negative feelings. In psychoanalytic theory, these negative emotions are related to some kind of repressed trauma and released through emotional discharge. Catharsis is not limited to psychoanalysis, though; Native American healing rituals, collective crying, ecstatic dance, and Roman Catholic exorcism are just a few examples of how catharsis can be used for healing. And while traditional psychoanalytic theory is no longer popular, there is still professional interest in how catharsis can be used in therapy and debate on whether or not it is effective.

While we all deal with our baggage in highly personalized ways, it’s very human to crave the safety of organized chaos while searching for catharsis. When I told a friend of mine that I felt weird about my reaction to the Knott’s Berry Farm controversy, she surprised me by saying she had similar thoughts in the past about similar exhibits and performances: “Show me the hospital bed behind the jail cell bars, the old school medical tools, the doctors and nurses in dated medical clothing. That shit gives me the creeps but draws me in at the same time . . . Maybe it’s all because I’ve seen a mental hospital in the flesh? Does it make me appreciative of current medical care for the mentally ill?”

The idea that a fake asylum with maniacal inmates could be fascinating, soothing, and even fun for those who have actually experienced the reality complicates the sentiment that these projects lack value. If some find these performances hurtful and offensive and others find them cathartic, what is the appropriate response? Is it better to shut them down because they are triggering and stigmatizing, or to leave them open with the understanding that everyone will have a different reaction — and some may even find them helpful?

There’s no easy answer. But because I’ve sat in the sterile waiting rooms; because my friends were in the hospital and wouldn’t return my calls while I tore my cuticles to bits; because I was in the hospital and bored and tired and worried, I do know this: The tacky version is infinitely preferable to the reality.

Be it Halloween or a convention, anytime there is an opportunity to costume or cosplay, the issue of skin color arises — specifically, the brown skin of Black people. White people believe that they can paint it on and wash it off with impunity. I’ve heard every excuse possible, from the “it’s harmless” to “my Black friend is okay with it” to “it’s a sign of how much I love the character.”

But regardless of how you wrap it in your head, blackface is not a compliment. It’s a dehumanizing insult that people literally paint themselves in and try to hustle other people into believing. That anyone can look at the history of Black people in America — hell, the world — and think that this is some kind of tribute only reflects how completely divorced they are from reality.

You see it in the cosplay community, any time a new brown-skinned character appears on the scene. White people and non-Black people of color promote the lie that skin-darkening is an attempt at authenticity. “It’s an inherent part of the character,” they say. “You should feel honored,” they say.

Why? Why should I feel honored? Do you think that you are doing me or any other Black person a favor? Why would you think that? What is it about wearing my skin color that makes you think you are doing something nice? Especially when so many Black people have spoken about how fucking insulting it is? Every year there are posts, essays, videos, podcasts talking about how terrible blackface is, and every year there’s a new crop of costumers crying victim when Black people tell them it’s wrong.

If you really want to honor me or any Black person, how about listening when we say that culture isn’t a costume, blackface isn’t okay, and it certainly isn’t a compliment. And then how about you stop doing that shit.

When you take a person’s characteristics and shrink them down to their skin color, you are promoting a dangerous way of thinking about people. This is a technique that has been used to dehumanize and destroy Black people for hundreds of years. You may claim to associate brown skin with strength of character, but historically it’s been used to say Black people are animals, criminals, primitive, and in need of strong discipline. To this day, white people interpret brown skin as dangerous and threatening. That is one of the reasons why police are so quick to use excessive violence to “subdue” us instead of just talking to us. Any movement we make is deemed threatening and they feel justified in using physical force to suppress it. This is a very real interpretation of my skin color, something over which I had no control.

If you really want to honor me or any Black person, how about listening when we say that culture isn’t a costume, blackface isn’t okay, and it certainly isn’t a compliment.
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It doesn’t matter that you see my brown skin as strength. It doesn’t matter if you see it as resilience. Strength and resilience are indeed traits I possess, but they’re traits that I’ve had to develop to compensate for the racist environment I live in. It doesn’t matter that you think my skin is beautiful. It doesn’t matter how many positive descriptors you load onto my Blackness — it doesn’t validate the dehumanizing aspect of it. This act of reducing my worth to my skin color is how stereotypes are made and doing it erases the complexity of human identity. It limits me to some finite list of characteristics that in many cases I’ve had to protect myself from — like the oversexed Jezebel stereotype that follows Black girls and women around, coloring their friendships and relationships throughout life and the angry Black woman stereotype that negatively affects how I’m regarded in the workplace.

Assigning specific behaviors and characteristics to skin color makes it easy for people to project their idea of what they think I am on me. They create the me they think I should be instead of actually getting to know who I am. I’ve gone to clubs and had white people approach me demanding that I show them how to dance because “everybody knows Black people can dance.” (For the record, I love dancing, but I’m terrible at it.) I’ve had men assume I was available because I was at the bar having drinks. I’ve had co-workers assume I’m violent because I was angry about something.

When you take a person’s characteristics and shrink them down to their skin color, you are promoting a dangerous way of thinking about people.
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It is annoying and aggravating to constantly inform people to squash their assumptions. I’ve lost the expectation that new people will actually try to know me instead of projecting whatever their expectations of Black women are onto me. I’m not a caricature, and I’m not a costume to be put on — or a voice to be affected, so please don’t yell “yaaaaass girlfriend!” and then make strong eye contact for some affirmation that we are in the secret Black girl club. I don’t fucking talk like that and I sure as hell don’t appreciate either the projection or the mimicry.

These stereotypes are boring and trite, but more than that, they’re dangerous. Just ask 17- year old Trayvon Martin, 13-year old Tyre King, and 12-year old Tamir Rice — all murdered because of the assumptions someone’s overactive imagination projected on their skin.

This is what we Black people live with. We live with the knowledge that our skin, a superficial physical characteristic we were born with, has been tainted by white people. Marred by white people with power. Disparaged by white people who work to punish us for existing. Growing up, we learn that the people around us, the pale ones who burn in the sun, actively and passively suppress us, oppress us, and benefit from mistreating us. We learn that you lie in your heads and hearts about us, and then lie to our faces when you say we’re all human and equal.

American history does not agree with you and we are living in its toxic present. A present where white people continue to make dehumanization a social norm.

I’m not a caricature, and I’m not a costume to be put on.
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You wouldn’t skin someone and wear their skin. So ask yourself, what are you actually trying to do when you feel the need to darken your skin in order to costume as your favorite Black person or character? What are you saying when you claim that darkening your skin makes you feel closer to them, like you are embodying them? It’s like you’re trying to symbolically absorb them into you and replace them. You are trying to be them and that isn’t admiration. It’s psychological cannibalism and it’s sickening.

Is this type of behavior the modern day descendent of colonialism? Is this constant cannibalism of other people, other cultures, until you absorb them at every level and become them feeding the inherited need to conquer, consume, and destroy?

I don’t know. What I do know is that absorbing us won’t make you into a better person. It doesn’t imbue you with the strengths you admire. It just feeds your sickness and masks your rot a little longer.

‘The Congress Planned Parenthood Massacre’

FADE IN.

INT. BREAK ROOM, GOVERNMENT BUILDING — EARLY EVENING

Cecile Richards begins to regain consciousness, stirring in the chair to which she is bound. For a few blissful seconds, she is able to believe that the past few hours were nothing but a bad dream — that her idyllic fall afternoon drive through Washington D.C. went off without a hitch, that she was never captured and dragged back to the hulking government building in which she now sits, trapped and terrified. Her eyes snap open — Cecile is forced to confront her reality. Her captors pore over book-length documents and argue. Cecile screams. The captors scream back.

CECILE
Why are you screaming at me?! I’m the one tied up here!

DESICCATED OLD MAN
Oh, that’s just what we do! We protect innocent baby lives by screaming at scared women outside of clinics. You know, calling them murderers and whores and stuff. Classic good guy behavior. Besides, we’re men and our voices should be heard over a woman’s at all times.

Cecile glances around the room and screams again.

CECILE
What are those?! What is wrong with you?!

She motions with her head to a pile of posters and signs covered with graphic pictures of dead fetuses.

ANOTHER DESICCATED OLD MAN
Those are our protesting placards. We use them to stop all you evil women from aborting.

CECILE
So you collect and surround yourself with gruesome high-resolution pictures of dead fetuses and somehow women who get abortions are the evil ones? . . . That’s not even what an aborted fetus looks like!

DESICCATED OLD MAN #1
Shut your mouth! What do you know?! You’re just a dumb woman. Now quit yer screaming — you’re distracting us from our important work.

‘Those are our protesting placards. We use them to stop all you evil women from aborting.’

CECILE
What work!? What are you going to do to me?! Let me go!

DESICCATED OLD MAN #2
Well, we’ve downloaded some new fonts that make words look like they were written in dripping blood, and then we wrote a pro-life parody of Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance” called “Bad Abortion (Abortion Is Bad).”

He makes a deliberate check mark on his clipboard.

Now we’re onto the next task on our agenda — we’re coming up with new ways to restrict abortions.

CECILE
But abortion is legal! Whether or not a woman aborts shouldn’t be up to you — the decision should be made solely by the woman whose body is in question, not lobbyists or politicians!

DESICCATED OLD MAN #1
(disregarding Cecile)
Remember when we talked about “legitimate rape” and how females’ bodies can shut down pregnancies if they want to?

CECILE
Oh god, please, no! Don’t say “females!” Please! Please! Anything but that!

DESICCATED OLD MAN #2
(ignoring Cecile)
This is a graph my kids helped me create on Excel. See, there are numbers and lines — which means it’s science, which means it’s basically fact which means . . . we’re right. That line going up is the number of abortions . . . I think. I don’t know — I got caught up in choosing the right colors for my graph lines and forgot to label the axes.

CECILE
What gives you the right to weigh in on women’s reproductive healthcare?!
You’re all just a bunch of cisgender old men!

DESICCATED OLD MAN #2
Cisgender old men with a lot of money, baby!

DESICCATED OLD MAN #1
Who better to determine what a woman can do with her body?

DESICCATED OLD MAN #2
Don’t you understand — we have to protect human life, so we cut funding for food stamps and Medicaid in order to pay for more investigations into legitimate medical organizations like Planned Parenthood! How doesn’t that make sense?

DESICCATED OLD MAN #1
Speaking of . . .

Off-camera, a grinding mechanical sound grows louder and closer. Cecile fights against her restraints and spasms with terror when the source of the noise is revealed to be a maniacal hulk of a man wielding a chainsaw in one hand and a reel of footage in the other. As Cecile screams, the man guides his weapon through the film, unabashedly splitting scenes.

DESICCATED OLD MAN #1
Yes! With that video, we will surely rile everyone up and come close to defunding Planned Parenthood! Good work, Fetaltissueface! . . . You know, we should probably work on your name. It’s not exactly catchy. Kinda sounds a bit foreign too, which you know the family doesn’t like.

CECILE
That footage is blatantly manipulated! You’ll waste millions of dollars probing into claims that have been proven false time and time again!

DESICCATED OLD MAN #2
Yeah, pretty scary, isn’t it? Just be thankful that we’re not talking about your emails. Now back to this graph — do you think the red I chose for the word “abortions” needs to be redder? Should I use the new blood-dripping font?

‘The Village Pharmacy’

FADE IN.

EXT. HIGHWAY — AFTERNOON

A girl in a dirty 19th-century-style dress emerges from a thick forest. Her hands and face are covered in fine scratches and leaves are tangled in her disheveled hair. She boldly steps forward into the middle of the highway, forcing a SUV to quickly swerve left to avoid hitting her. The truck comes to an abrupt stop mere feet from the girl, who appears confused but not entirely fearful. After a few moments, we hear the truck’s door open.

DRIVER
Are you okay?

GIRL
I’m not hurt. But please — bring me to the town. I seek tools of medicine.

GUY IN BACKSEAT OF SUV
(sticks head out of his window)
Uh, if she gets in the car, that makes this an UberPool, not an Uber — I’m gonna need the charges to reflect that. Also, not to be a dick, but I think I should be dropped off first since I got in first and happy hour ends soon and I’m not paying $12 for a whiskey ginger, you know?

INT. WALMART — LATE AFTERNOON

The girl stands before the store’s pharmacy counter, bewildered and blinking rapidly in the florescent light.

PHARMACIST
Can I help you?

GIRL
(hushed voice)
Please, tell me — I heard whispers in my village, in the meeting hall, amongst the women. They spoke of a certain medicine that —
(her voice drops to a hoarse whisper)
— that stops a woman from being with child. I thought it was surely a farce but . . .

Her voice trails off but she continues to lean eagerly over the counter, eyes locked on the pharmacist, and hopeful.

PHARMACIST
Oh. You mean birth control?

GIRL
Yes. Yes, please. One of that. One birth control for me.

PHARMACIST
I’m sorry, ma’am, but I cannot give that to you.

The girl’s face falls and her voice takes on a trembling quality.

GIRL
But please! I must have it!

PHARMACIST
I’m sorry, ma’am, but first of all, you do not have a valid prescription from your doctor for any sort of birth control. Second of all, even if you did, I wouldn’t be able to give that to you. It’s against my religion.
(in a deliberate whisper)
You see, birth control encourages sexual activity.

GIRL
But my village doesn’t carry this medicine and I have been encouraged to be sexually active! Do you know what really encourages sexual activity? Being locked in a tiny meeting hall with the village’s eldest boys after they have returned from a day’s work in the fields, their chests glistening with sweat, faces flushed with hot blood, breath forceful and uneven like that of a stallion mounting the broodmare, and —

The girl breaks out of her fantasy and notices that the pharmacist is holding something shiny and sleek in her palm.

GIRL
What is that?

PHARMACIST
My cell phone. I was just taking some notes for my fanfiction, don’t worry about it.

GIRL
Cell phone? Fanfiction?

PHARMACIST
Never mind. Ma’am, I appreciate your story but there is nothing I can do for you.

GIRL
But what of the hideous pain that comes with my monthly bleeding? Or the fact that the bleeding is irregular and unusually heavy? Doesn’t this medicine also treat those issues?

PHARMACIST
Well, yeah . . . but the sex stuff, like I said before, it’s bad. Thanks to conscience clauses, I don’t have to give you this pill, so I won’t. Now if you’ll excuse me . . . Ugh, god.

The pharmacist begins to pull and tug at her shirt, leaning forward and shifting it around, clearly trying to alleviate some pain.

‘Thanks to conscience clauses, I don’t have to give you this pill, so I won’t.’

GIRL
What’s wrong?

PHARMACIST
Nothing, it’s just my bra; the underwire broke so it’s poking into my side.

GIRL
You know, the whole point of this movie is the shocking plot twist at the end when it’s revealed that I actually live in the 21st century and that my village is just some strange secluded social experiment. But this interaction kinda has me questioning that whole premise. Like, it’s not the 1850s, but women still struggle to easily obtain low-cost and long-acting birth control? A woman’s sexuality is still a source of shame, condemnation, and criminality? And through some black magic, you have the power to write words on this “cell phone” without a dip pen and paper, and yet you people still haven’t invented a way to hold up a woman’s breasts that doesn’t involve sharp metal shards that eventually poke out and impale the very bosom they are supposed to be protecting?

PHARMACIST
Uh . . . yes? Wait — no? I don’t . . . what was the question?

GIRL
Forget it. My Elders also wanted me to procure some firearms, but surely there’s no way that a device created to take life is easier to obtain than some pill —

PHARMACIST
Aisle 11. Unless you want youth rifles, then that’s Aisle 15, next to the Minions toys.

‘The Sexistorcist’

FADE IN

INT. MEEGAN’S BEDROOM — NIGHT

Barely concealing his revulsion, Father Yesallmen enters slowly, picking his way across a floor littered with crusty tights, underpants, and empty jars of Nutella. His eyes flit across the dimly-lit room, then widen in horror. Arms held down by a double set of restraining straps, Meegan appears barely alive. Her hair is tangled and thickly matted — and we’re not talking about in a cute beach waves or Kylie-Jenner-culturally-appropriative-Teen-Vogue-spread kind of way. Her shoulders are shrunken and festooned with sheets stained with either human blood or red wine, depending on whether murder or squandered alcohol scares you more. A laptop sits on her withered lap; we can’t see the screen, but from the noises we know she’s watching the Entourage movie. Clearly something is wrong. Meegan lolls her head toward Yesallmen, who struggles to maintain some semblance of control.

YESALLMEN
Hello, Meegan.
(dragging a chair to her bedside)
I was told you wished to see me. How can I help you?

Meegan’s features recompose into a horrific demonic visage. Her throat swells and a nightmarish growl shudders through her body. Yesallmen remains silent, observing uneasily, until life returns to the girl’s face. It is the old Meegan once more, except her countenance is twisted with embarrassment and pain, a suggestion of an apology.

MEEGAN
(whispering)
I think it’s clear, Father — I need an exorcism.

YESALLMEN
An exorcism?

Yesallmen gathers one of Meegan’s hands in his own, careful to not pull on the restraining straps.

YESALLMEN
You want to get rid of this demon, this life, growing inside of you?

MEEGAN
Well, Father, I —

Sweat dots Meegan’s brow and some sort of wild electricity causes her frail body to seize. A foreign voice — thick, rasping, and filled with hate — passes through her lips.

‘You want to get rid of this demon, this life, growing inside of you?’

MEEGAN
Foolish man! She is ours! There is no god! Your world is scum! Beyoncé is overrated and her last album only had three decent tracks!

Meegan regains control. Her voice returns, frayed and tired.

MEEGAN
Yes, yes, I’m sure. Please cast this wretched monster out, Father.

YESALLMEN
Oooh, yeah, I don’t know if I can do that for you, Meegan.

MEEGAN
(baffled)
What?

YESALLMEN
This is a living demon that can feel pain. It probably has 12 long, poison-tipped demon fingernails already. You want me to cast something with fingernails out?

MEEGAN
Yes, I do — it keeps scratching “666” and “DEMON WUZ HERE” with a poor facsimile of the nail painting emoji into my chest. Besides, I’ve only been possessed for a few weeks. I can still talk to you as myself, so clearly the demon isn’t that strong.

YESALLMEN
Life begins at possession, Meegan. Besides, you engaged in the risky behavior; you should’ve been ready to accept the consequences.

MEEGAN
I got possessed by mistake! The Ouija board is produced by the Parker Brothers — how was I supposed to know that the creators of Monopoly unlocked a portal to hell?! I thought I was being safe; I mean, I only touched the tip of the planchette. I even faked it for awhile so it would end faster!

YESALLMEN
Meegan, I urge you to rethink your possession. This is a gift —

As YESALLMEN talks, a stream of thick greenish vomit shoots from Meegan’s mouth, soaking the bedding and the Father’s robe.

YESALLMEN
 — from God. You have to make the best out of a bad situation.

MEEGAN
How am I supposed to support myself? My savings are pretty much drained; I keep having to buy new beds to replace the ones I break after levitating.

YESALLMEN
Life is a miracle, Meegan.

MEEGAN
Considering that my flesh burns whenever I come into contact with holy water, I think this might be the exact opposite of a miracle. Father, please listen, this is my body. I alone should have autonomy over it. It is my right to decide what I want to do with it.

(dramatic pause)
And I want an exorcism.

Unable to reign back his disdain, Yesallmen glowers at Meegan. He lets go of her sweating hand and leans back in his chair, contemplating the girl’s case.

YESALLMEN
I suppose this is what you really want, Meegan. Before I can perform the exorcism, there are a few things I’m required to do by law. Firstly, I’m going to need your parents’ signatures on a consent form . . .

Meegan attempts to roll her eyes, but they go all the way into her head, leaving only the whites exposed.

MEEGAN
(hoarsely)
My parents are currently in the hospital. They were inadvertently crushed by a piece of furniture that I sent flying around my room with the new telekinetic powers I developed after a demon possessed me.

YESALLMEN
Hm, well, possessed women are known to be moody, heh heh. Hormones and all. I’d like you to look at this sonogram of the demon.

(Types on the laptop and turns it so the screen faces Meegan.)

Footage from the 1995 film “Casper” plays on the laptop screen. The bed begins to buck and fall as the Father snuggles up with Meegan in order to watch the movie.

YESALLMEN
Look at how adorable that spirit is! Do you really want to exorcise a spirit like that? Ugh, this is my favorite part — “Can I keep you?” I get the chills every time!

Yesallmen turns to Meegan for solidarity but she is motionless, the whites of her eyes glowing eerily in the dark room.

YESALLMEN
Ah, yes. Well. One last thing: just listen to the demon’s heart.

Yesallmen pulls a stethoscope out of his pocket and presses the diaphragm to Meegan’s stomach. A deafening hellish noise screeches from the ear tips, filling the whole room. The sound is unlike any other; it is multitudinous and deep, as if every soul in hell were howling for help. It is the aural equivalent of loneliness and fear and blinding rage and stubbing your toe on the corner of a desk while simultaneously biting your tongue and shattering your iPhone screen. The cacophony ruptures Yesallmen’s eardrums and he tumbles off the bed, pulling the stethoscope with him. As quickly as the noise exploded, it stops. After a few minutes of silence, Yesallmen pulls himself up to his feet. Blood trickles from both ears and his body noticeably trembles.

YESALLMEN
(shouting)
So, is adoption out of the question?