The Olive Mill

Morning, a blade of light cutting through the residue of a sleepless night. The need for a cigarette is a physical ache, a simple, mechanical problem I think I can solve.

But the tobacco shop’s metal shutters are drawn, a solid, blue-grey "no" against the morning. Defeated before I’ve begun, I turn back.

At my door, the landlord is waiting. Or perhaps he has just arrived; the timeline is already blurry.

"I have to pay the rent," I say, the words coming out in a rush. "I don't know how long I'm staying. Here's for a month."

He doesn't reach for the money immediately. His eyes scan my face, reading the tremor I can't conceal. "What's wrong?"

The confession spills out, raw and unfiltered. "I'm afraid. They want to hurt me."

"Who?"

"People. 101. 13. 14. The harridan..." The names are a shorthand for a universe of threat.

"They're gone," he says, his voice attempting to be an anchor. "Those people are in the past. Not in the present"

And at that exact moment, as if summoned by the utterance of fear, 30 appears, walking up the street. Terror floods my system, a cold, chemical tide. It's a physical reaction, a full-body flinch that the landlord sees before I can hide it. He turns, follows my gaze, and understanding clicks into place behind his eyes. He sees the source of the ghost that haunts me.

We part without another word. I retreat inside, the locks clicking into place like a final punctuation mark.

An hour passes, or maybe it's only ten minutes. I manufacture a fragile calm. I will try again. Cigarettes. A normal errand. A simple transaction. I can do this.

I step outside. And there he is, 30, approaching from the corner, his path a direct line to my fragile peace.

I bolt. The door slams behind me, and I stand frozen in my own entrance hall, money clutched so tightly in my fist my knuckles are white. My body has vetoed my mind’s command to be brave.

When awareness seeps back, I'm still standing in the same spot. But the money has migrated. It’s no longer in my sweating palm, but resting neatly on the windowsill, as if placed there by careful, unseen hands.

The realization assembles itself with chilling clarity: dissociation. When certain people appear, I vanish. Time skips a beat. Actions are performed by a ghost in my own machine.

I make it to 23’s shop. The need outweighs the fear.

"Me! Your hair!!" 23 exclaims, his voice a boom in the small space. "It's grown so much in a week!"

"I noticed too," I say, the social script coming automatically.

"Must be those powders you're taking. And you've lost weight again, a lot of it."

"The nutritionist says no," I reply, the contradiction hanging in the air between us.

Back home, I find a scale in the bathroom cabinet I don't remember putting there. Its digital readout stabilizes, showing a number five kilograms lighter than the one at the nutritionist's office.

Two numbers. Two realities. Which instrument is lying?

I gather the finished books. I need to return them. I need movement. I need the library's neutral, orderly architecture.

My usual route takes me past the house with the two dogs. I always stop to greet them. Today, they stand facing away, their heads twisted almost unnaturally backward to track my approach. Their eyes hold a look I recognize from nature documentaries, the frozen, calculating stare prey gives a predator.

The library queue spills out onto the street. And there, to the side, a man stands. He isn't browsing. He isn't waiting in line. He is just… observing. His attention is a laser, calibrated on my presence.

I reverse my course. The library is no longer a sanctuary.

Home again. The couch receives my weight. I sit with the question that has been crystallizing all day: what happens when the fear arrives? How do I stop vanishing when my own nervous system decides the threat requires the erasure of my conscious self?

My eyes land on the broom in the corner. An idea, desperate and primal, forms. I retrieve it, break off the brush head. The stick that remains fits my hand with a satisfying, solid weight.

An experiment: to transform fear into rage. To channel the terror through this simple implement and discharge it into the ground.

I strike the floor. Once. A jolt travels up my arm. Twice. The impact is a punctuation mark. It doesn't solve anything, but it gives the shapeless fear a form, a sound, a physical outlet. Relief, hot and immediate, floods through me. It's a tool. A method for staying present when every instinct screams for evacuation.

Empowered, I stride to the door, wrench it open, and slam it behind me with a force that announces my intention to the world. No more hiding. It is time to map this village properly, to walk every street, to identify each location where fear blooms like a poisonous flower, to understand the precise geography of my own terror.

The neighbor's cat, the one that always seems to shadow my movements, waits at the corner. A signal. A marker. I shout at it, a raw, guttural sound, and it flees.

Downtown. Past the pastry shop. I strike the ground twice, a moderate intensity warning. The fear is there, but it is manageable.

I continue my grim survey. Each location receives its assessment: a strike or silence, a measured violence or a forced calm. The stick speaks where my consciousness cannot articulate the danger.

A fork in the road. One path leads toward the old olive mill. I start down it.

The fear hits me like a physical barrier, an invisible wall my body simply refuses to penetrate. This place, this is where they kept me. The knowledge rises from a place deeper than memory. Where exploitation occurred in rooms my conscious mind cannot access.

I retreat, my heart hammering, back to the main road.

An elderly woman with a walker shuffles towards me. "Hurry up! Hurry up!" she nags. I accelerate, nodding at her urgency.

Along the river now. Near the fish hatchery. A different kind of danger radiates from that building, a low hum of malice disguised as industry. Something operates there beyond the visible tanks and channels. The stick hits the ground repeatedly as I pass, four times, five, marking it as a place of maximum threat.

The mapping continues. More sites, varying intensities. The dogs at the house bark aggressively as I pass this time, their usual friendliness gone, replaced by a territorial fury.

Finally, home. The couch. My breathing begins to slow.

Then, the harridan's waitress slams the courtyard gate. Voices filter through the walls, the waitress, the harridan's daughter. The terror surges back, fresh and acidic.

I pound the stick against the floor, beating the feeling back.

I call the Sheriff. He's not available.

Through the window, I see 30 walking past with an old neighbor. This time, the emotion that spikes is pure, undiluted rage, hotter and more powerful than the fear.

"Go away!" I shout at them through the glass.

My eyes catch on a bug on the curtain. It’s too symmetrical. Too still. A microphone? A camera?

The doorbell rings.

The Sheriff stands there with a female officer.

I let them in, and the words tumble out, the walk, the stick, the geography of triggers, the chilling understanding of my own dissociative vanishing acts.

"Why today specifically?" the Sheriff asks.

The question hangs in the air. And then I remember. It's my birthday. But the date is a blank, a hollow space. No memories, no associations, no celebrations. Just this, this unraveling.

"Would you like to speak with a doctor?"

"Yes," I say, the word feeling like a surrender and a victory at once. "A psychologist."

He calls an ambulance. We wait in a silence that is heavy but not unkind.

At the door, as we prepare to leave, he gives practical instructions: "Bring your documents. Turn off the electricity."

We say goodbye. Then I turn back, a sudden, formal impulse taking hold. I extend my hand. He shakes it.

The ambulance interior is a capsule of sterile, moving light. The paramedic moves with a kind of automation, her stare fixed, her checks of my vitals performed with a mechanical precision. I narrate the findings of my walk: the olive mill, the fish hatchery, the places where I now believe the village's dark traffic flows, where they hide things, and children.

She records numbers on a chart without comment.

The emergency room. The same doctors from last year. The recognition is mutual.

"What happened this year?" one asks.

And so I tell them. "After a couple of months of injections, I realized I was having constant hallucinations. Other problems. I didn't even know what they were giving me. When I asked, the psychiatrist wouldn't tell me. I had to force it out of him."

"But we wrote it on the discharge papers," the doctor replies, frowning. "We gave them to your friend."

"I never got any discharge papers. And that stuff made everything worse. I'd be watching films on my computer, and messages would appear: 'kill yourself.' It terrified me. Once I even cut my finger."

"The doctor didn't suggest alternatives. He took away my psychologist, too."

"After a couple of months off it, I started improving, though the insomnia continued, just like my whole life."

"I went to the pharmacy for something natural. The pharmacist said to come back in two days, he'd have something effective."

"He gave me a herbal extract. For two weeks, I slept from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. Then the insomnia returned, plus the sensations from last year, green light flashes, paranoia."

"A month later, my neighbors came for dinner with an opened wine bottle. Only I drank it. I vomited all night. After that, the deterioration resumed. A month after that, I ran away again at night, spent two nights in the woods."

"Finally," I say, the core revelation laid bare, "I realized that when I feel this fear, I dissociate. I have no idea what happens or what I do during that time."

"Okay," the doctor says, his voice calm and decisive. "We'll give you different medication and admit you for observation."

A profound, shuddering relief washes through me. This is not an end. This, finally, is the beginning of the great escape.