Page 133 of Don't Shoot Me Santa

Her lip curled. Grimaced. Thatparasite. That smug, rat-eyed intruder crawling into her boy’s head, planting thoughts, making Aaron believe he could belong to anyone else. That anyone else could ever love him more. More than she did.

Impossible.

He was hers.

Herson.

Hergood boy.

Not Kenny’s. Never Kenny’s.

He’d tricked him. Through mind control, hypnosis, cognitive invasion. He’d firmly planted himself inside him just to get at her. That’s all this was. Him trying to prove something toher.

Well, she couldn’t allow that.

Unfortunately.

So she raked her fingers through her blonde hair, smoothed her brows, rubbed the taste of stale bread from her teeth with her knuckle. Composure, always composure.

Then she screamed.

A raw, animal sound filled the cell and ricocheted down the corridor. She raked her nails down her cheeks like rose thorns, leaving ragged furrows that wept dark lines. The mirror answered with a thousand small fractures in its dull plastic face and she drove her forehead into it once, twice, until the cheap surface stung and the room swam.

She clawed at her hair until handfuls came free, scalp stinging, skin slick with blood and sweat. Her wrists were raw from twisting, from trying to tear something loose inside herself. The fluorescent light buzzed above, indifferent, casting everything the colour of old bone. The smell of iron filled her mouth; she tasted it and laughed.

Boots thudded. Fists hammered on the door. Voices barked, “Roisin! Stand down!”

But they stayed back, shouting orders through the hatch, afraid of the shape she’d made of herself. Too cautious to enter, too careful for their skins. So she hunched on the concrete, rocking, the chant rising in her throat like prayer and profanity braided together.

“I need my boy!” she howled, each word a torn thing. “He’s mine. They’re feeding him lies. Filthy lies! He ismine!”

The last three syllables left the cell like a vow and a threat braided together. The concrete answered with nothing but the hum of the fluorescent light and the steady, bureaucratic clank of the corridor: keys, radios, the small domestic noises of a place that called itself orderly.

Then the door eased open.

He came in like a man carrying an instruction manual. Soft shoes, softer voice, a sympathy rehearsed so often it had the sheen of a theatre prop. Not Dr Kenneth Lyons—no, not the man who owned Aaron’s laugh—but another: a paper psychiatrist in a paper coat, appointed to tick boxes and fill files and tell the board that she was “engaged with treatment.” Flanked by two guards, he offered the same platitudes all professionals were taught to deploy: calm, containment, acknowledgement. He meant to observe, to stabilise, to be seen doing the right thing while the machine kept turning.

They all loved procedures more than people.

Roisin watched him with a patience, the needle in her sleeve had been allowed, an oversight stitched into the prison’s own complacency. One small mercy they thought would keep her quiet. They had mistaken her need for fragility. They had read the scripture and seen only devotion; they had looked at her hands and thought them empty.

They were wrong.

When he drew near, she sprang up. It wasn’t her. She didn’t do it. But somehow the needle found the thin, vulnerable artery at the base of the doctor’s throat like a punctuation mark. He went down without a sound that mattered. The guards surged too late; their protocol froze them as if paper could restrain personhood.

This was not madness without reason, though. No. It was language. The killing itself was a sentence constructed to be read by a particular reader—Dr Kenneth Lyons, who thought himself ahealer.

“Tell him,” she screamed, each syllable cold as the concrete beneath them. “TellDr Kenneth Lyonsthat he ismine. He obeys me. And me only!”

It was a message in blood and theatre:a warning that the law’s neat forms could not contain her, that the theft of Aaron’s love would be answered in the only currency she valued.

Fear.

They forced her down, the syringe biting her arm, cold liquid flooding her veins. Still, she lifted her head and sang, voice sweet as tinsel and rot.

“I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus…”

The carol broke into laughter, high and jagged, echoing off the walls like sleigh bells in a tomb. She laughed until the drugs dragged her under.

Until the sound died in her throat.