Fragments

Content Warning: explores addiction, mental health, and death of or harm to a child.

The ankle monitor vibrated. Each pulse thudded louder in his head. It buzzed again, relentless, bone-deep. Every flash, every tremor, made his chest tighter. The red light had been on too long.

If the battery died, it wouldn’t just be a violation; it could mean a repeat of last time. He couldn’t let that happen, again.

This therapy session had to end soon.

Winston pressed his hands together in his lap, white-knuckled, one crushing the other as if he could wring the tension out of his body by force. His joints ached. His eyes swept the office, searching for a distraction. Nothing. The room was stripped of anything stimulating. No framed degrees. No pictures of landscapes. No shelves lined with medical journals.

Just bare walls—and Carl, the addiction therapist, a broad-shouldered man who seemed to fill the space.

Carl leaned forward across the mahogany desk. The heavy wood loomed like a barrier between them. It seemed out of place in a room this stark, yet perfectly suited for its purpose.

“Why are you here?” Carl finally asked.

“I drink too much and… um… the accident.”

Carl’s gaze locked into his, unblinking. Winston tried to turn away, but the stare pinned him where he sat.

“No,” Carl said quietly. “Why are you really here?”

Silence.

“I want you to come back when you have that figured out.”

Winston wanted to challenge Carl. It was in his nature, but lately his sharp edges felt dulled, blunted by exhaustion and shame.

He left the office without saying anything more, jaw set, chest tight.

Out in the hallway, the ankle monitor thudded again, a reminder of how small his world had become. He’d spent years in control—scalpels, steady hands, split-second decisions—but here, he was just another ruined man counting down minutes between sessions.

He headed back to his room to charge the monitor, every step echoing beneath the low, restless glare of the overhead lights. The air felt thick and close. No escape, no family, no autonomy—just time stretching out, taut and unforgiving.

***

That afternoon, Winston ended up in art therapy. It was the last place he wanted to be on a Sunday. Sundays were for golf, not finger painting and self-reflection with a bunch of rehab “inmates.”

Carl’s words still clung to him, needling at the edges of his thoughts, and by the time he sat down at the long harvest table, his irritation had deepened into something darker—a kind of hollowness.

By chance, he was wedged between a relentlessly chatty suburban mother of two and his new roommate, Frank—a man who’d come in off the street the night before. The facility kept a few subsidized beds, and unfortunately for Winston, private rooms didn’t exist here.

Frank had managed a shower, but it hadn’t done his body odor any justice.

Winston lowered his head into his hands, exasperated. He was usually mentally strong. But lately, his emotions felt scattered in every direction, and he hated the weight of this powerlessness.

The harvest table was draped with a drop cloth, its surface layered with years of hardened paint streaks and splattered colors. Small bottles of acrylics crowded the center: fluorescent, metallic, and glittering hues. Paintbrushes stood upright in red Dixie cups, their bristles fanned and stiff from overuse. At each place setting lay a mask—white, plastic, blank, large enough to fit a human face.

The instructions were simple: paint the outside as people see you; paint the inside as how you see yourself.

Winston dipped his brush into light brown and dragged the first stroke across the mask. The plastic disappeared beneath a color similar to his own skin. Too obvious, too simple — yet unavoidable. People sometimes saw him this way first, before they saw anything else. He painted carefully, letting the smooth acrylic paint dry in streaks beneath the overhead fluorescent lights.

While the paint dried, his gaze wandered down the table. The residents chatted softly, trading colors, some hunched over their work with obsessive precision. To his left, Frank painted with startling focus.

Winston watched as Frank’s hands moved with care, layering shadow and light. The mask in front of him seemed to take on depth, its blankness transformed into a face that almost breathed. For a man who had stumbled in, off the street, only the night before, it was a revelation. Winston felt a flicker of admiration, quickly shadowed by guilt. He had already filed Frank away under a single word: derelict.

The question slipped out before he could stop himself.

“What do you do for a living?” His tone carried more edge than curiosity, as if the answer were already decided.

Frank’s brush paused mid-stroke. “I used to work construction,” he said. “Had a wife, kids. A house in the suburbs. Lost all of it when the drinking got worse.” He dipped his brush again and kept painting, as though the story needed no defense, no embellishment.

Before Winston could respond, the suburban mother beside him lifted her mask, half-covered in glitter.

“Mine looks like a Pinterest fail,” she said with a weak laugh.

Winston surprised himself with a short, sharp laugh of his own.

“If it helps,” he muttered, “the way I paint, mine’s going to look like a malpractice suit.”

She grinned at him, and for a brief second, the heaviness lifted.

He dipped his brush again, dragging a teal-blue strip across the mouth and nose — a surgeon’s mask painted onto his mask. A mask to cover his mask. The irony tightened in his chest. It still wasn’t enough.

So he added clumsy little animals — bears, lions, rabbits. They looked childish, but they carried weight. They acknowledged what he had built his life around: children.

Still, the mask didn’t feel finished. He wanted to—or at least thought—the world should see him as a brilliant, capable surgeon. He steadied the brush and drew jagged red EEG lines across the forehead to symbolize brainwave activity, the sharpness of his mind, and the constant weight of life-or-death decisions.

But the withdrawal betrayed him. His hand shook. The waves came out wrong: violent peaks tangled with sudden plunges, fragments breaking away from the rhythm. In places, the line almost flatlined before spiking back in frantic bursts.

It didn’t look like a thought anymore.

It looked like a failing signal.

Like the moment before everything goes dark.

Maybe something a little more anatomical should be added, he thought.

Two heavy eyebrows came next. Then, without thinking, he began painting a scar along the cheek—the one he’d gotten when he fell from his bike at six years old.

When he was a child…The thought of children…The brush froze mid-stroke as a memory slammed into him.

***

The OR had been cold as usual, but his scrubs were damp under the heat of the lights and the strain of concentration. Monitors beeped in measured rhythm, the anesthesiologist murmuring vitals. On the table lay a child no bigger than a doll, her chest rising and falling under the tide of the ventilator. Outside, her parents waited, their fear resting entirely on him.

He remembered, too, the pills he’d swallowed hours before—modafinil and dexedrine, signed out under his own name. The prescription was technically legal, written for “fatigue management” during long shifts.

He hadn’t really slept in three days. He needed to stay sharp.

He’d taken them in his office, washing the bitter taste down with lukewarm coffee. Within minutes, his thoughts cleared, his focus sharpened, and the exhaustion slipped far enough away for him to keep going.

By the time the scalpel touched skin, his hands were steady. He knew the risks—too much could cause tremors, make his focus slip at the wrong moment—but that night, everything went as planned.

He had saved her life.

The parents had been ecstatic with gratitude, clutching him, calling it a miracle. When the girl woke, her tiny hand curled around his finger, her eyes wide and trusting, her smile weak but radiant. Everyone praised him. The golden surgeon. The hero.

But guilt gnawed through the applause. What if something had gone wrong? What if the stimulant had tipped him the other way, made his hand twitch at the wrong moment? He had gambled with a child’s life, and the secret weighed heavier than any praise could erase.

***

Back in the common room, Winston pressed the brush harder into his mask. The animals smeared, the jagged lines collapsed. The teal-blue strip blurred beneath his strokes until it looked less like protection and more like suffocation.

He turned the mask over in his hands. It lay there hollow and white. The longer he stared, the more the exercise unraveled him. Whatever this therapy was supposed to fix, it only scraped against raw edges he didn’t want touched.

He’d already lost interest, but there was still time left.

He hesitated, then dipped into a pale yellow. Carefully, he brushed a small sun in the corner. The rays were crooked, almost childlike. Next to it, he painted a red heart. Symbols of warmth, of family, of who he wanted to be. The images looked fragile on the plastic, too bright against the emptiness. A lie, or hope? He couldn’t tell.

His chest tightened. How do you paint guilt? How do you capture the hollowed-out ache of hurting the people you love?

He dipped the brush into black, dragging it across the curves of plastic. The color hit the surface like spilled oil. He added gray, streaks that ran like ash, like smoke. But it wasn’t enough. Nothing on the palette could hold what he carried.

The day had started beautifully.

A backyard cookout at a cousin’s place, the scent of ribs curling into the warm air. His daughter on a swing, shrieking with laughter as he gave her one more push, her curls flying wild in the sunlight. His wife balancing paper plates, rolling her eyes at his terrible jokes but smiling anyway. Music drifting from the radio, neighbors dropping by for a beer.

For a brief, golden stretch of hours, he had felt like the man he was supposed to be—husband, father, provider. Whole.

But the hours blurred. Another beer. Another shot. Laughter bleeding into dizziness.

By nightfall, the taste of whiskey clung to his tongue, but he told himself he was fine. Just a little drunk. Just tired.

Rain poured against the windshield, the night streaked in silver. Headlights smeared into pale ribbons, wipers dragging in a sluggish rhythm that never cleared the glass. Winston tightened his grip on the wheel, knuckles white, the sour tang of alcohol thick in his breath.

Beside him, his wife sat angled toward the passenger window, one elbow propped against the glass. She wasn’t speaking. She hadn’t been for most of the ride. Her silence weighed heavier than any words could. He thought of the conversation they’d been having for weeks about her getting her license. Now, more than ever, he wished she had.

Streetlights rolled over her face in fleeting gold, her profile carved sharp against the darkness, and guilt gnawed at him.

From the back seat came the soft, even breaths of their daughter. Curled in her car seat, her long curls spilled like ink across her cheeks, damp from the heat of the drive. One hand tucked beneath her chin, the other clutched her stuffed rabbit—the one she never slept without. Its ear trembled faintly with each rise and fall of her chest.

I’m fine, he told himself.

Just buzzed. Just tired.

And then…

A flash of blinding white.

The world ripped open. Tires shrieked. Metal folded with a deafening roar. His body snapped forward, then sideways, the seatbelt locking hard against his chest. His wife’s scream tore through the cabin, high and raw, just as the airbag detonated in an explosion of chemical powder and burnt fabric.

Silence.

And then chaos: horns blaring, glass raining like brittle ice, a child’s startled whimper somewhere behind him.

“Daddy?”

A breath.

A whisper.

A plea.

The single word would live in him forever.

And then the hospital.

His daughter’s body looked impossibly small beneath the weight of tubes and machines. Every beep and hiss felt deafening. His wife sat in the chair beside her, staring at the floor, refusing to meet his eyes. The silence between them, louder than any siren.

The judge’s words still echoed: rehab or prison.

The ankle monitor made sure he never forgot which one he’d chosen—or what waited if he failed.

Winston pressed harder with the brush, bristles bending under his grip. Black and gray swallowed the mask until it seemed to sink into shadow. His throat burned. He couldn’t breathe.

He shoved back from the table, the chair legs screeching against the floor. Without a word, he grabbed the mask and stormed out.

***

In his room, the air felt too heavy, too stale. He hurled the mask against the wall. It cracked, bounced, landed face-down. He stomped on it, again and again, until the paint smudged across the linoleum floor in streaks of blue, black, and red.

He wanted to set it on fire, watch it curl to nothing but he had no lighter. His body shook with rage, nowhere for it to go.

The door creaked.

Frank stepped inside. His eyes were steady and kind. He picked up a pair of scissors from his desk and held them out.

“Here,” he said softly. “Sometimes the only way to move forward is to look at things piece by piece.”

Winston grabbed them, his hands trembling, and cut into the mask. Jagged plastic pieces splintered under the blades, shards scattering across the bedspread. He cut again and again, until the fury began to drain from his chest, leaving only the sound of his labored breathing.

Frank eased down onto the edge of the bed, watching the pieces fall.

“It doesn’t have to be whole to matter,” he said. “Even broken things can be fixed… one piece at a time.”

Winston’s grip on the scissors loosened. The mask lay in fragments. The fury had cracked into something else. Not quite peace but a quiet realization.

***

The next morning, Winston walked into Carl’s office with his mask clutched tight in his hands.

“I figured out why I’m here,” he said, sweat sliding down his face.

Carl looked up from his laptop, intrigued. “Yeah?”

Winston opened his fists and let the mask fall onto the desk, shattering into a hundred jagged, multicolored fragments.

“I’m broken,” he whispered. “Can you help put me back together?”

Carl studied the pieces for a long moment before meeting his eyes. His voice was quiet and steady.

“No,” he said. “But you can. That’s why you’re here.”

The fragments shimmered in fractured color. Proof that even broken things could still hold light.

The ankle monitor buzzed again, softer this time.

Winston didn’t flinch.

For once, the noise didn’t sound like punishment or prison.

It sounded like the possibility of a second chance.