The Asylum for Idiots and Imbeciles

Lorette C. Luzajic

The Asylum for Idiots and Imbeciles*

*Historical note: This offensive and ableist name was a standard variation of like names in the 1800s for institutions throughout the USA, Canada, and the UK.

After the divorce, Jesse dusted off her ancient Nikon and started taking pictures. Her phone was better and faster, but she liked being forced to make choices about what she snapped, having a finite number of options. The sense of rarity about it changed the way she framed things. She also liked the surprise of what came back to her from the lab. Jesse was pretty sure the next step was developing them herself. The darkroom, that patience and solitude, held a certain romance for her.

But things took an unexpected turn. Instead of retreating into the artist’s lonely space, something she’d longed for over decades, she found herself on a noisy and crowded mini-bus with the urban explorers’ club, headed north out of the city.

Jesse’s seatmate wants to talk shop, asks about what abandoned factory or asylum she found most moving as a photographer. She gives up on being alone among many and drifts into comfortable conversation with Ed. She admits she’s new to this. The Asylum for Idiots and Imbeciles is her first run.

Jesse just happened to see the flyer posted at the library when she was returning some mystery novels. It was a camera club, with photographers who had a special interest in local ruins. They were going to a long-ago home for an aunt of an aunt she’d never known who’d been taken there because she was feeble of mind and of body, too. Though she’d never felt a particular kinship with or longing for Aunt Jane, the hideous name of the hospital had always stuck in her craw.

When Jesse’s breasts were amputated, thick keloid scars raised like ropy kudzu vines across her flat chest as quickly as she had once grown those delicate teacup buds. With Jim gone God knows where, barely able to look at her, she’d thought of her old aunt, who had festered to death with her “female troubles” in a godforsaken home run by nuns. When she finally pulled her camera out, she named it Jane without really knowing why.

This is the story she tells Ed, since he is listening. And being heard is not something she’s used to. She is sorry for wanting to shut him out when she nabbed one of only a few free seats. Everyone looked like they already knew each other, and Ed looked a bit like a redneck, and she had judged him for his overbite and the gangly fit of his pants. Now she thinks he looks like a scarecrow. She wants to photograph him in dry fields with a copper canyon sun sinking behind him.

She doesn’t know, can’t know, what he is thinking. How he wants to turn his own camera on her scars. Make a record of her soul and body finally freed, the fork in the road before her.

It’s a tragedy, Ed says, where we’re going. What they named them, and what they did to people who were different or disabled. He also tells her about his time on Manitoulin Island, snapping long grass growing through some vacant old stone church window arches.

Jesse doesn’t know that within a few months, she will trade in her casual capris and flowy cowl-neck blousons for vintage Lee jeans and ankle-biter hiking boots. She will sport Tilley vests with an array of pockets for her gear. She will climb over stone walls and under bramble vines and carefully snap the way the slatted light moves over the barred windows of an old labor prison. She doesn’t know how tough she will get, or how adrenaline will carry her, over padlocked walls where barking dogs brandish rows of gleaming daggers. How she will find that solitary flower or that lost tiny toy bird. How she, with her hopelessly old-fashioned film, will capture those small promises, those brave but long-forgotten disappointments of hope.

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Lorette C. Luzajic reads, writes, publishes, edits, and teaches small fictions and prose poetry. She is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw.

Featured image: Hospital for Idiotic and Imbecile Youth, Columbus Metropolitan Library, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons 1875 public domain