The walls of the mental hospital crumbled, flakes of paint falling away as Su Xi wrote his name on the back of the seventeenth portrait. Hereditary schizophrenia was like a sweater her mother had knitted: the more she struggled, the tighter it wound around her throat.
Her secret admirer held out a rotten sunflower and said he loved her scars, but she used a shard of glass to carve “bad luck” into his palm. When the security camera became a single eye peering into the abyss, was this forbidden game of waltzing on the edge of a breakdown the mutual salvation of two mad people, or a cross-infection of mental plague? As the white sedatives dissolved in her stomach into a blood-red confession, who was the real prisoner trapped in the dark?
