Sarah

        I will never understand all that Sarah has seen.
        She sits very still on the passenger's side staring with her steel grey eyes out the window, seeing everything or nothing at all, it's hard to tell. She sits enveloped in her own world, memories of her past coming and going freely, swarming around her. She sneezes twice into her elbow-a habit from her job in food service-and returns to staring out the window. My brother makes vain attempts to talk to her and, with great difficulty, she tears her eyes away from her window in order to answer. She takes in everything, analyzing it and storing it away for future reference. She chews blue Trident gum with her mouth closed and a muscle in her temple twitches with each chew. Occasionaly she rubs her dry lips together, after moistening them slightly with the tip of her pink tongue. We pass a highway sign and she smiles. My brother, upon seeing this, asks why and Sarah simply murmurs "Tarrytown…." And just like that, she's back in her own world. My brother knows he has lost her and returns his own eyes to the road.
        We pass buildings that squat along the side of the highway. They are small and unassuming, colored brightly so that hungry motorists will stop and sate themselves as well as their automobiles. We pass a gaudy Holiday Inn and I noticed Sarah's eyes grow very large and roll upward with her nose and cheek pressed against the glass, trying desperately to see the top of the building. Her mouth hangs open, her gum resting on a dip in the middle of her tongue, like a misshapen tongue ring. When we finally pass the building she looks down at the flying roadway beneath us and I see tears welling in her eyes and her lips murmuring a silent song to herself.
        "What's wrong, Sarah?" I ask, curious as to her reaction toward the generic concrete and glass structure. She remains silent, murmuring to herself inaudibly, a gentle rocking accompanying her struggling tears. "Speak up, I can't hear you," I urged gently.
        "Big building fall down, go boom, big building go down, fall boom, nine one one nine one one nine one one…." she repeated over and over, incessently recounting her last moment of coherent thinking. "Go boom, go boom, go boom…." she sobbed into her sleeve. Her rocking ceased. I saw signs for the exit we were looking for. I notified my brother, who had frozen behind the wheel. He was clutching the steering wheel and I could see by the whites of his knuckles that he was tightly holding on, fighting the need he felt to smack Sarah, to bring her back into the real world, even though he knew it wouldn't work.
        I know he didn't want to bring her here, to leave her in an institution. We had tried for the last six months to bring her back into reality, out of her world, but it was impossible. Her doctor finally decided that we had wasted enough time and money trying to cure her and that the only resolution was this small piece of paper that I held clutched in my hand, a neatly printed address in the place that Sarah would learn to call home, far from us and reality.