Medusa Fails Therapy by Joelle Killian
Medusa’s snakes have turned on her.
She declares today a lost cause as glittering green serpents swarm around her head, each pink mouth open and hissing:
Good for nothing
Monssster
Everyone sssecretly hatesss you
Yellow eyes bore into her. She stumbles into the living room, swatting away the bared fangs diving at her face and trying to ignore their shrieking:
Call your mother
Why bother
You’re a disssappointment
Medusa freezes in her tracks. That sounded like overgeneralizing. Or wait, maybe catastrophizing? Crap. She always mixed those cognitive distortions up.
Your therapissst has told you a million timesss
Can’t even do therapy right
Fail
Maybe it’s time to check in with her therapist, actually. She picks up her phone and taps the counseling chat app.
Even your therapissst is a bot
Real humansss can’t help you
Literally petrifying
Maybe not. She closes the chat and opens Instagram instead, scrolling through a feed filled with new puppies, beautiful spouses, and artfully-plated dinners.
Everyone has a life but you
Lossser
Why can’t you be normal like these basicsss
And even the briefest glance at the dating app makes the squirming mass lose their tiny minds:
Wissshful thinking
Grotesssque freak
All those incels on the internet are right about you
Two serpents face off and lunge at each other, forked tongues darting in her peripheral vision.
Internalized misssogyny alert
Some feminissst icon you are
FAIL
Her cheeks burn. She drops her phone. OK, try another tactic. What was it her women’s group always said about being kinder to yourself?
Nice try
Undessserving
No compassssion for horrible monstersss
Medusa collapses onto her sagging couch and drapes one arm over her eyes. Officially out of ideas.
Lazy ssslob
Filthy houssse
Disssgusting
Fine, she’ll tidy up. She shuffles her bunny-slippered feet into the kitchen and opens the fridge. She wipes down the ketchup and mustard bottles, then aligns them so the labels face the same direction. But wait, she could arrange all the condiments by color—now that could be very satisfying. Create some order.
Procrassstinating again
Monthly report overdue
Gonna get fired, gonna be homelessss
Her shoulders slump. She eyes the lovely, chilled bottle of rosé in the fridge door. Could really use something to take the edge off these damn snakes right about now.
Do it, numb the pain
Drank every night thisss week
Hopelessss alcoholic, just admit it
Medusa has had enough. She tightens her robe and storms out the back door, into the garage to look for her gardening shears.
Joelle Killian is a queer Canadian living in San Francisco whose fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Fusion Fragment, Mythaxis, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. One of her doppelgängers is a psychologist writing about psychedelic therapy. Another was once in an undead dance troupe.
Medusa Fails Therapy was published in stygianlepus.com – link here and it was published in “Wicked Flashes of Fantasy,” a dark fantasy anthology from Wicked Shadow Press – available to purchase here
Photo / image by emsalgado on Pixabay
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