“I love sea horses,” he said, looking at the Rorschach, turning his head one-way and then another. “Used to see them on holiday, delicate little creatures we watched in the shallows at the lake. Never caught one as they looked so fragile we thought they’d fall apart if we took them out of the water.”

We didn’t have any reason not to believe him, after all, he had been around a long time and even though the medication he was one left him extremely docile we knew that somewhere inside his brain some sense of logic and cohesion was waiting to come out.

It was such a breakthrough train of thought coming from him we thought maybe he is turning it around. Then he said, “You can see them up the Eiffel Tower as well, floating about in the air. There was one spoke to us said: ‘ Beware the lift, it’s dodgy and it might not work, and you’ll be stuck up here.’ I laughed at that suggestion, after all, who ever thought of the lift on the Eiffel Tower getting stuck. And I said as such to the seahorse making the outlandish claim. Lift getting stuck, as if!”

He drifted off into a memory that made no sense to us and looked up and winked at me as if saying ‘I know I’m being silly, but its fun isn’t it?’

“Anyway,” he continued, “ Seahorses are precious. My mum gave me a stuffed seahorse as a present when I was ten. I took it to bed with me for years, I’m expecting Mum to come over the afternoon and bring it for me. I need something to comfort as the nights are very long.”

He stopped there, looked at the door to the clinic and somewhere in his seventy-year-old mind he saw his mum coming down the path with his stuffed seahorse.

“You’ll let her in won’t you?” he asked as we took him back to his room. As he shuffled along, he muttered to himself: “They’re precious, delicate, but my one loves me, I know it does. My mum’s coming with it. You’ll like my mum, she’s bringing my seahorse.”

Written for: https://mindlovemiserysmenagerie.wordpress.com/2019/05/19/sunday-writing-prompt-rorschach-test/