He was born sick. Fever after fever. Infection after infection. Staph. Gastroparesis. You name it, he had it. Instead of working as a part-time cashier at the local grocery store after school or taking his date to the movie theater as any normal seventeen-year-old would, Gaspar had succumbed to a bed-ridden life of visiting hospitals and evaluating the most recent medicine that was prescribed to treat his ailment. It was only after he was intoduced to antidepressants that Gaspar felt invincible, ready to tackle head on the challenges of high school.
           Gaspar lived with his mother, a pharmacist. His father had left shortly after he found out that his wife may have been pregnant with another child. He had told Gaspar and his mother that he was going out buy two gallons of milk. He then pulled out of their driveway in his beat-up, white pickup truck, never to return again.
           As Gaspar grew older, his mother’s financial burden increased, and  Gaspar was unable to help out because of his bedridden life. It was at the pinnacle of such stressful moments that Gaspar began lowering his wall against Riley. The more antidepressants Gaspar took, the more Riley hung around. Within a matter of months, Riley had sucked Gaspar into an unstable frenemy relationship, one that was subject to the whims of jealousy and attention. Riley refused to leave Gaspar’s side, forcing Gaspar to cater his thoughts and actions to the needs of Riley.
           That’s when the anorexia and chronic food poisoning started. Gaspar had proceeded to the bathroom to follow the usual routine after eating dinner. His mother had made his favorite: chicken noodle soup and dumplings. But as usual, Riley had disapproved. Now here Gapar was, staring at the off-color water in the toilet bowl as Riley sat next to him, cooing in his ear, “Ok, Gaspar, you can do it. Just unclench your fingers for me.”
           Gaspar’s fingers slowly uncurled from their fist-like position and he brought them into his mouth as Riley continued cheering him on.
           Without another thought, he jammed his fingers down his throat and felt the warm putrid feeling rising up in his throat. He let the river of vomit float past his lips as an acid, bitter taste settled in his mouth. His eyes were watering as Riley whined in his screeching voice, “Atta-boy, Gaspar. I knew you could do it”
           Gaspar nodded his head and slumped to the bathroom floor as he felt a wave of sharp pain growing in his abdomen. The pain felt like a surgeon was experimenting with the various blades of a Swiss Army knife. Just as he was about to drowse off, Riley shrieked in his ear, “Wake up! You didn’t think we were done, did you? I’m not letting you sleep on an empty stomach.”
           “But I just —” Gaspar began.
           “No. Get up. I’m going to find you something better to eat. Don’t tell me your witch of a mother can take better care of you than I can,” Riley spat.
           Gaspar silently got up and wandered downstairs into the kitchen while Riley instructed him on what to collect. “Alright, some of that chicken will do… No, no. Don’t be meager! You deserve some salt with that.”
           Gaspar chowed down on raw leftover chicken scraps blanketed in salt as Riley sat by his side and told him his plans for tomorrow. Refilling his stomach brought Riley back to his senses and his world of pain. His antidepressant from the afternoon was drastically wearing off, especially after he threw up his first dinner. Riley was becoming fainter and fainter and Gaspar was becoming dizzier and dizzier. He knew he would lose consciousness in a matter of seconds, so he decided to act fast.
           With the loosened restraint from Riley, Gaspar was free to talk to his mom, or the witch as Riley liked to call her. “Mom, I need to go to the doc—” That was all Gaspar could get out before he collapsed face first onto the kitchen floor.
*                      *                      *
           The medications were starting to wear off. After overhearing his mother last night, he figured they were some new experimental drugs for which his mother had shelled out a lot of cash. Gaspar could sense Riley trying to emerge. “No, stay away,” Gaspar said through gritted teeth. He winced as he tried to move his head. A new migraine had formed.
As Gaspar tried to move around, he realized that he was washed over with a sense of lethargy and numbness, a terrible combination to wake up with. He instinctively reached for a tablet from his nightstand, longing for the brief comfort from the antidepressant.
           However, his mother walked in just as Gaspar’s hand was fishing for the pillbox in the drawer. “Well, well! Look who’s up bright and early in time for lunch! How are you feeling?” his mother asked.
           Gaspar stared right through his mother. Without Riley, Gaspar had lost the ability to think and speak on his own.
           His mother parted the curtains beside his bed, giving way to agonizingly bright rays of sunshine. “It’s gorgeous outside. Maybe we can head to the park like the old times after you finish your lunch? This time, don’t tell me it tastes funny,” she spoke again.
           Gaspar tilted his head in the direction of her voice as he struggled to craft a response. By the time he had thought out his reply, his mother was leaving his bedroom.
           Gaspar quickly swallowed an antidepressant in the hopes of forgetting about his encounter with his mother. Within minutes, Riley appeared. There was something new about him today. Perhaps it was his quieter voice. “Gaspar, your mom is onto me. I can feel her jealousy of my special bond with you,” Riley told Gaspar.
           “What am I supposed to do? She’s my mother. She has worked day and night to—” began Gaspar.
           “Shut up! I can tell she’s pulling you towards her. I have an idea, but you have to follow my directions very carefully,” said Riley. Without waiting for Gaspar’s response, Riley continued, “Maybe I was wrong about that witch. She always wastes her time cooking for you. Let’s try to make peace by cooking her special meals for the next week.”
           Gaspar readily agreed, but it came at the expense of swallowing another antidepressant, the last one in the box. These days, Riley was beginning to lose communication with Gaspar faster and faster.
           After the two were in the kitchen, Riley instructed Gaspar to make sure his mother wasn’t in view. She wasn’t, for she was occupied with a phone call to the health insurance agency. “Remember, we want this to be a surprise,” he said. Then, Riley made Gaspar empty the trash can onto the floor and select the oldest meat scraps and put them into his mother’s chili.
           “You’re not done yet. Go to the medicine cabinet and add some of that tasteless laxative powder,” Riley told Gaspar. Gaspar obliged and emptied a good portion of the medicine into the chili. As he saw his mother near the dining table, Riley went away. It was a rare occasion, leaving Gaspar to finally enjoy a meal in peace.
           His mother had been surprised that Gaspar had left his bed, but she quickly forgot about that when Gaspar smiled at her, his first sign of communication with her in months. When he rambled on about cooking lunch for her in his broken speech, his mother smiled in confusion and tousled his hair to make up for her lack of understanding her son.
           As the two were preparing to leave for the park, Gaspar realized that his migraine was emerging. But, he had swallowed his last antidepressant earlier that day.
           Slowly, Gaspar began to question Riley’s definition of cooking. What had he been told to do? Toss some scraps into a bowl? That was more like garnishing, not cooking. With Riley gone and his head throbbing against his skull, Gaspar’s head raced with thoughts. He walked to the kitchen trashcan, picked up a scrap of meat, and analyzed it. With its small, fuzzy green dots of mold, the scrap was definitely more than three days old. And the laxative? He never saw anyone use that for cooking before.
           What had he done to his mother? Poisoned her? No, it couldn’t be, and if it was, it wasn’t Gaspar’s fault. It was Riley’s, but Riley he was never willing to take the blame; he always had to go off and disappear whenever Gaspar began to question his actions. As he struggled to reach Riley, Gaspar’s headache increased twofold, forcing his to give up the matter of his mother’s possible poisoning.
*        *        *
           Due to the lack of antidepressants, Riley had made fewer and fewer appearances the next few days, only restricting Gaspar’s diet when he came and reminding him of his promise to prepare his mother’s food.
           The medications his mother had paid for were working better than expected. His headaches were appearing less frequently. As Gaspar enjoyed a whole six hours without Riley interrupting him, Gaspar realized that he may be able to go back to school again. “Must have been seven months since I’ve seen that place,” he mused.
           Later that night, Gaspar’s mother collapsed from kidney failure, and a week later, she disappeared for good.
*                      *                      *
           This is the closest to what I call an account of the last few weeks Gaspar, who was the son of the late prisoner 9347 (Ms. Elda Waters), spent with his mother before he was separated from Ms. Waters for good.
           I had been placed in charge of Ms. Waters ever since the jury found her guilty of child abuse in the infamous Munchausen’s Syndrome By-Proxy case. Her son had been sick all his life, and his mother, Ms. Waters, appeared to be dedicated to her son, working double shifts to pay for his medical expenses. Her long hours weren’t enough. The magic the doctors worked into her son’s body was devastatingly reversed shortly after the boy was released from the hospital. No one, not a single doctor there, had any idea of why this was the case.
           The tide seemed to change when Ms. Waters herself was admitted to the hospital. She had been rushed to the emergency wing under the diagnosis of severe food poisoning. She required a stomach pump, and the doctor that treated her, coincidentally, had been the physician who treated her son the prior week. After the procedure, the doctor immediately recognized that the bacteria in her stomach sample was an exact match of that found in Gaspar’s blood sample. He concluded that both the mother and son had eaten the same food.
           That’s when suspicions started to arise. The mother was released from the hospital but was deemed too weak to work. Shortly after, her coworker at the pharmacy caught her stealing some drugs, which were stomach acid weakeners. Desperate to keep her job, Ms. Waters had begged her co-worker to keep her secret. The co-worker obliged, but asked for a financial bribe. An argument ensued, for Ms. Waters had little money, and as a result, the authorities became involved.
           Suspicious of Ms. Waters’ motive in the theft, the police looked into her family’s health history. The authorities were working closely with the hospital, too. All the information they gathered seemed to point in the same direction. But in reality, it was all a setup waiting to happen. It was a trap ready to snap.
           Ms. Waters was arrested during an out-patient check-up on the charge of child abuse. She was diagnose with Munchausen’s Syndrome By-Proxy*. The evidence against her, including her son’s chronic illnesses and thefts at the pharmacy in which she worked, was so convincing that it brought Ms. Waters a sentence of fifty years behind bars.
           As I led Ms. Waters to her jail cell, I could not help myself from labeling her as the most vile human being I had ever known. Purposely sickening your own child for attention and sympathy? Out of all the prisoners in the ward, I thought Ms. Waters was the most mentally disturbed.
           Sadistic, cruel, and heartless were the words I used described this prisoner to my fellow prison guards. It was only after I heard the news that a retrial was being summoned for Ms. Waters that I began to rethink my opinion of her.
           Ms. Waters’ son Gaspar, who had been institutionalized for his fragile health after his mother’s arrest, was thought to be suffering from schizophrenia. Clinical tests discovered that the trigger for his alter ego named Riley was antidepressants. His psychiatrist at the clinic had finally gotten him to crack, and Gaspar told the doctor that Riley had forced him to undergo various health-related rituals. When asked to describe these rituals, a second diagnosis came out: Munchausen's syndrome**.
           Gaspar, through Riley, had a mental disorder in which he repeatedly feigned severe illness so he could receive hospital treatment. Just as Gaspar was on the brink of recovery, Riley had acted out in a last attempt at dominance by persuading Gaspar to poison his own mother. Luck was on his side, and Riley had won by preventing Ms. Waters from seeing Gaspar for good.
           Now as I think about the late Ms. Waters, her unfair suffering, and her pneumonia-caused death in prison that took place before a possible shot of freedom after a retrial, only one word comes to mind about her: tragic.
___________________________________________________
Reader’s Notes (The following definitions come from the New American Oxford Dictionary)
*Munchausen’s Syndrome By-Proxy:  a mental disorder in which a person seeks attention by inducing or feigning illness in another person, typically a child
**Munchausen’s Syndrome: a mental disorder in which a person repeatedly feigns severe illness
so as to obtain hospital treatment.