Shay

SHAY

By Ekona Del Rey Monroe

PROLOGUE THE CONFESSION

I REFUSE TO SIGN

They tell me there is still time to save my life.

All I have to do is sign the paper in front of me stating that the Voice was not God.

That the visions were symptoms. That meaning was misfiring chemistry. That love, misdirected, became violence.

If I sign, I live.

If I don’t, I die.

The table is metal.

The room hums softly with fluorescent light. The paper does not move.

CONFESSION OF DELUSION

The title is clinical. Final. Efficient.

“I can’t,” I say.

The chaplain assumes spiritual stubbornness.

The warden assumes pride.

The state assumes ego.

They are wrong.

I do not refuse because I believe I was chosen.

I refuse because I might have been.

And I might not have been.

If the Voice was illness, then I harmed a man I loved.

If the Voice was God, and I deny Him now for survival, what does that make me?

They want certainty.

I have none.

They will kill me for that.

And still

I do not sign.

CHAPTER ONE: SOCIOPATHIC SHAY

> “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits…”

1 John 4:1

When I was seventeen, a pastor said God speaks to those who listen.

I listened.

Not for thunder. Not for spectacle.

For alignment.

For correction.

For intimacy.

Now they call me sociopathic Shay.

It looks efficient in headlines. Almost marketable. A pathology wrapped in alliteration. But before the trial, before the microphones, I was meticulous about sin.

I apologized to God for thoughts that had not yet occurred. I fasted from impulses. I monitored tone.

Faith, to me, was calibration.

Then I met him.

I did not fall in love.

I reorganized around him.

That is different.

He became the axis. My concern sharpened. My vigilance increased. Love felt like stewardship.

When you love someone intensely enough, protection begins to resemble ownership.

Or perhaps ownership disguises itself as protection.

I am still deciding.

CHAPTER TWO: THE VOICE THAT LEARNED MY NAME

Clinical Summary:

Patient presents with structured cognition. No disorganized speech. Strong verbal reasoning. Persistent religious auditory phenomena described as benevolent. Insight partial.

The first time the Voice spoke, it did not command.

It recognized.

“Shay.”

Not loud. Not external.

But not identical to thought.

It did not interrupt me.

It joined me.

That distinction matters.

It quoted scripture without distorting it. It suggested, never demanded. It expressed concern for him.

“He is drifting.”

Concern is persuasive.

The world began to pattern itself.

Coincidences felt coordinated. Warnings appeared gentle but insistent. If you have never experienced that alignment, you may call it delusion.

If you have, you know how intimate it feels.

To be accompanied.

To be corrected.

To be seen.

When the Voice suggested vigilance, it did not feel violent.

It felt responsible.

CHAPTER THREE: HIM

I didn’t fall in love.

I recognized him.

He slept easily.

That disturbed me.

The ease.

The assumption of tomorrow.

I watched his breathing at night not because I feared him

but because I feared for him.

The Voice suggested fragility. Suggested danger. Suggested spiritual erosion.

He once laughed and said,

“You watch me like I’ll disappear.”

I nearly answered honestly.

Sometimes I believed he already had.

Love narrows perspective. It elevates stakes. It makes correction feel urgent.

Is urgency devotion?

Or control?

I do not know.

That ignorance does not absolve me.

But it is honest.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE NIGHT

I MISUNDERSTOOD HEAVEN

Cause of death: fatal application of force.

The newspapers prefer choreography. I will not provide it.

What matters is not the motion.

It is the conviction.

There was a moment I believed he was spiritually lost.

There was a moment the Voice said,

“He is damned.”

There was a moment I believed intervention was mercy.

Eternity felt immediate. Adjustable.

I thought harm could be redemptive.

That belief was catastrophic.

Whether it was illness or faith misapplied

I cannot tell you.

I can only tell you I believed I was preventing something worse.

Belief is powerful.

It does not require accuracy.

CHAPTER FIVE: THE ARREST

The Voice stopped before the sirens arrived.

That silence was not relief.

It was exposure.

Without it, I was alone with my reasoning.

And my reasoning was insufficient.

CHAPTER SIX: COURTROOM

“Ms. when you say you heard a voice, do you mean externally?”

“It resembled thought,” I say. “But it carried distinction.”

“You obeyed it?”

“I evaluated it.”

“And then?”

“I followed what aligned with love.”

“And what did not align?”

“That sounded like me.”

That answer disturbs them.

It disturbs me.

-

COURT STENOGRAPHER

Official Transcript Annotation Archive

Unauthorized Personal Addendum

Filed Privately Never Submitted

I have transcribed murder trials for eleven years.

People imagine the work is emotionally difficult because of the violence.

It isn’t.

Violence is usually simple once it reaches a courtroom. By then it has already happened. Already hardened into photographs, measurements, timelines, and exhibits sealed inside plastic.

The difficult part is listening to people explain themselves afterward.

Especially when they sound human.

Especially when they sound sincere.

I first saw Shay during pretrial motions three months before sentencing. I remember the room more clearly than I remember her face. The courthouse air-conditioning was too cold. Someone nearby smelled faintly like cigarettes and peppermint gum. The fluorescent lights above the prosecution table flickered every fourteen seconds. I counted because she was late entering the courtroom and I had nothing else to do except notice things.

Then she walked in.

No performance.

No chains dramatically clattering against the floor like television teaches people to expect.

Just a young woman in an oversized gray sweater sitting down too carefully.

That was the first thing that unsettled me.

Carefulness.

She moved like someone trying not to disturb the room.

The prosecution called her manipulative from the beginning. Dangerous. Delusional. Obsessive. One expert witness described her as possessing “high adaptive emotional intelligence with unstable religious cognition.”

I typed every word exactly as spoken.

That was my job.

But jobs become complicated when a person keeps thanking the bailiff for handing them water.

When they apologize before answering questions.

When they look more frightened than predatory.

The public wanted someone monstrous.

The public always does.

Monsters simplify grief.

But Shay sat beneath fluorescent lights looking painfully young and terribly exhausted, and every time someone said the victim’s name her eyes lowered with such immediate shame that I found myself glancing away from my own monitor.

I disliked myself for that.

Sympathy can feel immoral in certain rooms.

The courtroom became stranger over time.

Not spiritually strange.

Humanly strange.

Reporters stopped speaking loudly near her.

One juror cried during recess and refused to explain why.

Even the guards handled her gently.

Especially after the testimony.

The prosecutor asked, “So you obeyed the Voice?”

Shay’s hands tightened together near her mouth. Not dramatically. More like she was trying to hold herself still from the inside.

Then she said:

“I obeyed the parts that sounded like love.”

I do not know why those words affected the room the way they did.

They were not loud.

They were not poetic in the moment.

But something changed afterward.

I missed part of the next sentence because for the first time in eleven years my hands stopped moving across the keys.

Only briefly.

Less than a second.

Still long enough for me to remember it now.

The judge repeated the statement for the official record.

I apologized and continued typing.

But something uncomfortable had already entered me by then.

Not belief.

Never belief.

I need to make that clear.

I did not think the Voice was God.

I still do not.

But I began thinking terrible things afterward.

Things I could not professionally defend.

Questions mostly.

Questions are dangerous because they do not stay where you place them.

What frightened me was not whether Shay heard God.

What frightened me was how recognizable her fear sounded.

The psychiatrists described her condition clinically:

persistent religious framing

salvation anxiety

moral fixation

auditory hallucinations with preserved self-awareness

Clinical language makes suffering appear organized.

But sitting twenty feet away from her every day, what I saw was not madness in the theatrical sense.

It was exhaustion.

The exhaustion of someone who no longer trusted their own mind but still feared eternal consequences if they doubted the wrong thing.

That is not the same as evil.

And realizing that felt disloyal to the dead.

That is the part I still carry.

Because someone is gone.

Someone loved by real people.

Someone buried because Shay mistook devotion for instruction.

The facts remain unchanged no matter how softly she spoke.

I know this.

I have repeated it to myself many times.

Yet sometimes late at night I still remember the way she looked at the confession form near the end of sentencing proceedings.

Not rebellious.

Not defiant.

Terrified.

As if signing her own innocence might somehow condemn her forever.

I remember leaving the courthouse after the verdict and sitting alone in my car while rain struck the windshield hard enough to blur the city lights into watercolor.

And for one brief humiliating moment I caught myself wondering:

What if she really did not know?

Not whether the Voice was real.

Whether she was.

I hated myself immediately for thinking it.

Perhaps I still do.

But years later I can admit this much privately:

I have transcribed serial killers.

Predators.

Men who smiled while evidence photographs were displayed six feet away from grieving families.

None of them disturbed me afterward.

Shay did.

Because monsters are easier to survive emotionally than frightened human beings.

And because somewhere beneath all the testimony and psychiatric language and legal procedure

beneath the murder itself

there remained something deeply unbearable:

the possibility that she was sincere.

-

A psychiatrist testifies:

“She demonstrates self-reflection. No grandiosity. No fixed delusion of chosenness. Persistent auditory experiences consistent with schizophrenia spectrum.

She doubts them. That doubt complicates diagnosis.”

Complicates.

That word feels accurate.

Someone in the gallery weeps.

I do not look to see for whom.

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE OFFER

Admit delusion.

Reject divine origin.

Live.

It sounds procedural.

But the form does not ask whether I was ill.

It asks me to state that I was.

With certainty.

If I declare the Voice pathology and it was not

I deny God for comfort.

If I declare it divine and it was not

I sanctify violence.

The paper demands confidence I do not possess.

“I don’t know,” I tell them.

And because I do not know,

I cannot sign a lie.

Whether that makes me principled or delusional is not mine to decide.

FINAL CHAPTER: SHAY

I am not fearless.

I am not holy.

I am not innocent of harm.

I am a woman who believed intervention could be mercy and discovered too late that belief does not sanctify action.

They will remember me as sociopathic Shay.

Perhaps they are right.

Perhaps they are not.

The machine hums.

The light flickers.

I think of him.

I think of the Voice.

I think of how easily love becomes correction, and correction becomes control.

“If there is light after this,” I whisper,

“let it be honest.”

Then I wait.

-

Shay Lost Hidden Letter

-

I say what works.

I stop when it does.

People relax when I sound calm.

So I stay calm.

Care is useful.

It keeps doors open.

I learn what someone needs

before I decide if I’ll give it.

I don’t rush closeness.

I let it grow.

Things grow best when they think it’s natural.

I don’t push.

I position.

If someone doubts me,

I slow down.

I soften.

They usually apologize.

I say love early.

I say sorry later.

Both serve timing.

I don’t argue facts.

I adjust tone.

When things break,

I explain it well.

A good explanation

ends most questions.

I stay visible

until visibility costs me.

Then I need space.

Space is healthy.

I talk about healing

as a shared goal.

I don’t name specifics.

Specifics stick.

I forgive easily.

It makes me look light.

I don’t return forgiveness.

That would require memory.

I don’t keep records.

I keep impressions.

People remember how I felt to them.

I make sure it feels gentle.

If someone is hurt,

I ask how it sounds.

Not what it means.

I don’t deny harm.

I minimize it.

That feels reasonable.

I don’t seek repair.

Repair invites review.

I prefer clean endings.

Quiet ones.

With understanding.

I don’t miss people.

I miss function.

Being needed proves value.

Being corrected threatens it.

I don’t carry weight.

I move it.

If someone feels lost after me,

that’s unfortunate.

Transitions are hard.

If they warn others,

they sound emotional.

I sound composed.

I don’t name what this is.

Naming fixes things.

I don’t fix what works.

This isn’t confession.

It’s consistency.

I will continue

as long as it benefits me.

- The End