A Professional Failing

20260211

Written for Bradley Ramsey’s “Flash Fiction February Day 11”.

CW: Violent mental breakdown.

Before demons seeped back through from the aether, suffering from “burnout” meant you needed time off and perhaps a relaxing retreat. Recovery meant boundaries and meditation.
Now it meant waking up chained to a bed, wards painted all around you, your body screaming from the abuse it’d been through. And often you started screaming for real as you remembered what you’d done before people managed to subdue you.
It wasn’t possession. The demon wasn’t along for the ride. They just found people teetering close to an edge and… pushed you over.
And demons were very good at sniffing out souls struggling with a brink.
Suddenly “mental wellness” wasn’t a buzzword, it was basic safety. Nobody knew this better than Debrah. Which made it all the more painful to be waking up the Burnout Ward again. She knew she’d been pushing herself to get that “Maintaining Boundaries” presentation finished, but she thought…
What day was it? How long had she been… out?
Squinting through the sterile hospital lights and her pounding headache, she managed to get the large clock on the wall to swim into focus.
Tuesday.
Oh god.
She let her head fall back on the pillow, her eyes sliding shut. Memories were pressing against her awareness. There was no avoiding it. Might as well try and make sense of what had happened.
Alright. Last thing she remembered was… going home. She’d clocked out only a little late, because she’d been trying to avoid pushing herself too hard and… making herself vulnerable to this. Clearly she’d acted too late.
She… remembered queuing for the bus? Oh no. Had she…?
Yes. Yes, she remembered now. The bus had been late. And crowded. And a group of… old teenagers? Young adults? Whatever you called them, they’d been playing music full blast off one of their phones and singing along and she’d already had a headache and…
A sob squirmed from her lips, the pounding between her temples deepening as the memory of that rage hit her. The burning, pulsing, all-consuming fury. There was no thinking, once it got hold of you. Like an animal driven mad by pain. You wanted, needed, to make everything stop and leave you alone.
Those poor children. Well, not children, but… and even if they’d been her age, their behaviour still wouldn’t have warranted charging up the bus towards them. Snatching at the phone. Getting hold of it, ripping it from an unready grasp, and… oh god.
She shuddered, a penitently painful full-body spasm of guilt and grief. Why, oh why, had she aimed for the boy with glasses?? Her mind relayed the sound of plastic frames shattering in sickening detail. The sight of him collapsing, face bleeding, the lens digging into… she’d have to ask if the eye had been saved. Had to apologise. To all of them, but especially…
The bus had stopped at once, the driver following proper protocol for an emergency evacuation. But she remembered another screech of burning rage followed by more screams. She’d triggered someone else Burning Out, hadn’t she? Leaving the other passengers caught between them.
That part wasn’t clear. She only remembered what had happened directly around her. Being pulled off the poor child and pinned down under two bodies. Flailing and screaming and trying to hurt anything she could touch. She was fervently glad that she’d started keeping her fingernails short after her first… episode.
Ah, yes, that explained the agony plaguing her back; she’d thrown herself against the people helping her, again and again, pain from the forming bruises only sending her deeper into violent fits. Which meant she must have bruised them just as bad.
If they hadn’t clung on… hadn’t managed to hold her down until the emergency responders got there… she dreaded to think what she might have done to those teenagers.
The phone had still been playing. That song, which she was sure she’d never heard before, now etched into her brain by the nightmare it’d inadvertently caused. Playing around and around and around her screaming mind.
Tears seeped from her closed eyes and painted hot trails down to the pillow.
She’d have to apologise. And ask if they knew who’d stopped her, so she could thank them. And… talk to work. Bad enough to miss three days without warning (never mind that normally she’d have done some bits and pieces over the weekend, so it was more like losing five). Bad enough for an employee to be the cause of a violent public incident.
It being your company’s Chief Burnout Prevention Officer… not to mention, her second episode…
This was it, wasn’t it? Her career was over.
Maybe that was for the best. At least for everyone else.
And if it meant not having to remember those screams… not waking up to find her flesh battered and skin torn from her own outburst… not needing to face the people she’d injured - or perhaps their next of kin…
Yes. Time to take a long sabbatical.
After she’d dealt with what had happened.

Prompt was “A new mental illness called “Burnout” is afflicting people around the world. It happens suddenly, and turns people into killing machines filled with rage and bloodlust. It wears off eventually, but they remember everything. Write a story or poem from the perspective of someone who experienced “Burnout”, and remembers every horrific thing they did…”