Free Sample
Preview from the beginning
Also available as a free PDF
Thank you for reading A Tale of Woe.
If you’d rather read on your phone, this book is also available as a free, phone-friendly PDF edition — yours to download, no strings, here:
A Tale of Woe
Book 1 of The Old State Hospital for Women
Published by Marshlight Press.
Copyright © 2026 M. A. Bell.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer quoting brief passages.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is coincidental.
Intended for readers 18 and older. Contains depictions of institutional abuse, coercive control, and explicit sexual content.
Electronic edition, 2026.
Ebook ISBN: 979-8-9978853-0-4
Marshlight Press • mabellbooks.com
1 That’s How They Get You
1.1 This Was All a Mistake
Claire wondered why they had needed to put her into a hospital gown for this. It was all a mistake; all a misunderstanding. It would all be cleared up soon enough, once the Doctor had seen her. Maybe they would send her home, maybe they would hold her for a few days. 72 hours was what she’d always heard on TV.
So there was no need for the gown, she thought. There was also no need for the zip ties that the officer accompanying the paramedics had placed on her hands. “For your own protection,” he’d said. Protection from what? From who?
This was all a mistake that would be corrected soon, she hoped. Perhaps even in time to get back to work. This is what she thought as she sat in the waiting room, her hands tied, the gown’s thin fabric feeling strange and unfamiliar.
The hospital itself was strange and unfamiliar. The walls of the waiting room were utilitarian, painted cinder blocks. Like a high school cafeteria, she thought. She sat on one of those metal-legged, vinyl-cushioned benches that looked like three chairs fused together — the kind of furniture that existed only in waiting rooms and nowhere else. There were metal bars over the cross-hatched shatterproof glass windows. Fluorescent lights buzzed in the drop-ceiling overhead. The place was, in a word, institutional.
The hospital staff went about their business, paying…