“This concludes the Muse program. Thank you for your attention.”
“I’m scared,” said Alice.
“It was only a dream,” said Dr. Deluse.
“Was it?” Alice squirmed on the leather couch. It had grown warm as she related her dream and felt more than ever like human skin.
Alice had resisted coming here. She had always been suspicious of the smug professionalism of her mother’s doctors; the smooth way they described the old woman’s symptoms with high sounding Latin phrases that obscured the plain truth. They didn’t know what was broken, and they couldn’t mend it.
What reason did Alice have to believe that Dr. Deluse could do anything for her either?
Yet there had been something about the woman herself, perhaps just the uncritical friendliness she had displayed, the feeling of warmth and safety s
