"Do No Harm"

A Halloween Amelia City Special!

Author’s Note: This Amelia City Story first came as a paywalled tale on The Storyteller’s Corner Substack, which I operate. However, I am ever the enthusiast for Halloween, and would like to further demonstrate to the good folks who partake of Montag’s offerings that a payday isn’t always what should be reached for, but rather, that readers deserve to be offered something to enjoy and mull over. Cheers, and Happy Halloween!

    The rain pattered down at an angle steadily, not a harsh downpour, as it had started off a couple of hours before, but more a trickle. Taking the moment to enjoy the muffled sound of it striking the window of her office between patients, Dr. Janice Haight tilted her head slightly to the left, then the right, passively seeking any sort of recognizable image patterns in the spatter of water on the glass. After a few moments, observing none, she moved from beside her slope-backed, cream-hued chair to her narrow pine desk, pulling open the middle left side drawer to draw out the hardcover journal-style notebook that she had assigned to her next patient’s session notes.

     Her system for notation was relatively simple and reliable, and had seen her through her private practice as a psychiatrist for just over a decade now. Each patient was singled out to their own hardcover notebook, and when one such book filled up entirely, she started up a new one for them. Most of her clients only required one or two such journals before integrating their issues and concerns enough to require only routine, almost maintenance-level visits to Dr. Haight, a fact she took some measure of pride in. A Jungian specialist, she had focused her practice on ‘Shadow Work’ when she was starting off in the field, and for the first few years of her private practice.

     For the last three years, however, she had become focused on a very particular sort of patient, due to her interest and involvement with various socio-political causes, and these ones required more intensive therapy, usually for lengthier periods. Sometimes she would have to see the same patient two or, in the case of one particular client, three times a week, just to ensure that their fragile emotional states didn’t further deteriorate and lead them down a self-destructive path. Of course, none of these patients were quite as unwell as the fellow she would be letting into her cozy little office in another minute, running her finger slowly over the patient’s name on the cover of the journal she presently held in her hand.

     “Markus Sellers,” she said to herself, using the same hand to brush a stray brown hair off of her glasses. Janice turned to the most recent page, marked with a thin cloth ribbon sewn into the spine of the notebook itself, and reviewed her most recent notes from their last session. During that session, Markus had become more agitated than usual, and when Janice had tried to find out why he seemed so much more on edge even than usual, he had at first demurred, rolling his head this way and that, obviously uncomfortable with something right there in her office. Finally, he had pulled off one of his shoes and flung it with considerable force at the faux wood bookshelf to the right of her desk, knocking down a small, angled desk mirror that she had received as a gift from one of her other longer-term patients just a few days earlier.

     It hadn’t broken the mirror, thankfully, and Markus apologized for the outburst, but Janice had made note in his assigned journal that he had demanded that she cover it or hide it away for the remainder of their session. He had not requested this action, which lay at the root of Markus’s problems, his agreeableness getting in the way of his being able to make progress in his personal and professional lives; despite the outburst , Janice had seen this as a potential foot in the door, as it were.

     Setting the notebook on the arm of her swoop-back chair, she then took the desktop mirror off of its spot on her bookshelf, and set it right on the corner of her desk. She straightened out her dark red pantsuit coat and long skirt, reset her glasses, and smiled gently as she went to the door between her office and waiting room, poking her head out and spotting Mr. Sellers. As usual, he was dressed still in the kind of dark blue shirt and trousers that was typical of men in his field of work, and the ‘Certified UAW’ patch in white stood out on his left arm, small splotches of oil or grease on his fingers.

     “Come on in, Markus,” she said with a soft smile, waving him in to follow her. Heading toward her chair, Janice tensed slightly as Markus swooped past on her right, swiftly grasping the desk mirror and levering it down to lay its flat, reflective surface firmly against the desk.

     “Sorry,” he said with a nervous smile and nod, prior to having a seat on the antique fainting couch that Janice had purchased and had installed for her clients a couple of years earlier. “Just, can’t trust them right now.” Janice scribbled a quick starter note for the session in his assigned journal, writing, ‘Mirror phobia persists, and seems to have intensified. Must work toward cause.’

**

     Two clients later, Dr. Janice Haight took the chance to respond to a handful of emails, mostly from colleagues in the field who were looking to get her take on some of their own patients if she had the spare time. These were of the sort she had, in recent years, come to specialize in, the sort whom she had tended to between Mr. Sellers and her current break in the day’s schedule. She only had one more patient on her appointment book for the day, and when the fourth of her emails turned out to be from said client asking to re-schedule, she realized that she had the remainder of the day to herself to consider more in-depth replies to these colleagues.

     The patients in question, her recent specialization, were young adolescents struggling with identity crises and gender confusion issues, a subject she found both currently relevant and interesting, sociologically. She assembled a few short but carefully considered responses to her colleagues, then turned her attention to a message from Abby Hartman, an acquaintance who worked out of Amelia County Memorial Hospital. She was an endocrinologist who had joined Janice at a demonstration some seven months earlier to protest a proposed city code which would put a pause to all gender-affirming care programs in and around the city, a proposal that had already failed at the county level thanks to a trans rights activist group that Janice supported.

     She formulated a swift reply to Abby’s latest inquiry, fired it off, and turned her attention to the notes from her last client, Sam. Sam had been brought in to see Dr. Haight shortly after starting sixth grade, an incredibly shy and slight eleven-year-old displaying classic signs of awkwardness in physical development. Sam opened up to Janice almost the moment his mother had left them in the office to speak privately, informing the doctor that he felt like he’d been meant to be a girl all along. “I don’t like boy stuff,” Sam had sad, on the verge of tears, trembling like a leaf in the path of an autumn breeze. “Everything about me just feels wrong. And I don’t have any friends, except this one boy, Kyle, and I don’t like him like boys like each other, you know? Like, I don’t think about playing football or video games with him, I feel like I want to hug and kiss him.” Janice had scribbled in her new notebook for Sam furiously, quickly talking Sam through what she felt ‘he’ was going through.

     “It’s okay, Sam, it’s okay. What you’re experiencing is perfectly explicable,” she’d said, going over to her desk and retrieving a pamphlet aimed at pre-teens who were experiencing their first inclinations and hints that they might well be transgendered. Sam sniffled and looked at the pamphlet, and after looking through it for just a few minutes, the tears seemed to dry up, and she looked at Janice with something bordering on revelation. “I’m going to help you through this, Sam. Is there another name you’d prefer to call yourself now?”

     “No, Sam still works,” the child replied with a half-cry/half-chuckle. “I know a couple of girls named Sam.”

     “Well, now you know another one; yourself.”  It had been a short initial session, and that had been almost two years ago now. Today’s session, however, had taken an unusual turn for the good doctor. As she looked over her session notes, she quirked her lips to the side, mulling over the sudden change in Sam’s attitude. The girl had been telling her about the abrupt ending of her friendship with Kyle, the boy she had seen as her only good friend prior to the start of her transitioning. She had been thoroughly upset, borderline devastated by the development, and Janice had tried explaining to her that all relationships go through periods of tumult and adjustment as people learn and grow, coming into themselves as fully realized individuals over time.

     “Yeah, maybe,” Sam had said, pausing to blow her nose, head lowered. She brought her head up slightly, glowering up at Dr. Haight through her bangs with a scowl. “And maybe that doesn’t matter to you, because you must get a nice kickback for putting me on these drugs.” It had been delivered in an unexpectedly hostile tone, one that Janice hadn’t heard since she had begun divorce proceedings against her ex-husband twelve years ago. Even the look in Sam’s eyes had reminded her of Jack, the way he had looked at her across the island in their former home kitchen as he looked up from the papers she had handed him.

     She had tried to handle the accusation calmly and evenly. “I think you may be speaking from a place of deep hurt right now, Samantha,” Janice replied after a moment. “And I want you to know that I understand. If you feel the need to lash out at someone right now, I present a sensible target. You and I share a therapeutic relationship, not a familial, professional, or friendship one.” Sam had not responded to this, though her tangible aura of contempt and anger had subsided from there. The patient had volunteered nothing further for the remainder of the session, which had blissfully only been slated for half an hour; those last seven or eight minutes, passed in utter quiet, had been painfully awkward. Now, looking over the session notes, Janice jotted down a quick follow-up note for herself to contact Sam’s mother and schedule the next appointment sooner than the usual once-per-week; to attempt to repair any lingering damage from this session, she would want to move quickly to re-engage, and move past the upset.

     With the day’s work done, she headed out to the waiting room, where her secretary, an amiable if somewhat reserved middle-aged woman named Melissa, sat at her desk, reading through what looked to Janice like a website devoted to the history of psychological experimentation. “Melissa, you can head home for the day, if you’d like,” she informed the secretary. “My last client for the day had to reschedule.” Melissa smiled at her and nodded, then appeared to copy the web address on her laptop screen onto her phone’s web browser before starting to shut down the office computer. “Don’t forget to lock up,” Janice called over her shoulder as she exited the suite.

     Her office was situated in a small, single-story quadplex, with one of the other offices belonging to a financial advisor, one to a two-man law firm, and the fourth office remaining unoccupied for the last year-and-a-half; previously, it had been the office for a housekeepers’ agency. Heading out of the building to the tiny parking lot, she made her way to her humble dark blue Honda Civic, and started heading home.

**

     Home was one half of the fifth floor of The Howard Betting Tower, one of the most exclusive buildings in all of Amelia City. As she rode one of the two main elevators up toward her floor, Janice cycled through her mail, wondering how her son Nathan was adjusting to being back home. He was fifteen now, and had been moody and withdrawn since returning from his father’s home the week before the school year started just a month earlier. Janice recognized the usual signs of teenaged angst, and wondered if her son had left behind a summer-time sweetheart up north in Minneapolis; it certainly wouldn’t be unheard of.

     Outside of sharing dinner together, though, she didn’t see much of the boy. Rangy and gangly like his father had always been, Nathan was quite possibly the only person in Janice’s day-to-day life who she had, for years, carefully avoided psychoanalyzing. It had been a piece of advice that she carried from her own mentor years earlier at medical school; ‘Analyzing one’s spouse is an almost second-nature thing, something you will do without meaning to, and it can serve you well in the maintenance of your relationship. However, if you ever have children, and want to maintain a healthy and respectful connection with them, then avoid doing it to them wherever possible. If they recognize what you’re doing, they may well end up resenting you for it.’

     She had tried, yes, though she had failed to always keep this advice in mind over the years of Nathan’s upbringing. Mostly raising him on her own, with the exception of some holidays and summer breaks, Janice had relied on her analytical toolset to keep a close eye on his development, to get him help where she thought he needed it, quietly recommending certain routines or habits that could improve his daily life. He’d caught her out and questioned her rationale for some of these recommendations only a few times, but each time he did, she pulled away, leaving him largely to his own devices for weeks at a time, until she could either detect that his upset had passed, or he simply opened up again on his own.

     As she unlocked the door to her condo, she kept one piece of mail in her hand, setting the others on a credenza immediately to the right of her door as she stepped inside. She peeled the envelope open, a missive of some sort from Nathan’s school, and quickly scanned its contents as she strode past the back of her luxurious leather couch toward the raised hardwood area in the back of main commons room, heading for the shelves where she kept her sherry. It was nothing immediately vital, just a reminder that his tuition was due for the first quarter the following week; Matthews Academy liked to ensure that their balance sheets were nice and tidy, and all things were paid for well in advance. Janice poured herself a small drink, used her phone to head to the school’s website, and made the tuition payment online.

     She considered the time, recognizing that she had a couple of hours before Nathan would be home from school. Sauntering through the commons area, she headed for the sliding glass door that opened upon her broad balcony, a pleasant exterior space with a chest-high solid railing with a narrow one-inch space along its bottom for rain and snow to be brushed off to the sidewalk far below. She had several high-price pieces of patio furniture arranged on the balcony, to give herself and her son an enjoyable retreat out in the fresh air, which she often used on bright spring and summer mornings to ease into her day.

     For the nonce, she relaxed down into one of the cozier chairs on the balcony and leaned her head back against the cushion, trying to unwind from the day’s sessions. Janice sipped her sherry, eyes closed, for several minutes, until she heard a curious sound, which brought her eyes open without sitting up; a flutter of feathers from several feet away drew her attention, and she found herself looking at a sizable black bird. It took her a few moments to properly identify the avian creature tilting its head to one side, then the other, regarding her with the queer intensity that only wild animals seemingly out of their element in nature can conjure up- it was a raven. She slowly tilted her own head to one side, grinning at the bird.

     “You gonna say ‘Nevermore’, pal,” she quipped with a dry chuckle. The raven, seemingly in reply, turned its head in profile to her, one eye seeming to widen out slightly, revealing bloodshot whites, and its beak peeled open, revealing ranks of needle-like teeth in a bizarre, otherworldly smile of its own. Janice’s breath caught in her throat for a moment, and the raven quickly took flight, winging away out over the city.

     She looked at her glass of sherry, and wondered momentarily if she might have started drinking too early in the afternoon.

**

     “And how did you come to this conclusion, Markus,” Dr. Haight asked a couple of days later, her patient’s notebook open on her lap once more, pen tapping lightly on the pages. The middle-aged auto mechanic had called her office the day before in a near panic, demanding an impromptu therapy session as a result of some incident that he would not describe in any detail to her secretary. Given that Mr. Sellers’s delusions seemed to have been becoming increasingly disruptive to his ability to function in his day-to-day life, Janice had agreed to squeeze him in between a couple of other clients this one time.

     “This,” he said, rolling up the left sleeve of his work shirt, showing her a crude medical bandaging wrap that had already begun to show signs of bleed through. “I’m telling you, doc, this wasn’t some dream, or nightmare! I went through that mirror, and there were things on the other side, things that tried to kill me!” Janice scribbled down a couple of quick notes, and took out her prescription pad from its place under the notebook on her lap, quickly writing out a scrip for 3mg of risperidone for Mr. Sellers.  “I wrapped it myself, didn’t want to miss a day of work at the shop; we’ve got a lot of jobs right now, getting kind of backed up since Tom quit.”

     “Markus, I want you to consider for a moment that whatever happened here, it wasn’t actually real,” Janice said slowly, evenly, hoping to bring down some of the panic in her client’s eyes as he sat hunched forward on the fainting couch across from her in the office. “It could well be that what you experienced is what is known colloquially as a very intense, lucid dream, one in which your body physically got up out of bed and did something in order to simulate or create the circumstances that arose during the dream. What exactly did that to your arm in this dream, for instance?”

     “I, I don’t know how to describe it,” he stammered, eyes darting back and forth. “It was like a really big house cat, but it had little tires on the ends of its legs instead of paws, and a butcher knife like, growing out of the end of its tail. That’s what it cut me with, its tail,” he said, lower lip quivering. Janice took a quick note.

     “And did you find anything, when you got back to your side of the mirror in the dream and woke up, that might explain how the cut happened?” Mr. Sellers blinked rapidly at her, and seemed to slouch somewhat, as though realizing that yes, there was a simpler explanation.

     “Um, yeah, actually. One of my folding knives was on the floor next to my bed,” he said, letting out a long sigh of relief. He lowered his head into his hands, shaking it slightly. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on with me, doc. This stuff with the mirrors, it was never this bad before.” From prior sessions, Janice knew that Markus Sellers had been host to a long-standing phobia about mirrors, or any reflective surface, since  a young age. She had tried over the course of half a year’s worth of sessions to get down to the root incident that had caused this terror, but thus far, nothing seemed to fit the normal expectations of childhood or adolescent trauma that tended to form the foundation for long-standing phobias.

     Janice took a moment to cycle through her options for questions, and arrived at one after a few long moments of contemplation. “Can you remember a time, since you were a child, when you weren’t as aware of the mirrors, or afraid of them? Maybe when something else of significance was holding most of your attention? Maybe while you were training to become a mechanic?” Markus sat up a little, head tilting slightly to one side (like that raven), and his face seemed to soften a little as he nodded.

     “Yeah, actually, I do. There were a couple of summers, between eighth and ninth grade, when my folks rented this cabin over in Nebraska for us to vacation in, used to be kind of a thing they did when they were dating. Those summers, I never once thought about what was on the other side of a mirror, didn’t bother me a bit. Pretty much the best times of my childhood, those trips.” Janice took note of this, and adjusted herself in her chair.

     “Do you have any particularly fond and strong memories from those vacations,” she asked.

     “Lots of fishing with dad,” Markus said with a snort, nodding, his posture relaxing a little bit more. “We never really caught much, but that didn’t matter really. Making friends with some of the local kids; had my first beer at a party that second summer, my mom caught the stink on my breath when I got back to the cabin and raked me over the coals about it.” He let out a genuine chuckle, shaking his head again, but this time with a measure of happiness in the memory. “Could have been a lot harsher about it, looking back. She let me get away with an awful lot.”

     “Was it only those two summers,” Janice inquired, pen poised for more note taking.

     “Well, no, we didn’t go the next year, my dad got hurt at the plant and we couldn’t go. But then we went again the summer after my junior year, and my buddy Stevie Macklin came with, his parents were pretty cool with it. Honestly, I think they were just trying to get him out of their hair for a few weeks; we were kind of hellions back then.” A pause, then, and another of those far-away looks crept back into Markus’s eyes. “But then a few weeks after we came back home, Stevie took off. At least, that’s what everyone says, that he was a runaway.”

     “Do you not believe that?” Markus snorted, gave Janice a half-lidded, sardonic grin.

     “This is Amelia City, doc. People ‘run away’ all the time,” he said, making air quotes with his fingers. “I figured he was worm food. I still think that.” Janice took a couple more notes, then tore the sheet from her prescription pad and stood up, offering it to him as he stood to match her. “What’s this?”

     “Risperidone, 3 milligrams. I want you to try taking it for a month, and we’ll see if it helps at all. It’ll take about a week before you should notice any helpful or mitigating effects, but I want to give it a try,” she said with a sigh. “It’s an antipsychotic.” He raised an eyebrow at her.

     “I ain’t no psycho, doc.”

     “I’m not saying that you are, Mark. But it’s been shown to help people who suffer from paranoia, hallucinations, and disorganized thinking patterns in many, many cases. Again, this is just a trial run for now,” she said, trying to be reassuring in her tone. “If it doesn’t help, we can move on to something else, okay?”

     “Okay. You still want me to come on my usual day next week, then?”

     “Yes, we’ll keep those appointments as they’re set for now.” Mr. Sellers saw himself out then, tucking the sheet in his pocket before leaving the waiting room. Janice’s next patient was already waiting in the room, another of her transgendered youths named Mel, seated with her mother. Mel, fifteen years old, had been one of Janice’s proudest accomplishments in this specialized area of treatment, and as he followed Janice with his mother into the office, Janice took a moment to notice the way he seemed to be holding himself.

     The session was brief, with Mel confessing that while the initial days of recovering from his first successful procedure had been a blur of pain and discomfort, he was now experiencing a kind of weird dislocation, as if he could still feel something that wasn’t there. “That isn’t unheard of,” Dr. Haight explained to Mel and his mother. “It’s what’s known as ‘Phantom Limb Syndrome’. It usually occurs when someone, say a former soldier who loses an arm or leg in conflict, gets a kind of odd sense of their lost appendage still being there. In your case, with the double mastectomy, your mind is trying to adapt to the fact that you no longer have breasts.”

     Janice wrote out a script for Mel and his mother to fill, saw them out, and told Melissa that she could head out for the day, since she had no more appointments. As the secretary packed up her purse, Janice headed back into her office and sat behind her desk, considering a city council meeting that she would be attending after the weekend on Monday evening. As she went over a set of notes she had written up to read to those present at said meeting, she heard a short, sharp tapping on her office window, and she looked up, spotting a bird perched on the windowsill.

     It was another raven. She had almost completely forgotten the one from her balcony a few days before, and as she looked at this black bird, she found herself admiring the sleekness of its feathers, as it spread them out a few times, tilting this way and that and slowly stepping a few paces in either direction along the narrow sill. She grinned toward the animal and said, “Aren’t you a curious one? I think I met a cousin of yours the other day.” The bird, seeming to hear her, drew its wings tight against its side and peered directly through the glass at her.

     “Not likely,” the bird replied before abruptly taking flight away. Janice just blinked rapidly at the spot where the bird had been, wondering, momentarily, if perhaps she should go ahead and write herself a scrip for some risperidone.

**

     Saturday morning, and the city below and before her made Janice Haight wonder if perhaps she had taken for granted the fact that cities really weren’t intended for people to live in, long term. The blare of horns on the street, shouts and howls of arguments and hostilities, and every now and then, what almost could not be mistaken for anything but what it was, the sound of a gunshot somewhere in the middle distance. Amelia City wasn’t quite as hostile a Midwest metro as some places she could think of, like Detroit or Chicago, bastions of gun control laws that seemed to do little to actually control guns and more often kept citizens unable to defend themselves from the criminal element. Being situated where it was in the state of Iowa, it was a little less progressive than she might have preferred, but it was still a city, with all of its resources, amenities, and benefits. She doubted she would have been able to find as good a school for her son if they lived outside of the city than within its confines.

     She finished her first cup of coffee while looking out over the railing of the balcony, then headed back into the condo, sliding the glass door shut behind her, her fuzzy white bathrobe keeping the chill in the home from cutting to the bone. Winter was indeed approaching, but she wouldn’t give in to it entirely until the first flakes flew; this meant she would continue to keep breakfast relatively light for herself and Nathan, setting up to make just a few eggs and some toast for them both. She got the coffeemaker going (she wasn’t a fan of her son’s acquiring a taste for coffee already at only fifteen, but she wouldn’t argue the point), set up the toaster, and started cooking the eggs. Soon enough she brought everything to the dining area table, set off to one side of the larger overall commons room, and Nathan came shambling along within minutes, his hair a tangled mess and eyes baggy from what she suspected was a long night of video games on the Xbox hooked up in his bedroom.

     “Hey Mom,” he said muzzily, taking a seat across from her at the table. He grabbed the carafe and one of the two plain brown mugs, pouring himself a cup of coffee and lacing it with sugar and creamer before taking up about half of the eggs in the little serving bowl between them.

     “Morning, Nathan,” she replied. She sipped her coffee and cast a quick look toward the piano, which stood on a raised section of the main room, just a few feet from the shelves of sherry and several of her older books on psychiatric history and study. “Long night?”

      “Yeah, me and some of the guys were doing a marathon of Shredder’s Revenge,” he said with a smirk. “Old school games are good stuff. I feel like I really missed out on an era, being born when I was.” He shrugged, took a bite of food. “Thankfully, they re-release or remake a lot of the better classics nowadays.”

     “Hmm. Anything new and exciting with any of your friends at school,” she probed gently, sipping her own coffee. Nathan paused for a moment, letting out a low rumble of consideration without speaking. “Something the matter?”

     “Not sure,” he said slowly, looking off to one side. “It’s Kathy. You remember her?”

     “Is she the girl who was helping you with math last year?”

     “Yeah, that’s her, frickin’ genius with numbers, I swear,” he said with a faint smile, finally looking his mother in the eyes. The smile trailed away, and he paused a moment, looking down at his food. “She’s been, I don’t know, acting kind of funny.” He speared a bit of egg somewhat aggressively, a motion Janice made mental note of. Clearly he’s upset about something here, she thought.

     “Funny how, Nate?” He took a bite of toast, chewed slowly, swallowed, then gave his mother a quick glance.

     “I guess the best way to say it would be, like, she’s acting like a dude, you know,” he finally replied. Before she could consider any other explanation, Janice, thanks to her specialization in the last few years, offered her immediate, almost automatic, answer.

     “Maybe she is a ‘dude’, Nate,” she said, taking another pull of her coffee. “It’s certainly not unheard-off for someone around your age.” Her son rolled his eyes at her and shook his head, sitting back in his chair, arms quickly folding over his chest.

     “That’s crap, Mom,” he groused.

     “And that’s your father’s attitude, that right there,” she shot back, feeling her temper quickly rising.

     “No, it’s understanding the basics of biology,” he retorted hotly, shooting to his feet and grabbing his coffee mug, turning to walk away from what little breakfast remained on his plate and his mother. “Don’t give me your spiel when it comes to my friends, Mom,” he added, stalking away from her.

     “And you don’t give me a knock-off version of your father’s toxic male attitude, young man,” she snapped back as he disappeared down the hallway back toward his bedroom, slamming the door to bring their sudden argument to a close. The moment the echo of his closing door faded, bringing the condo to near total silence, Janice let out a sigh, slouching in her seat as she tied her bathrobe shut over her long shirt and black fuzzy pants. She’d known full well how her ex-husband felt about her practice, his overall respect for the field of psychiatry, but his rampant and firmly held disdain for the topic of gender-affirming treatment and care. She hadn’t realized that this perspective had bled over into their son, however, a boy who she had always thought of as being more open-minded than that, especially given the more progressive attitude of his generation as a whole.

     She determined to have a talk with Jack about this when she had the chance.

**

     “He hasn’t mentioned anything about her to me,” Jack replied a couple of hours later over the phone. Nathan had finally come out of his room an hour after their tiff, but only to inform her that he was heading over to his friend Stevie’s place and bolting out of the condo, likely to be gone for most of the day. With no patients to see, and no set plans for the day, Janice had found herself increasingly restless, wanting to find out what she could as soon as possible. Waiting until ten o’clock to call, since Jack had specifically requested that she not call him before nine-thirty on a weekend, Janice flipped through her contacts, took a seat on the luxurious couch in the recessed lounge area of the commons room, and turned the television on, muted.

     When Jack picked up, there was a minute or two of polite, if somewhat strained, small talk, before Janice dove in and asked after this Kathy girl and Nathan. “Nothing at all? She’s the girl who helped him with his math work last school year,” Janice added. There was a brief pause from Jack, then what sounded like snapping fingers.

     “I do remember him mentioning her a couple of times, yeah, but it was just sort of a passing thing. I think he might have had a bit of a thing for her, maybe a crush of some kind, but that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary; she helped him with something he needed help with, so he developed some kind of affection or attachment to her. Isn’t there a word for that in your profession? Transference, I think it’s called?”

     “If their relationship was a therapeutic one, yes, that would be the proper term,” she replied. “Where did you pick that up?”

     “The department’s in-house shrink,” Jack replied with a snicker. “Had a righteous shoot a couple of years back, captain wanted me to see him for a few weeks before they cleared me to be back out on the street. He’s a decent guy. But listen, Nate’s a bit more like me when it comes to all that stuff, dealing with, you know, girls,” Jack said, and she could practically hear his shoulders shrug, as if this weren’t a big deal. “Did they have some kind of fight or something?”

     “Not exactly, no. He’s just worried about her, says she’s acting strangely,” Janice said, not wanting to get into specifics now that she knew her ex-husband didn’t have any additional information to offer her.

     “As I recall, that whole county has a thing for making people act strangely. It’s a big part of why I got out when we split up.”

     “It doesn’t hurt that law enforcement jobs paid a lot better at the time up there,” Janice offered playfully. Jack let out a little laugh on his end.

     “No, that certainly didn’t hurt. Listen, if he brings it up when he calls me tomorrow, I’ll let you know, okay? Nate’s a good kid though, Jan, maybe he’s just worried about her, given what happens to some people in Amelia. Anyway, I gotta go, there’s not many decent days left for fishing before Old Man Winter dicks me over.” He hung up then, leaving Janice to stew on the situation with her son’s attitude. She cycled through her available television options, settled on catching up with a show she’d recently taken interest in, and un-muted the set as she settled in to relax.

     It maybe wasn’t the worst thing in the world, she mused, to let the subject cool off between herself and her boy.

**

     They were closing on her, and if they drew too near, she would be as good as dead. Sweat streaking down her forehead, heart racing, she pelted as fast as she could down the narrow street, a street she didn’t know, didn’t recognize. Vaguely, she was able to discern that she was in a suburb of some sort, the street lined with trees and long fences and towering arc sodium lamps every twenty yards or so, half of them flickering as though dying. She looked back over her shoulder, spotting her pursuers as they sloshed along after her.

     Vaguely humanoid in shape, they shimmered in the night, the radioactive sludge that composed their likenesses sloughing off in drips and clumps, yet never reducing their overall size and form as they chased after her. Here and there they flung chunks of the glowing material after her, the substance hissing and burning through everything it touched. “Get away from me,” she screamed, still running as fast as she could, yet seemingly unable to put more than a couple dozen paces between herself and these toxic slime creatures.

    Each time she looked back at them, their facial features sharpened, becoming more and more identifiable. Just before they caught up with her, she realized they were the faces of her ex-husband and her son, and with a snarl, they flung their nastiness at her, and their throws landed squarely on her face.

     Janice awoke with a yelp dying in her throat, the blankets twisted around her in knots. The imagery of the nightmare lingered for a moment, as she realized that something had been riding along on her ex-husband’s glowing, radioactive shoulder- a raven, with two very human, bloodshot eyes.

**

     “Often times, these children feel that their teachers are the only adults in their lives who they can completely trust and confide in,” Janice continued, addressing the members of the city council the following evening, reading from her notes. “And given the recent spate of anti-trans legislation that has been given fast-track support in several more conservative states throughout the country in the last year, it is my professional assessment that these kids, already among our most vulnerable members of the public, need to feel safe in bringing these very real, very private concerns to someone who will hear them out, and not judge them for how they feel. It is for that reason that I stand in opposition, as a professional in the field of psychiatric treatment, to the proposal being put forth by councilman Ford.”

     There were some murmurings from the other members of the public in the gallery and the city council members as she folded up her laptop and returned to her own spot in the gallery, taking a seat as the next speaker from the public took up at the lectern provided for public commentary during the council meeting. Janice recognized him as James Quentin, a local reporter for The Amelia Chronicle, a county-wide news website that had gone from print-to-digital just a few years earlier. She knew him not only from the news outlet, but also because his own daughter also attended Matthews Academy, one grade behind Nathan.

     “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the council, members of the public,” he began, speaking clearly into the provided microphone. “I’m James Quentin, resident of the seventh city district. Some of you may well know me from my work with the Chronicle.” He paused to look back at Janice, giving her a brief nod. “And Dr. Haight, as well as a couple more folks back here in the gallery, know me as a parent who has a child who attends the same school as their own. I’m actually quite glad you’re here tonight, Dr. Haight, and that you offered your remarks first.

     “I am here tonight, ladies and gentlemen, to offer my support, of councilman Ford’s proposal,” the journalist said, looking down at his own yellow legal pad of handwritten notes for a moment. Janice raised an eyebrow at his back, wondering where this was going to lead. “I know that it might seem curious, to some of you, that I would come out here tonight and say that I fully endorse the ordinance that he has put forth. After all, it was just two years ago that this city council put forth a proposal that all public and private schools operating in Amelia City should incorporate the Responsible Drug Use Education Program. At the time, initially, I was skeptical about the proposal. It took coming to one of these meetings and hearing the exact language of the proposal for me to sign on with the concept, that teachers and parents should work together to give their children and students a full, no-nonsense understanding of the effects of various drugs, their common usage, and to allow for teachers to inform parents if and when they suspected or discovered their kids using or possessing such substances in and around the school.

     “At that time, I thought the phrasing that councilman Ford used to promote that program was quite apt,” Quentin said, flipping to his second page of handwritten notes. “Quote- ‘When we promote an environment of openness and transparency, sharing vital information between teachers and parents regarding the well-being of their students, everybody benefits. By eliminating secrets, we ensure the growth and potential of those children is fulfilled, and they are kept safer’, end quote. I believe that this same rationale holds here; by requiring that teachers and staff inform parents about issues surrounding their children’s gender identity confusion and/or sexual identity questions, as well as behaviors that would indicate such perceptions, we will help foster an environment that focuses on time-tested and professionally relevant treatments and therapies that may not end up resulting in the application of unproven medical procedures or chemical interventions, sometimes delivered behind the backs of those very same said parents. Thank you,” he said, tucking his legal pad under his arm and turning around to return to his seat in the gallery.

     To Dr. Janice Haight’s dismay, not only did most of the people seated in the gallery begin to applaud him, but three quarters of the city council rose to their feet and did the same. A few minutes later, the vote was cast, and the city-wide ordinance was announced as effective immediately.

**

     “Mom, Dad, please,” the kid said softly, eyes aimed down at the waiting room floor. “I just, I want to do this part by myself.” Janice stood in the doorway of her office, watching as the slight, waifish adolescent awaited their parents’ approval. With a hesitant nod from both finally coming several moments later, Janice led the youth into her office, letting the soundproofed door click shut as she headed to her usual swoop-backed chair, indicating the fainting couch for her newest client.

     “So, Jack, is it?,” she began. The kid nodded, hesitated, then shook his head. “Your parents told my secretary they were concerned with some of your recent behaviors,” Janice continued, noting for herself the boy’s long-sleeved thermal shirt, the choice of a dark color garment.

     “They think I’m cutting,” Jack replied, seeming to almost fold in on himself. “But I’m not. I, I’ve read about you, online. What you specialize in,” he said, taking a chance to look up at her briefly. “And I read online this morning about the meeting at city hall a few nights ago. I was gonna talk to the school councilor, but that’s not an option now, so, I used one of my dad’s box cutting razors and gave myself a couple of nicks so they’d poke around.” Janice took a couple of quick preliminary notes in one of her own yellow legal pads, a common measure she took before transferring initial notes into a client notebook, in the event they didn’t end up being long-term patients.

     “That’s clever, Jack, though I’m not sure I necessarily approve,” Janice said evenly. “Deception is a destructive behavioral pattern, though I suppose I understand why you might have felt it necessary in this case. How did you convince them to bring you to me?”

     “I told them that one of my friends comes to see you, which is true, actually. Mel Collins?” Janice hesitated, said nothing for a moment.

     “I’m not legally allowed to confirm or deny who my clients are to anyone without a legal order.” Jack waved her off with a slight flap of one hand.

     “Sure. Listen, I was wondering if you could maybe help me without my folks, you know, figuring out what’s exactly going on.” Janice cocked an eyebrow at the kid, pen poised over her pad.

     “And how exactly do you think they would react if I did that, and they did figure things out,” she replied, a perfectly valid question. Jack shrugged.

     “I love my folks, but they’re no geniuses. If you prescribed me something that could help, they wouldn’t have any idea.” Janice appreciated the kid’s situation, and moreover, certainly admired the obvious thought that they had already put into the request for her assistance in this matter. Thanks to the black letter of the law, she didn’t really have to tell Jack’s parents about anything that was said in the office, and if they didn’t do research on a prescription, well, that wasn’t Janice’s fault, now was it?

     “I have a friend at Amelia Memorial, an endocrinologist,” Janice said, moving from her session chair to the one behind her desk, opening her laptop and quickly starting to compose an email. “I’ll have her send me a quick email, which I’ll print up here, and present to your parents along with a prescription. That should allay their concerns, and we can get you started down the path that’s right for you.” Jack’s entire demeanor changed then, relaxing by notable degrees.

     “Thank you, Dr. Haight,” the kid said. Half an hour later, Janice returned with Jack to the waiting room, handing over the printed email and script, explaining to the parents that she thought what was happening was a common enough situation, and that a colleague at Amelia Memorial had been helping her treat disorganized and self-harming ideation with some new hormonal treatment programs. The parents struck her as intensely grateful for the guidance, and promised that if they felt Jack needed further attention, they would set up a follow-up appointment.

     Her last appointment for the day, Markus Summers, walked through his appointment with her in something approaching a muffled haze, telling her that the drug she had given him seemed to be working throughout much of the day, but explaining that it seemed to wear off throughout the day, and that his dreams had begun to swing repeatedly into nightmare territory, often incorporating mirrors within their imagery and tone. “I wanted to smash the one over my bathroom sink the other day, but I can’t; I don’t own my own home, I’m renting an apartment,” he said with a melancholy tone. “So for the time being, I’ve just got it covered with a towel.”

     Janice told him to keep a record of these dreams and let him go, not wanting to adjust the dosage just yet, not until some more time had passed. She let Melissa head out, and determined to go over a few more of her notes before heading home to wait for Nathan to get off from school. Since their flare-up about his friend Kathy, he had been giving her the Silent Treatment most days, only posing questions that required an immediate answer before he could determine his next course of action. But as for casual mother-son dialogue? That had gone out the window, at least for the time being.

     It was as she was shutting her laptop that she heard it, a kind of low, rustling sound, as of something dragging itself across the deep pile carpeting of the office. She grabbed her valise, came around the desk slowly, looking down at the floor, and spotted the source of the noise, making its way around the fainting couch toward her. At first, her instincts shrieked at her and she felt herself stiffen up at the sight of the creature; she assumed it was a snake of some sort. Trying to keep herself from moving too suddenly, she started to sidestep toward the side wall, halting as the snake, curiously flesh-hued, rose up, its hooded head now clearly visible to her.

     This was no snake, not exactly- it was some kind of hybrid of a serpent and a penis, the urethral slit a narrow, snarling mouth filled with foam-slicked fangs. “What in the name of God,” she rasped, breath catching in her throat.

     “Why did you lie to them,” the creature moaned in a voice that reminded her of Bullwinkle Moose from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons of the 1960s. “They’re gonna mutilate me,” it then screamed, as Janice shrieked and bolted out around it, making a mad dash out of her suite without even pausing to properly lock up her outer waiting room. Her vision narrowed to a tunnel with adrenaline dumping through her body, she dashed to her car, and without even using her usual traffic precautions, she raced for the safety of her home.

**

     Three glasses of sherry later, she felt a little more stable, and was able to write off the incident at her office to a stress-induced hallucination, and little more. The severity of some of her clients’ cases was simply getting to her, that was all, particularly Mr. Summers, she reasoned. That, and, well, this is Amelia City. Things get weird here. She opened up her email as it dinged her, a quick message from her secretary letting her know that she had a request from a potential new client for that Friday, a professor from the Amelia campus of the Iowa State University System. Janice sent off a quick approval after checking that day’s schedule, then settled in on the plush living room couch to watch some mindless show on one of her several (too many, really) streaming services.

     A few episodes in, as Janice was enjoying her fourth sherry, she spotted some kind of movement from the corner of her eye, accompanied by some kind of wet slapping noise. “Please, Nathan, if your shoes are wet, remember to take them off by the door,” she said without looking away from the television. There came no response, but she heard the bathroom door down the hallway clap shut, roughly. This silent treatment can’t last forever, she thought. As the current episode of her show came to a close, she sat up and turned to face the condo’s front door as it opened, revealing her son coming home. “Hey Mom,” he said, using one foot to kick off the opposite shoe, then the other. “What’s for dinner tonight?”

     If he just got home, who the fuck is in my bathroom, Janice thought, the alcohol’s previous relaxing effect vanishing quicker than a politician’s promises once the election is called in their favor. “Pizza, from Maretti’s,” she quickly lied, standing up and heading over to the dining area table to grab her purse, swiftly retrieving her debit card and bringing it over to Nathan. “Could you go pick it up?”

     “Um, sure,” he said, slipping his shoes back on. “We haven’t had Maretti’s in a while. You mind if I stop by the 7-11 too on the way there, to grab some soda?”

     “That’s fine,” she said, mentally willing him to get the hell out, away from whatever psychotic might have broken into their home just a few minutes earlier. She stood by the door until she saw the elevator door across the hall shut and begin its descent, then rapidly retrieved her cell phone and punched in 911, not yet hitting the ‘Call’ button as she grabbed the meat tenderizer from the kitchen and made her way toward the bathroom. “Whoever’s in there, I’m warning you, I’m armed,” she called out hesitantly. “And I’m calling the police, right now, unless you get out of my home!” There issued from behind the bathroom door a soft, barely audible whimper, sobs. Janice said nothing for several moments, then added, “Whatever it is you’re after, if its drugs, just take whatever you want in there and get out.”

     “What’s wrong with me,” said a familiar, feminine voice from behind the bathroom door. “I’m a freak, Dr. Haight!” Janice froze, identifying the voice quickly now.

     “Mel? Mel, is that you, sweetie?” Her grip on the meat tenderizer loosened a little, though she kept it in hand; even the gentlest patient, in the grip of a panic episode, could prove dangerous. “Honey, whatever’s the matter, I can help you through it, okay? But you really can’t just come barging into my home; I’m your therapist. This is a bit of a breach of the boundaries of our relationship as doctor and patient. Please, come on out of there,” she said, reaching for the door handle. When she tried to turn it, she discovered that Mel had locked it from the inside.

     “Don’t come in here! I’m hideous,” Mel barked, her voice teetering on the border between masculine and feminine. “Please, just, leave me alone.” The voice now came through more masculine, the testosterone treatments helping make Mel present more like the boy that he had been inside all along.

     “I can’t do that, Mel. You’ve broken into my home. I don’t want to contact the police, though. Can I call your parents instead?”

     “They can’t help me now,” Mel said, though his voice sounded distorted, as though several voices were coming from one mouth. “Nobody can help me, doc; and nobody can help you.” The bathroom door tore inward with a crack of wood and shriek of screws as it was ripped off of its hinges into the chamber beyond, and Janice Haight found herself gazing upon a thing that defied the laws of nature. Composed of an amalgamation of breasts, uteruses and dense black medical stitches, the construct oozed out toward her, reeking of blood and infection, a kind of mouth made of stitching high up on its ‘body’, flapping as leaked blood and some white, viscous fluid as it snarled at her, “Look at what you did to me!”

     Janice managed to let out a deathly shriek just before she fainted.

**

     “Jesus, Mom, you scared the shit out of me,” Nathan said as he held her head on his lap, her eyes fluttering open, finally regaining consciousness. “How much have you had to drink since you got home?”

     “Wha,” she managed, trying to sit up, her head throbbing. Her eyes rolled left, spotting the bathroom door, completely intact and with no signs of damage or intrusion by a creature from the fifth or sixth ring of Hell, no queer fluids staining the hardwood flooring of the hallway. “What happened?”

     “I don’t know,” Nathan said with a half a grin. “But I think you’ve been hitting the sauce a little hard, Ma. Maretti’s didn’t even have our order, you must have thought about it and then never actually called in the order, so I had to put one in and wait there for them to make it. Come on,” he said, grunting as he helped her shakily to her feet. “Let’s eat, then get you to bed, Mom.” Janice wordlessly agreed, going through the motions of eating, observing that the meat tenderizer had been returned to the silverware drawer in the kitchen.

     When she went off to her bedroom to get some much-needed rest, she did so only after retrieving said tool and bringing it with her to bed.

**

     She felt terrible about doing it, but Dr. Janice Haight decided that she needed to take a couple of days away from the office, shuffling her patients around as best she could, and opting to return to her practice that Friday. She would begin, she decided, with the new potential patient, Professor Corvus. While the familiarity of her usual patients’ concerns might normally allow for her to ease back into things, she felt that the presentation of a new patient would grant her a breath of fresh air, a chance to perhaps address a patient with a diagnosis that might prove different than what she had been so strongly focused on for the last couple of years.

     Grabbing her yellow legal pad and writing down the client’s name at the top, she approached the door between her office and the waiting room, opened it, and looked over to the long occupied chair, hosting a middle-aged gentleman in a slightly frumpy tweed blazer and trousers, the blazer hosting a pair of worn black elbow patches, his hair unkempt, horn-rimmed glasses perched near the tip of a rather lengthy nose. The professor looked up at her, his eyes an odd kind of gray, half-lidded, and he offered her a tight-lipped smile.

     Melissa wasn’t at her desk, which Janice found curious. “She stepped out just a few moments ago,” the professor said, his voice tinted with the hint of some sort of accent; Janice couldn’t quite make out if it was English, or just New England Old Money. It didn’t matter either way, but as the man stood up, she realized with a start that he was rather tall and rangy, an angular man who towered over her by nearly a foot. Like a consummate old-fashioned professional, he wore a vest and button shirt with a tie under his blazer, and the tie pin piqued her interest; a little metal piece in the shape of four hooked blue claws, joined along their rounded tips by a single thick, horizontal black line. “I presume to use the restroom. Dr. Haight,” he said with a nod, offering his hand to her. She took it and shook, silently surprised by the strength of his grip.

     “Professor Corvus,” she replied. “Please, do come in,” she said, guiding him into her office and indicating the fainting couch. She took her usual seat in the swoop backed chair, taking up her pad and pen. “So, what do you teach at the university?”

     “Mythology and comparative religions,” Corvus said. “I’ve always been fascinated with stories of old, you see, the way they reflect the values of a people, their hopes and dreams. You’d be surprised how much you can learn about people by finding out what they consider sacred or holy.”

     “Interesting,” she said, taking down a couple of quick notes. She narrowed her eyes for a moment on his name as she had written it down on the top of the page. “Your name is quite curious.”

     “Len? It’s short for ‘Leonard’,” he replied.

     “No, your family name. I believe it’s Latin, right? For a bird of some sort,” she added, not quite able to put her finger on which avian. The professor gave her a wry grin, eyes half-lidded behind his glasses.

     “Indeed, it is a type of bird. Which makes my, situation,” he said, casting his glance aside, “somewhat peculiar.” The professor looked down for a moment, took a deep breath, and finally looked up at her with a steady, stoic expression. “I’ve come to you, Dr. Haight, because it is my understanding that you specialize in identity issues, yes?” Janice adjusted herself in her seat slightly, trying to figure out what possible tie there could be between this man’s family name and issues of identity.

     “That’s one way of putting my primary focus, yes. Why did that bring me to your attention?”

     “Because, Dr. Haight, I do not believe that I am entirely human; I believe that I am a bird, trapped in the confines of this human-shaped body.” Janice felt a spark of irritation lance through her mind, a spark which swiftly blossomed into a flame. She uncrossed her legs and sat up straighter in her seat, pen and legal pad quickly set aside on the small end table to the left of her swoop-backed chair.

     “Professor, did somebody put you up to this,” she asked waspishly, rising to her feet. She planted her hands on her hips, the anger ratcheting up a couple of clicks in the back of her mind. “Are you here to mock the vital work that I do here?”

     “Not at all, my good doctor,” the professor replied, his voice taking on a subtle shift, a kind of momentary doubling, as if two voices were speaking from one throat. He slowly rose up off of the fainting couch, his head hung down, face obscured by his hair. “I speak true, you see; I am a bird, of a sort,” he snarled, the double voice now clearly audible, his body trembling, arms spreading theatrically out to either side. Before her incredulous eyes, Janice watched as the sleeves of his blazer wavered and trembled, thick black feathers sprouting from the sleeve cuffs, shooting out of the top of his head and along the scruff of his neck. His nose, pointed down toward the floor, began to issue a sound as of something brittle breaking, like sidewalk chalk, and the room filled with an overwhelming odor of cinnamon and rotted meat. She began staggering back away from the man-thing, watching with her mouth hanging half-open as the blazer and trousers rippled, taking on a new fit and pattern, as of a checkerboard suit.

     As her back came into contact with the bookshelf behind her desk, Janice Haight saw the previous Professor Len Corvus stand up straight, his head that of a raven with large, bloodshot human eyes, his feathered hands open wide, talon-bearing feet bare of footwear upon her office’s carpeted floor. With a flick of its right wrist, the raven-thing conjured a slim, silver microphone, like those used on game shows, which flew out into its hand from an inner blazer pocket. “You see, Dr. Haight,” said the raven-thing in a light English accent. “I am, in point of fact, a sort of bird. Well,” it said, folding its arms over its chest, tapping the underside of its enormous beak thoughtfully, eyes once more half-lidded in a bemused expression. “I suppose ‘sort of’ is a rather loose terminology to use here, isn’t it?”

     She tried to muster up some sort of words, anything, a cry for help, but all that issued from her mouth was a kind of mewling moan.

     “What’s the matter, good doctor? Cat got your tongue,” the raven-thing asked, reaching behind its back and pulling up a calico cat, held by its tail, a bleeding human tongue held tight in its mouth. “No matter,” the bird-thing said with a shrug, tossing the cat aside, yowling. “Did you enjoy meeting my little emissaries before, Dr. Haight,” it asked, taking one long, slow stride toward her.

     “Your, what?”

     “My emissaries, my messengers,” said the bird-thing, a too-wide smile full of needle-like teeth filling the gap between upper and lower portion of its beak. “You know, the one from your bathroom that you initially mistook for the girl you helped get mutilated? And the serpent that, well, may as well have been representative of any of the phalluses you encouraged to have lopped off of a perfectly healthy human boy. Them, you know?”

     At first, she just shook her head, watching as spectral gray fog began rising up off of the floor, obscuring everything below the bird-thing’s knee level. She wasn’t sure when the fog had cropped up, exactly, but she was certain that this thing was the source of it. “What are you,” she managed to croak out, as it halted just a few feet away from her.

     “I’m so glad you asked, particularly given your little jab when first we met on your balcony,” said the raven-thing, flashing that smile once again. “You may call me Quoth, Dr. Haight. Though, truthfully, you won’t be calling me much of anything for very long, I should think. Nurses! Prep the patient for treatment,” Quoth barked out, raising his microphone high overhead in a pose reminiscent of Freddy Mercury. From out of the fog to either side of her, the emissaries Quoth had referred to rose up, wrapping themselves around her arms, dragging Janice as she struggled and started screaming toward the fainting couch. As she was drawn nearer to it, she saw that it had been changed into a hospital gurney, the sort used in surgery theaters. The servants of Quoth threw her roughly down upon it, and when she tried to sit up, the mass of breast and uterine tissue struck her hard in the forehead, knocking her down to the gurney before lashing her in place with leather straps attached to the bed.

     As she tried to wiggle hard to either side rapidly, Quoth came striding up beside her, now dressed in the blue scrubs and white lab coat of a doctor of some sort, a surgical mask split absurdly over his beak. In his hands he held a patient’s chart clipboard, flipping through pages; even from her current position, Janice could see that there was no actual writing on the pages, but instead, scribbling of some sort of arcane symbols and sigils. The clearest one, embossed on the underside of the clipboard, was a set of four hooked blue claws, joined along their rounded tops by a thick black horizontal line.

     “Well, I can see here that we’re all set to go for your treatment, Dr. Haight,” said Quoth, tossing the clipboard over his shoulder carelessly. Once again, she heard the cat, now unseen, yowling in annoyance. The creature reached under the gurney where she could not see, and brought its feathered hand back up holding a large syringe, filled with some kind of neon green, glowing fluid. Janice could practically feel the sickness radiating off of the needle, and her proximity to this creature set every nerve along her skin on end, as if it were madness and violence given a physical embodiment. “This, you see, is Amelia’s very own proprietary blend,” Quoth said cheerily, twirling the hypodermic like a pen or pencil between his clawed fingers. “A mix of every puberty blocker and artificial hormone replacement therapy drug you’ve ever foisted upon your confused patients, Dr. Haight,” he said, leering down at her.

     “W-w-why are you doing this to me,” she begged, feeling warmth spread through her undergarments and the gurney sheets as the dam of her terror broke entirely. Quoth’s smile rapidly transformed into a scowl, the ridges over his too-human, bloodshot eyes curling down in a furrow.

     “Because, good doctor, you forgot your oath,” Quoth snarled, stabbing the end of the needle deep into her carotid. “First,” he hissed, pressing down the plunger, the unknown fluid feeding into her system. “Do. No. Harm.” Quoth slid several yards back, once more dressed in his checkerboard suit, a vintage white-and-red box of popcorn in hand. He offered it toward the penis-snake beside him, but the creature shook its ‘head’ in the negative. “Doesn’t hurt to offer,” the raven-thing said with a shrug. Janice Haight began thrashing violently in her restraints, streams of brackish black fluid leaking from the corners of her eyes, her nose, and her mouth, smoke rising from her chest as the flesh and muscle, quickly turned necrotic, caved in, exposing a heavily strained beating heart. Moments later, the muscle burst in a spray of corrupted blood and mass, some of it coating the top layer of Quoth’s popcorn. The creature looked down at his box, dropped it unceremoniously on the carpet, and brushed his hands together in an ‘all done’ gesture. “Well, I believe our work here is done, friends. Come along, now. I’m sure we have other patients to see to. After all,” he said, stepping out into the empty waiting room alone, straightening his tie. “This is Amelia.”