Margaret Shield (sophist) wrote in dunhavenic, @ 2018-02-27 08:08:00 |
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“Why do I feel like you’re about to send me off with a card that says I am a looney?” Margaret, whose petulance rebounded into crossed arms while she slumped into the overstuffed chair, stared at the doctor balefully. She’d (very smartly, she believed) gone two towns over just to ensure that she’d be seen by no one who she or her friends knew. The doctor, placid and old, merely offered her one of those imperturbably English smiles. Of course the Doctor was Virginian, but still. Margaret made to speak again, to offer another barbed criticism of the modern practice of psychology. But when she blinked the room around her seemed to melt and rethaw into a tiled, sterile office. She looked down at a clipboard in her hands. Steven Grant Rogers. That must have been the man sitting on the examining table with his sleeve drawn up, permitting vial after vial of blood to be extracted from his arm. She recognized the features of that young man who’d tossed himself on the grenade. She saw the same keen gaze in the warm blue eyes. But the man had several feet and hundreds of pounds on the sickly, determined man. She drew up the courage to speak and then, the scene was gone. She was staring at the doctor once more. With a modicum of pique, she leaned forward and pulled her bag over her head. “With all due respect, this was never going to work out.” Medicine, therapy, whatever. The memories were too sharp. They cut too close to reality to be the product of her mind or a mind’s sickness. She didn’t need a ph.D to understand it. “Best of luck to you,” she said brusquely, and showed herself out. |