When the Magic 8-Ball again turns up consciousness, Rose opens her eyes to an op-art nightmare of shapes: hangmen’s nooses, sharps, bulbous-eyed heads. The texture of panic is not ice cold and ice blue. Instead of carving through her cranium, this terror leaks, filling gaps in the mist with nauseating sludge as thick, black, and evil-smelling as tar.

Breathe, she tells herself. Relax into the moment. Inch by inch her breath reclaims mental real estate, blows fear back into the corners.

Right View: She is in a hospital bed, looking at a ceiling in a hospital room, side-lit from lights in the hallway. “I am confused and disoriented,” Rose whispers. “I am in a hospital. I am back in the hospital again.”

Right View: Not a hospital. A nursing home. Like scraps of shredded paper, images flutter behind her eyes: people slumped in empty sacks of wrinkled skin, staring, spittle at the corners of their lips, the stench of urine and hopelessness.

Right Intention: Get out.

Rose had gotten out. Now she is back in.

She tries to lift her hand to scrub the sand from her eyes. The motion is aborted; her hand jerks like a little dog reaching the end of its leash. Her other hand meets the same fate.

Breathe in, calm the mind. Breathe out, calm the body. She can breathe; a cause for happiness.

Inner clamor and confusion lessen. Monsters on the ceiling are a simple play of light and shadow. Craning her head up until her neck aches, she can see her hands. Both wrists are cuffed to the sides of the bed with wide soft bands. The cuffs are tethered to the rail.

They have tied her down.

Rose’s eyelids glow orange. Daytime. The sun has risen. Miracles abound, Rose thinks groggily. She forces her eyes open a little. People. People she should know. She is beginning to hate this. That she hates it means it has happened before. Emotion attached to thought equals memory.

“Good morning.” A man in a white coat and tie—a doctor, Rose supposes—smiles down at her. “You’re looking much better.”

Rose isn’t feeling better, but, she realizes, she is feeling. Before there’d been numbness, gray featureless brain-scapes.

“Wanda, what kind of meds do we have her on?” the doctor asks.

“Just antidepressants,” Wanda replies. Rose recognizes Wanda. It is she of the luna moth eyebrows. She works here. Not a nurse. Her teal pantsuit screams management.

“She will have purged any medications with the vomiting,” the doctor says. “Now that she’s out of the woods as far as the flu goes, and back in a secure environment, get her levels back on par slowly. Half for a day or two, then, if she’s doing well, up them.”