Frog Spawn

   

The Office - August 13, 7:30 PM

She arrives thirty minutes early, tapping her foot despite herself. Four clocks ring three distinct chimes: pouring, growling, humming, and banging. No, the humming is him. Then, the banging twin bracket clocks click in unison by the back wall on a lacy, long tablecloth. Lain around them is an amethyst rosary, with a hanging son wearing a solemn face. Mother Mary sits in brass at the cinch, looking down at him with flower-petal tears in her eyes. To the right stands a large umber shelf. It has holes in the sides sporting scarves, ribbons, loose fabric swatches, and bandanas. Only one hole is left empty, she assumes it to be the gossamer indigo cravat that the hypnotist has tucked into his black sweater. It matches the jewels hung from his ears and the shining labret pierced right below his lip. He has his hands clasped together, in black lace gloves. 

Crammed into dark corners of his massive shelf are spinning tops, swirling metal sculptures with fish-bone pieces, crystal points, crystal grids, the sea green and brain-like raw malachite, blue spheres of sodalite, selenite wands, a glimmering fluorite skull, goldstone cats, an onyx dragon, a moonstone moon, a tigers eye sun, pearl necklaces, bracelets stacked on a wooden bell, metallic feathers, striped and golden feathers, bismuth blocks, rose quarts hearts, silver chains with silver timepieces, golden chains with sapphire circles, a metronome, a newton’s cradle with the planetary system, swirling goggles, and glowing projectors casting abstract shapes in rich colors across the ceiling. As for the table between them, it holds an incense cone burning in a teal dish, four shades of pink-ish candles, and a plate with his keys and loose change.

Facing him and ticking behind her is the third clock. It is rust-hued and carved with grape accents. As the bottle-opener hands wipe its glazed face, they never cease to point to a numbered glass of wine. Below this clock, a curling wine rack. Each bottle sits just about empty and the one that sits clasped in his hand was not an exception. The smell taints his breath, the red stains his teeth, and the ethanol slows his composure. Herself, she feels a warming of the chest. It has nothing to do with alcohol. Perhaps, it stems from the insects pinned on canvas below his desk or his incautious glare that makes her skin crawl and her heart tick.

She studies all these assets of the busy room while they wait in silence. He seems to be expecting her to break it, but she does not give in to the lingering invitation. She continues to look at the garish room. 

And the fourth clock, just barely worthy of note, is the most obscure of his clicking, rattling, swaying, spinning, buzzing, yapping, and plocking instruments. This clock’s pale face peeks out from under a starry tapestry behind a golden globe. Its pendulous tail swings low, sinking in and out of space. Gleaming from behind the cotton galaxy, like her stomach, it growls.

“Hallo,” he beckons with his hands up around him, introducing the stage of his conduction. She does not feel the need to peer around a second time, though is certain there are features of the busy room she brushed over. The space appears overwhelming enough without the clutter, the German showboat, and the familiar figure of the woman in her neighbor’s window hangs just behind her eyes. The sight is pinned up on the pink flesh beneath, though she stands a far drive away from her neighborhood. She is waiting for the right moment to bring that to focus, with little hope that this is the man for the job. The cold has brought a faint red to his nose and cheeks - and a puffiness to his jacket. He breathes heavily, as if his lungs are made of metal. He sits, an anticipant, eccentric robot.

“Chachi, no? You are mein 8:00 appointment?” She has yet to sit down in the fuzzy chair; she watches the ceiling projection, the hanging ornaments, and the bead strings running from tip to tip of each crooked nail jammed in the dark wallpaper. The way they jutted out, they resembled plump little flies. 

Each nod of his head and wave of his hand grows in firmness. Her silence stays with her wide eyes. The quiet draws out and the eyes draw out, in chorus together. When she finally complies to sit, she can not peel away her sour face: the wrinkle in the corner of her lips as she pulls in her cheek, the raised brow, the shifting eyes, and the rolled-in chin. It is only 7:45 and she clutches at the keys in her pocket.

“Something wrong, zweiflerisch frau?” he asks. Though she cannot see past his rose-tinted shades, she guesses what wrinkles and creases form underneath, following the pattern from the details drawing themselves around his mouth and his twitching nose. He is one bothered by her quiet.

“Zwifrish?… Froo?” she wonders aloud. It is the first words she’s said since she had gotten here, and they are gibberish. It did not sound like a name she would want to keep, the way he had spoken it. She crosses her legs, frowning, and then her arms. The chair eats her up, the feathery fluff tickling her face. The sewn-in shorts of her loose gray skort pinch at her crotch with the cushion’s give. Her boots are slick with rain, the fuzz sticking there. She sees them in the mirror, in the corner. It has a message in messy handwriting tucked in the frame: Zu leben und zu lieben. “Some hypnotism words?”

“I am just German, not a hypnotist. That is only part of my process, die hypnotisierung, if you’d like. Whatever helps settle your mind.” His chair squeaks as he leans back, grabbing the bulbous ends of the armrests. It had appeared static, and just as uncomfortable as her chair. Yet, as he reclines, the chair back unhinges to reveal springs at its base. He bobbles a bit. It suits him, as an animate inanimate human doll. He clenches a discomforted fist. “What I do, however, is very real. More real than anything, Chachi. What is fake is the concept of spinning a piece of jewelry and snapping one’s fingers and clicking and that. The circle is just a distraction for the eyes. Distracted people are only those who want to be distracted. To hypnotize is to willingly divert the mind’s interests.”

She is about to comment on the willing distraction that was his ‘office’ space. Yet, Chachi does not have the nerve and thinks it might waste time. It is 8:00, the time for her session to begin. What prevents this - what is most distracting - is the ticking. There are at least two sources of ticking: one being the metronome and the other belonging to one or a pair of clocks. It etches at her already fried nerves, driving her mad. Perhaps, given her new circumstances, mad is not such a good descriptor. From the lowest, nuttiest, part of her mind, she decided to seek out this man’s nutty methods, for her nutty mother’s sake. A whole cluster, bushel… barrel of basket cases, she understands it as. Now, where does this nut begin?

“Are you… certified?” she interrogated. He laughs, confused. 

“Excuse me?” His nose crinkles and he scratches his jaw with his thumb. It makes a sound like chalk.

“Soo.. what do you do? Do your very real thing. I need someone who can…” She is about to say ‘penetrate my mind,’ but that feels too invasive. She tugs at her hair, then clutches at her chest and rubs her arms. She is distraught, yes. The silence she creates, each awkward moment, gives her some piece of mind. His accented words and accentuated office are blinding - unwanted noise. Yet, her discomfort has most to do with the cold. This room, though flowing, hot, and heavy colors are streaming and glinting, can freeze the steam off a smokestack. “…help my brain not rot out my head.”

“Soo.. describe what needs help, simply. What’s rotting here?”

“Not enough time.” Chachi points back to the wine clock. It indicates that 8:12 is wine time, then 8:13 becomes wine time, 8:14, 15, etc. The German seems to follow this principle with every quiet moment, slipping the bottleneck down his throat. There are many.

“We have limited time now, perhaps not later. For now, bundle it all up. I’ll not promise to give you both the diagnosis and the cure, but I’m sure I can.” For ‘diagnosis,’ he points to various charts of anatomy - not all human anatomy - on the far right side of the black shelf. On ‘cure,’ he spins his palm up toward the shelf itself. “You can start where you’d like.” She pauses, breathes, sighs, clasps her hands, and begins to fill the silence well enough to suit his unease.

“My mom says I’m schizophrenic or something. I don’t want to agree, not all the symptoms seem to be there. I’m not paranoid. I’m not anxious. I take good care of myself. Up until just recently, I’ve been a normal functioning person.” She counts her fingers with each trait. The sweatered man shakes his head.

“Those aren’t direct symptoms of schizophrenia.”

“What?”

“They’re only common results of the effects of the disorder, symptoms of the symptoms. And you wouldn’t be ‘schizophrenic,’ you’d have schizophrenia. Might as well be professional.”

“Sorry,” she begins. She stops. “Wait, professional? You’re the professional here?”

“Obviously not, since you’ve so well researched the symptoms.” His smug, pudgy cheeks swell up. She makes today's dice roll of the brain. The basest part of the lowest base, the very drop of blood sitting square in the center of the bottom, tells her to stay for her mother’s sake. Sitting in the new silence he created, he tries to backpedal. “Like I said, I will give the diagnosis. Just explain, what is this problem? Talk me through your point of view. What’s going on with your head that doesn’t seem to fit right?” The woman appears in her mind, but she is saving her for later. First, context is needed. 

Pulling up the collar of her jacket, her necklace slips down the back of her wrinkled blouse. She slicks back her black, frizzy hair with her oily palms. She picks at the lint on her gray skort. It falls to the confetti carpet, blending right in. Batting her eyes against the projections, every flash of black clears her irritation and mops up all the intrusive shades of shapes into a dull gray liquid. She keeps them shut for a moment, a blank tarp covering the mess. 

“Well, there was one hallucination,” she puts up her index finger. “The other things are real. It’s like there’s certain people, they’re not very real to me. My friends and family tell me they are, but they don’t even seem positive about it either. It’s like… all at once there’s all these new faces. I’ll just run through them I guess.” She shudders. The German sits with his ears perked, smiling slightly. She does not understand his devilish smile.

“The old man who lives down the street, his wife died. I’m positive. She was dead. Now, she’s back. He’s like… pretending to be happy. I don’t see him that often and I don’t know him that well, but I knew his wife. She was gone and now she’s back. So everyone… and this is how it is for everything, but we’ll get there. So they all say, ‘Oh she looks similar, but she doesn’t look exactly the same’, ‘Mrs. Dawson didn’t have that mole there,’ or ‘He’s happy, let it be. I think it’s coincidental too, but what are you going to do, accuse the man of being Frankenstein?’ That one was my Mom.

“So there’s new Mrs. Dawson, then there’s my friend Hendrick. He looks.. well, he’s no looker. Well, he knows that, you know? He doesn’t try too hard. Anyways, he got a hot new girlfriend, I mean killer good looks - she looks just like that actress, Ana de Armas? Know her?” The German nods no. He is ignored.

“To. A. T. Ana. de. Armas. They go out, and they get stopped in places all the time for photos. And this girl, this gorgeous girl, she handles it so poorly, almost like an infant. The new Mrs. Dawson too, she doesn’t talk - not like the old Mrs. Dawnson who was a huge chatterbox. New her just has a blank face. Both of them do. Actually.. now that I think about it, it isn’t just Hedrick. No, there’s for sure more people I know who are dating these new gorgeous people. The thing though, I’ve never ever seen these pretty new people alone. It’s always them arm in arm.

“A lot of people too, have been getting back together with their exes. That’s not really that strange, I guess. But the other things, those are strange. As I said, those things are weird. They don’t come close to what I saw the other day. This was the hallucination. That part, there I was, on my front porch,”

“Quite the storyteller.” 

“..ON THE PORCH. I felt someone watching me. Felt that, looked around and saw someone in my neighbor’s window. I haven’t seen the neighbor in a while, by the way. Well, this person was not my neighbor. They were pale, with messy black hair, bruises and marks all over their face and their neck and their shoulders, and they had chapped, bleeding lips. It was me. I saw myself all beat up and naked in my neighbor’s attic.”

The hypnotist leans in, nodding his head as if finally confirming something. His chair back bounces behind him as the springs are released. He has one elbow piqued on his knee and the other on the ankle atop the other knee. His black sweater has a feathery quality, like her chair. His face is a prideful toddler’s. Again, the strange smile.

“I made that,” he announces. She shakes her head and mouthes, ‘Huh?’ The words can barely hiss from between her lips. Only her breath escapes her. “I remember your neighbor coming in.”

It is her turn to stop and listen. He gets up and goes over to his posters. When he rolls them up, he reveals two enclaves in the wall. They hold buckets. He brings them over, sloshing.

“I got them from that well in the park. They’re frog eggs. From my many treatments, I’ve learned the best thing to take a person’s mind off something is someone - a school crush, a celebrity, an ex, a dead spouse, a neighbor. I take these budding frogs and turn them into little someones. They’re very much real people, the way I do it. The egg is only for structure. You can see in the other bucket, the pretty little eyes growing?” She rolls off her chair, hands and knees on the floor. She crawls back, then rears up against the wall. Standing, she peers back into the frog buckets. They did not look like regular frog eggs - they were far larger and pinker.

“Crazy bitch,” Chachi says quietly, not entirely sure this whole ordeal was not another hallucination. It is a dream, too, possibly. Or, life before this was a dream. He cackles a calm but eccentric pastor laugh. It is a laugh for an audience, one she did not want to be a part of.

“I’m just the wizard of love.” He shrugs, still grinning. She laughs. Though the laughter was a slip, she makes no effort to correct it. It could have been quieter.

“And I’m the duchess of common sense,” she jokes. It only seems to amuse herself. 

“Well, duchess, it sounds like you’ve been caught up in the past - can’t wrap your head around my work. I’m setting a new era in place, du weisst. You’ll find that love is freer, freier liege.”

“You’ll find that this is my last appointment,” she announces, proudly smoothing her clorhes. He makes a hmph.

“Like I said, some people just aren’t willing to accept change.”

“Some things shouldn’t change. Death, for example.” She shutters, thinking of the old man’s new frog wife.

“Before you go, tell me, what is something you love but you can’t have?” The big sales pitch. She thinks maybe he can hypnotize her into forgetting about everything. She could distract herself from the crumbling world and feel some sort of big, deep love. Still feeling sly, she chuckled.

“Heaven.”

Pre-Mortem - August 13, 9:00 PM

Thunder cracks down on the road with its dark, puffy fists. These dark hands appear primed to strike. They reach across every corner of the newly nighted sky. They drip down their sweat. Mother Nature, the blessed queen, rages at the hubris of her boldest creation.

Brick by brick, the white lines stack under Chachi’s hood, and each passing reflector rod jutting along the road blinks away. Each passing mass stays and clutters her mind, stacking in mental photos framed by the teary window. In her discordant brain piles clouds, tarmac, lines, rods, trees, and leaves - all framing the outrageous face of her ‘therapist.’ 

The unsaturated bark of mossy trees flash by. Their bright branches reach high, shining leaves soaring through every spoke, every moment. White lines of rain outspeak the quiet dark. She slouches with one hand on the wheel despite her own anticipation, folds in her bottom lip, and waits for her mother to pick up. 

Dududududu, dududududu. The bumbling phone rests snugly in the crease of the passenger cushion. The vibrations and desperate buzzing are eaten quickly into the fabric. The cushion placates its mechanic voice. Every piece of the scene calls out for her attention, including the other noisy machine in front of her. 

Like the many gutted bodies that plaster themselves across her cracked windscreen, there is another annoying bug flying down the freeway. Unlike the insect paste, this one is a car-bug and its shiny metal ass takes up the bulk of her windscreen. 

“What you need is a little love-tap,” she whispers, her mind daring her feet to press just an increment further. They don’t. 

As she comes up close on the left lane, the buggy veers in front of her to pass a semi. She pauses with her hand overlapping the horn. Though her whole body feels heavy, there isn’t enough force in her wrist to dig in. The bug flies free, slowly overtaking the big metal trailer with a stupid green logo, then losing progress, then gaining again. 

They bug and the semi wrestle back and forth until the loose-strap trailer looms beside her. The rear farings are cracked open. Inside, there is nothing but the hollow echo of the wind. Strange enough, the only cargo seems to be ratchet-strapped to the trailer top. The strap ends whip behind the semi. Strings of lightning thread down behind them. They are yellow, old, and gnarled from age and wear. They remind her of someone. ‘I’m coming home soon, mama,’ she promises.

The bug seems to be at a standstill with the 18-wheeler. She wants to lean out and smack it out of the way. It is a small enough car that a big enough gust might take care of the issue. The truck’s hazard lights flash on. 

“Great.”

The radio shows her that twelve minutes had passed since her ‘therapy’ session: 9:12 PM. It stays silent. It needs to be; everything had been set today to clamor - her ears, the freeway, her phone, the cars, her mind, and his words. That mad ‘therapist.’ They blare like alarms, set by a cruel and unusual universe. His words principally echoed in the swimming cavity of her thrumming head. The da-dum da-dum was made worse by the grumbling and flashing sky conducting the orchestra of catastrophe.

Another truck strap hangs down. No, the same strap, cut. It dangles - an instant so thin Chachi doesn’t have time to notice. She sneaks closer to the little bug, right up on its rear. The buggy decides then that it should slow down. Now, Chachi's horn comes into play. Her 2012 Nissan Versa bleats like a lamb. It is not very effective. 

Something pounds on the roof. The metal thud gives her a near heart attack. Gasping, she clutches both hands on the wheel, sitting upright and alert. Her eyes scan everything anew - the phone ringing, the wind, the sky, the bug, the semi, white lines, white stripes, reflector rods, tree trunks, spiraling leaves, and her own car hood. Tree branch?

Then, a new substance encroaches past her windshield. Short, wet tendrils of hair hover down. It’s curly and dark. Two yellow eyes peeked over, encroached in the shadow of her headlights. A dark face in the center of her screen. Once the pupils glimpse her contorted face, they dilate and the lids peels back wide. 

A bumpy hand’s muddy nails lash down right at her head. A new crack streaks across the glass; lightning cracks. The buggy and the semi drive on into the storm, torn out of her sight. She stomps down hard on the breaks, screaming. In no time at all, Chachi is swallowed up by an overpass beam. Her Nissan accordions in. Her face smashes into her dash. Bones rip through her legs and arms. 

Post-Mortem - August 13, 9:32 PM

Under the bridge, a thick, bodily paint drips. The DIY graffiti is submerged far down in the dirt trench; no one passing can catch the scene until dawn breaks. The body rests there.

She is spat back out into the office from which she came, disembodied. The soul appears in the door frame, caught between the invisible walls of the office and the night air. The wizard waits there. He holds an egg bucket in one hand and his emptied wine in the other. The other eggs are back in the enclave. 

As soon as he sees her iridescent shadow, he finds its tail at the base of the door where it is trapped. Catching it in his hand, he feeds it into the brown glass bottle like rope. It appears to her as laborious, the weight of her - the way he was heaving. 

It takes a while to set in and wring herself out of a frozen state. This new no-body space has a different system of operations. She does not feel like she had before, the senses are entirely arbitrary. Looming above him as he coaches and hauls her out, she understands the pull on her lower half and sees herself sinking, but she has lost the sensation of his hands clasping around her and the stink of the incense. The room is darker. The edges of objects are looser. The world melts into itself and things unknown to her float in and out of each surface and each strange artifact. Possession overtakes the office. 

The thought strikes her mind to resist her possession of the bottle. If she possesses it, it no less would possess her. And what good is being bottled up by some love guru?

“The nerve!” she shouts. Her old voice is not there, but a haunting screech barrels from everywhere. For a second, he covers his ears with one hand and his shoulder. He doesn’t let go of the amorphous form. In fact, he clenches tighter as he grits his teeth. Her voice is no longer suspended behind her throat; it carries as loud as she wishes, everywhere. Yet, as he crams the very top of her into the bottle and caps it off quickly and expertly, the voice becomes caught in the glass and only shakes the bottle. It is suppressed.

“I need you to focus on your breathing… is what I usually say.” He grins. Chachi shakes in her wine bottle. She is getting very tired of that sick smile he has. 

He clutches the thin neck tighter than before. She, the new wine, pushes against the cork. He carries her to the back of the room and sets her on the side table by the shelf. Every other surface is covered in objects where other terrible creatures spin and weave in and out of them.

Sighing, the audacious man stands up straight and tall, adjusting his cravat. He puffs up like a feathered bird breast and begins his squawking.

“Your desire, miss, coats the seed that I dip into the ovvum.”

“Gross,” she says. 

“… and as it grows, your spirit is consumed by the egg. Since your desire was so morbid, it didn’t have much time to grow. I’m sorry, it must have looked a bit frightening, armes lamm. Now you’re in a rather… let’s say… precarious, no, delicate state. Your soul, es versteht sich von selbst - er, it goes without saying, it is payment for our session.”

The glass is so close. It pulls on her, contorting her figure that now yearns to stretch and spread infinitely. She had been a door, then a rope he had molded, and now a bottle. The possibilities are all she can think of. Yes, at first she’d missed her old body, on sudden impact. No use crying over spilt blood. Now, there is a pronounced buzzing overtaking her like radium. It is unstable and glorious. It feels like she is being continuously squished, over and over packed together like a snowball.

“Your soul inscription, you gave it up in exchange for your true desire,” he says. “Fluchtgeist, Phantom der Angst und Visionen, Kopf ohne Leichtigkeit.”

As she hears it, she feels a sharp pang. Human feels, not this new kind of sensation. It takes her back for a passing moment.

“I didn’t tell you my spirit name or whatever. Besides, that wasn’t even a REAL ANSWER I gave you, dipshit!” she yells, muffled. She slams and ricochets across the glass. It stinks of vermouth, but she cannot smell that. As she writhes, the smell becomes overwhelming and putrid. The wizard covers his nose. It is the smell of rot and death that she still carries.

He stares, drunk and exhausted. His face is damp and red. While he watches, he waits for her soul to settle and the stink to ease. Clasping his fingers together, he rests his chin on the holy table, his hat leaning with him - brim on the cork. 

“You perhaps convinced yourself you’d made a clever joke, lästige seele - you troubled soul. There is no joke, no. Deep inside you, you’ve yearned for death as your reality shatters before you - as my reality settles. I could see that. I could see many things too, not just what you’ve said to me. Yes, I saw that ‘better place’ you’ve dreamt of for a very long time. But heaven doesn’t exist, so your frog prince gave a ‘different place,’ so to say.” He slid the rosary into the crease of his fingers, letting the glass beads catch the light and speckle the glossed wood with glistening, glowing blue. Mother Mary’s tears were caught in the polished sheen and reflected across Chachi’s sepia prison. A fake saint weeping? No, perhaps heaven was just beyond the glass.

“Wh..” Was he right? Had she wanted the heaven in that way? Of course, she is filled with grief, loneliness, desperation, stress, and a fierce fear of the changing world. Her only friend, her mother, lacks any sense. What person would not have the passing desire for a new start. And the skies, so peaceful and still and beautiful. She is now a similar matter-base. Her new body is air, filling any space presented: the woody cracks of the door, the space between his hands, and the bottle. Though she didn’t expect death to be the vehicle, here it sits: her final destination. 

“Calm yourself,” he requests gently, letting his wrist pivot back and forth. The glass beads sway across her new, many eyes. They fill her space, drowning her full vision. The countless eyes water. “Our little frog fulfilled your skyward journey, mein liebling dear. He died in the crash too. We’ve all made sacrifices to have you this way, as you wanted. Think of your poor mother…”

“Mother,” she says. It is her new voice’s first calm tone. How could she forget her mother so easily? The phone was ringing only a short while before. The phone, the car, her body, and her mother. They were now all things lost to her. ‘And what has been gained here,’ she wonders.

“Well.” He seems distressed now, standing back upright against the shelf. “I don’t want a client unhappy. There are many unsatisfied with my creatures’ deeds. Your neighbor… Well, anyway, this is not so reversible. I can at least cure the quality of your spirit. Right now, it is very unstable… and putrid, mist! Even in this form, all I want for you is joy.”

“Do you? Joy?”

“Yes.” He puts his hand over his heart while slowly letting the rosary beads cascade and wrap around the bottle, like a bind.

“Be at peace, little spirit, your very nature compels you to do so. If you cannot make your own peace, you might lose yourself to a baser form.. and seek out those familiar to you, for better or for worse. Look at those around you, warped into fiends their mind creates.” 

“What does it mean to be at peace? Do I dissipate and go away?”

“More like,” he starts to explain, clasping his hands together once more and blinking rapidly. The gear turns slowly for him. “…you disseminate into everything. You are not turning into nothing, as you might think. You are contributing yourself to a whole collective of knowledge, mass, horror, and beauty. When you give yourself up to the universe - the ‘heavens,’ as you have requested and fulfilled, you gain everything.”

“What then? What can I do?”

“You do everything, are everything.”

“Everything,” she contemplated, lost in his promising words. It sounded both terrorizing, tremendous, and very ridiculous. Though it sounded insane, that pressure she was feeling, the weight of the bottle, was so strong that she did feel like she could expand forever, over and into everything. 

“What about the others?” she asked. He looked around.

“Hmmn.. oh the others,” he shuddered. "You can see them can’t you. I’ve caught glimpses when I’m conducting my summons. They are horrible to look at.”

“They are everywhere. You’ve got quite the collection.”

“Are they? That is no good, I’ve upset them, arme dinger…”

“No, they don’t care about you any more than I do,” she laughs. It is very presumptuous of him to call them horrible when they float about, minding their own business. More than likely, it was he who trapped them. He ignores her insult. 

“You feel it, can’t you?” he asks. The feeling builds with his words.

“The bottle?” The cold, strong-smelling thing envelopes her existence.

“No, everything besides the bottle.”

“Yes. I want it. I want to break the bottle.”

“Yes, focus on that. Focus on the glass breaking, the whole of everything at your fingertips, er, the extremities of you.” 

Centering her weight, she tries contracting herself even further, smaller than the bottle. If she has room to wiggle and bounce about, there is room to shrink. It doesn’t lessen all at once, it thins out on this side, that side, and here and there. It churns and bubbles. She floats still in the center of the bottle, no larger than a cheese cube. It’s obvious the wizard is trying to seal her in her mind, but what about his mind?

Many little beads are floating about it, beads of worry. They are not as clear as the phantoms about her, but the mists of them are prominent. Yes, he is concerned. If she escapes, she might come after him. No wonder he had been so meticulous with his work, and now so professional and relaxing with his sweet and inspiring words. Though, if what he said was not true, she would die all over again. It was too enticing. 

“Good! You’ve shrunk. You can manipulate yourself. Make whatever shape you want. Concentrate on the shapes and the spirits surrounding you. Look at them as examples.”

“Ah yes, the horrific monsters. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I find it surprising that you can see me clearly but not them? Are you, perhaps, trying to disregard your accountability?”

He laughs, and yet the misty beads of unease are blooming all about his head and his stupid hat. His smile is not there, and her robbing of it gives her no lack of satisfaction. A budding frown begins on the great wizard of frogs as her shape shifts into a corkscrew. 

“Viola!” 

References

(n.d.) Hypnosis. Mayo Clinic. https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/hypnosis/about/pac-20394405#:~:text=Overview,verbal%20repetition%20and%20mental%20images.

Izquierdo de Santiago, A. & Khan, M. (2007). Hypnosis for schizophrenia. The Cochrane database of systematic reviews, 4(1), CD004160. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD004160.pub3

Pyun Y. D. (2013). The effective use of hypnosis in schizophrenia: structure and strategy. The International journal of clinical and experimental hypnosis, 61(4), 388–400. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207144.2013.815059

Notes & Quotes

(Mayo Clinic, n.d.) 

• “Hypnosis is a changed state of awareness and increased relaxation that allows for improved focus and concentration.”
• “Hypnosis usually is done with the guidance of a health care provider using verbal repetition and mental images. During hypnosis, most people feel calm and relaxed. Hypnosis typically makes people more open to suggestions about behavior changes. Hypnosis can help you gain control over behaviors you'd like to change.
• “Although you're more open to suggestion during hypnosis, you don't lose control over your behavior during a hypnosis session.”
• “Harmful reactions to hypnosis are rare, but they may include: • Dizziness. • Headache. • Nausea. • Drowsiness. • Anxiety or distress. • Sleep problems.”
• “the provider typically begins by talking in a gentle, soothing tone, describing images that create a sense of relaxation, security and well-being. When you're relaxed and calm, your health care provider suggests ways for you to achieve your goals. That may include, for example, ways to ease pain or reduce cravings to smoke. The provider also may help you visualize vivid, meaningful mental images of yourself accomplishing your goals.”

(Izquierdo, 2007)

• “Schizophrenia[…] can also cause social withdrawal.”
• “no conclusive evidence that hypnosis was better than the other interventions. Very few people left the trials suggesting that hypnosis, relaxation and listening to classical music (Sibelius) were at least acceptable interventions.”

(Pyun, 2013)

• “Hypnotherapeutic methods such as direct and indirect suggestions, psycho-strengthening suggestions and imagery, hypnoprojective restructuring, guidance, and neutralization of affect associated with delusions have been effective in selected highly hypnotizable patients.”