Something has haunted Alice’s dreams as of late. It is a shadow of a wisp of a man. It is long and pale, jutting from the darkness of sleep like bones from the sludge of an exhumed and ancient grave. It has no face, besides a toothful grimacing grin around which there are no lips. It looks like a victim of some horrible illness, illness that cannibalizes one from the inside until there is nothing left but a frame stretched with ashen leather: a kind of invisibility.

Alice would know. She had seen such a thing very recently. Perhaps it is simply the memory of that visage that haunts her, speaks to her and paralyzes her with a dread incongruent with the perpetual grin into which it has atrophied. She is a stranger to academics, let alone psychoanalysis, but she knows there exists an Interpretation of Dreams: “The dream is the liberation of the spirit… a detachment of the soul from the fetters of matter.” 

She hopes that means something different from what she suspects.