Michelle kicked the covers off her body as she thrashed around the bed. Her sweet dreams had morphed into a horrible nightmare. Darkness slashed through the fairy-tale images she happily dwelled on in her sleep. The smile on Sebastian’s face turned into revulsion as he looked at her. He dropped his hands from her body, too disgusted to keep touching her, kissing her. Point of no return. She was changing into an animal. She couldn’t stop the transformation. Couldn’t bear to see the abhorrence in his eyes. She ran away from him…on four legs. Michelle sprang from the bed. She looked at her hands and feet and sighed in relief as she lowered herself back down onto the pillow. She scrubbed her face with both her hands and tried to shake the doom crowding out her coherence. But her memory kept playing snippets of information past her mind. She let her thoughts flow and pieced together her dream only to realize she hadn’t been dreaming at all. The images in her sleep had been a simulated reenactment of a conversation she had overheard in her conscious state, the one she could still hear coming from Sebastian and her aunts.
