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The little girl across the reception counter–which is the rather grandiose name given to the rickety antique table serving as a desk in the front room–is rocking back and forth on her heels, nervously chewing a thumbnail on one hand while the other clings tightly to her mother’s slacks. The Surgeon is turning her rabbit over in her hands. It has faux, plasticky velvet inside its ears with the flocking worn quite thin–gone in some places–and a gingham bow around its neck that had once been a shiny nylon and was now a mass of unraveling strings, fuzzed up like gathered cobwebs at the ends of the dangling ribbons. This is her usual intake procedure. She assesses the patient’s wounds and ailments, and soon, Cradle knows, will pronounce her recommended course of treatment and the prognosis. The prognosis is always very good. “And what happened here?” asks the Surgeon, lifting one forlorn ear. The sun from the shop windows comes through it like a bullethole in a saloon wall, and the girl

Later on, when thoughts and ideas are shaping themselves into the firmness of words rather than nebulous impulses, she will learn the word aesthete. She likes the word. It becomes one of her favorites, because it can be applied to herself. There is no topic she enjoys more than herself. But she does not know it yet, and cannot sort her thoughts into anything like order: there is only a swirling, horrific chaos of instinct and sensation and ideas; a flower opening and unfurling two dozen hidden petals from some unknown bud, drinking in light. For a moment it terrifies her and she crouches, newly-made, her now-enormous arms wrapped around the branch that bends under her sudden presence. Moments before she had been able to perch, albeit somewhat uncomfortably, on Ikkit’s head. The Esk now gazes at her from between her three-fingered hands, his head tipped back and back to observe his creation looming over him. “Hello,” he says, but she does not answer. The forest roars. She has