Two weeks of calm followed. She sat quietly in her sessions and seemed to want to cooperate. For some time she even accepted that her friends and the boy she loved were dead, though she continued to claim no knowledge of how this happened. The doctor moved her into music and art therapy and had hopes for a change.
After the darkness of a new moon they all saw it again. The agitation, the pacing and talking to herself at night, the way her eyes always moved to watch the moon. She ceased cooperating with her sessions. Music therapy ended abruptly when she slammed the lid of the piano down, nearly taking off the fingers of the player. Her art consisted of symbols painted in different colors, always blue, gold, red, and green. The art therapist had watched in silent shock after the girl had spent nearly an hour tracing a thin crescent in dark gold paint. Suddenly she had turned the paper over so that the whole thing was upside down. She bothered with no brush as she plunged one hand into black paint and smeared it over the inverted crescent.
Then she had grasped the paper in both hands and tore it in half. The pieces she shredded, over and over, while sobs wracked her entire body. When the therapist had stepped towards her, hands out and soothing, she pushed the woman fiercely away. As no one could do anything but watch she sank to her knees amongst the scraps of paper, wrapping her arms over her stomach as she whispered a desperate apology.
"My small lady…oh, my small lady, I'm so sorry!"
Dr. Naboru never learned who "small lady" meant. That session she offered nothing but silence and slow tears.
A full moon rose that night, and she began to scream again.
