Tangled in images and feelings, Allison’s mind reels at the dissolution of her family identity. Who she was, who she came from – lies. Everyone she trusted had lied to her. Her father didn’t love her enough to tell her. But he couldn’t tell her because he loved her!
   So much confusion and humiliation. She aches, trapped by questions. ‘Do I confront Mom? I can’t pretend … like it matters! Everything’s a lie. How can I face my family after this?’
   And most revolting, it doesn’t make a difference what she does with these emotions. It won’t change the facts. And she knew, she knew! Her subconscious or that ghost or both had told her.
   ‘All the signs were there! I spend years learning to breathe, learning to be unattached, learning serenity. All I learned was how to be clueless!’
   Another voice, from the dream, arises, ‘The path of enlightenment is braved, not paved.’
   She’s dumbstruck, then groans aloud, “Now I’m hearing voices too?!”
   She’s so disgusted with her naiveté she literally gets sick. Running down the hall to the laundry room, she retches in the sink. Her stomach empties, her abdomen wracked, then she dry heaves, until she collapses to the hard concrete floor. The coldness of it is the only tranquility.
   She has nothing more to fight with. Her mind rejects this new reality outright. Allison sees herself on the floor. She can feel distantly the cold on her cheek, but then her awareness shifts.

   Spiraling steps down a DNA chain to the beginning. Suspended in the depths of my insides, the stranger in me, down. The doctor waits for my long descent. Each step, through animal evolution, down – aquatic, embryonic, bacterial self, to a single cell.
   Living elements maintain my form. The doctor, with his totems, has the medicine of all the animals. Dog, cat, bird, down. Fish, conch, amoeba, down.
   I am an egg, just a seed. My first cells divide. Conscious, unconscious, and the unknown. Soon I will be grown. I share my nest with two other eggs. One a golden white, the other striped blue and black. They hatch spirits who only look like birds. One is a motorcycle nomad sweetheart and the other, a mad dog, rabid with insight. They push me out of the nest, to the cold and lonely ground, cracked. They crawl back into their eggs, unbroken.
   ‘How can I live, born into the world like this?’
   The dream voice asks, ‘Let the universe unfold before you, what do you see? Blind to all but a mirror in your very center. Are they reflections of you or me? From absorbed rays, every-color-but, light’s delay. The difference between your skin and your substance becomes distinct. Here, inside all prospected outsides, all you have is –’
   Allison inserts, ‘Instinct.’
   ‘You give it a name, yet you are so far from … instinct.’
   ‘Who are you?’
   ‘Who are you? That body on the floor? The sentience that hears me? The girl who didn’t know, or the woman who does?’
   ‘You’re not Dan.’
   The voice sounds ambivalent, ‘I don’t think so.’
   ‘Are you the White Maiden? You are a ghost, aren’t you?’
   ‘A ghost?’
   ‘The soul of someone that died. Did you die?’
   ‘Probably.’
   ‘You’re not sure?’
   ‘I don’t remember.’
   ‘How could you not remember?’
   ‘We can be so much more than the shell of what we once were.’
   ‘Then what are you?’
   ‘Like a hunter, you stalk me and learn to see, but I don’t know if you’re ready to see the real me.’
   ‘I wasn’t stalking you. I was looking for – for Dan.’
   ‘The one who fathered you, the one you left in the ground.’
   ‘Yes. So how did I find you instead?’
   ‘Whenever you give up that thing you call a mind, it is me that you find.’

   She’s sucked down into physical sensation, pulled into her body in a heartbeat. Traumatized again, chilled by more than the concrete floor, she peers up at the ceiling.
   “Astral projection? A conversation with a ghost? Clearly crazy.”
   Getting up, she stumbles. Her foot’s gone numb. She leans against the sink, kicking the air to get feeling back in her leg. Turning the water on, she lets it wash through her hands and wash away her sick. Drinking in slurps, she feels the cleansing liquid flow through her.
   She shuts the tap. The water furls down the drain as the water in her funnels to her gut – to this enigma in her memory, in her blood, in her being. It is there, but has no location. Beyond names, objects, boundaries, she feels it, but cannot hold it. Instinct.
   Acting on her feeble sense of this inner drive, she goes upstairs, into the kitchen, the sunrise hinting at arrival. The full house is quiet as a mouse. She opens drawers and cabinets until she gets what she needs. Sitting at the table, she butters some crackers and eats, sniffing the air like a new animal.

   ‘Deep inside, denied the right mind, another creature, another name. Egress through regress, eyeless opening finds, a soul sold fetching to primal tame. Knowing this you that can’t be civilized, your survival is realized.’