I asked Marlene to picture the day her ex broke her nose and waved the wash out wand across the base of her skull. Her light hair fanned out around her head on the pillow as the ultraviolet waves penetrated her Hippocampus, where external event memories were thought to be stored. Prone, she recalled images of Freud and his ladies from early psych textbooks. Or, perhaps darker, if she slipped from the pillow to hang off the edge, someone would have mistaken her for a modern day pictorial of Fuseli’s Nightmare.

I sat close enough to her that I smelled her lilac perfume. Noticed an undercurrent of sweat, like onions.

Some consultant–likely worth a cool million–had advised the Bureau for Tragedy Exchange to structure their offices like therapists’ rooms rather than a doctor’s office. But they hadn’t sprung for leather couches and personal library collections, so we were stuck with teal IKEA couches and shelves with cardboard backing that held empty books, the spindled feet set on synthetic hardwood. Every time Marlene shifted on the couch, it crinkled loudly. At least the walls were a gentle taupe instead of hospital white.

The look and feel supposedly made getting rid of trauma easier, but I wasn’t so sure. Especially not ones with physical associations like Marlene’s. She had to see her nose every day, how it healed around the break, and pulling out all tendrils of this particular incident was tough work. Sometimes, I wasn’t sure the Exchange was up for it, but she was in too deep now. Once the treatment began, she couldn’t receive cash compensation, so she was motivated to see it through to the end. Mostly so, maybe, one day she could sleep again.

Her eyelids twitched as I brought the bleach light over the right-hand side by her temple. Blue veins mapped an interstate across her thin skin. The wand gave off a faint buzz. I hummed along.

The monitor at my desk blinked with the image of Marlene’s cortex, zooming in as the wand did its work. I watched the memory particles, small floating amoebas, pop and burst like enemy ships on a video game. I hoped, as I did with all my patients, that she wasn’t letting her mind drift.

We’d destroyed precious things by accident before.

When we were done, she rested in corpse pose on the couch so she didn’t fall over as she rose. I booked her weekly appointment. Always Thursdays.

“You good?” I asked.

“Yup,” her voice was weak and small. Gently, I helped her up to stand and led her to the door before motioning to the exit. Cassandra leaned casually–too casually–against the wall across from my office, but I ignored her. Cassandra waiting outside for you when an appointment wasn’t fully closed was normally a problem.

I focused on Marlene instead. The muscles in her face had relaxed, showing the divots of her laugh lines and the crackle of wrinkles across her forehead. The bump at the bridge of her nose. Her pupils, the ones previously hidden by her pale lids, had an unfocused quality.

“Have you tried covering up the mirrors? At least until we get somewhere?” I said.

“Not a bad idea,” she said. Which meant she hadn’t listened to me last time.

“Remember, don’t drive for the next hour and I’ll see you next Thursday,” I said.

“Thanks, Yvonne,” she said and headed toward the exit.

Patients never left the way they came in and often, unless you searched it out, you wouldn’t know a building was a Bureau for Trauma Exchange unless you requested an appointment. Of the two, I loved the disguised exit far more. It took folks through the back of the building and into a closed flower shop. As much as we liked to pretend it wasn’t the case, there was still stigma for seeking out the Bureau. It marked a person. The worst were people who sniffed at the work we did and called it ‘a hand out’ or worse, ‘woke welfare’. Not something the traumatized deserved for the horrors they’d endured.

“New intake for you,” Cassandra said. She had crossed the floor between us and leaned over my door jam, a brown file in hand

“Why can’t Becky take her?” I asked. “This is my only break today.”

“Not her specialty,” Cassandra said.

I rolled my eyes. “We both know that’s bullshit.” It wasn’t like we were the ear, nose, and throat guys.

“I think you’d find this one interesting. It’s a bit of a sensitive case,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. Sensitive was in our contract. Sensitive was what we dealt in every day.

“They’re from Lockland Correctional.”

My jaw dropped. Cassandra smirked. I’d vaguely followed the bill on my morning political podcast that had recently classified intake and exchange as a necessary medical procedure and, with prisoners, you weren’t supposed to withhold needed healthcare. They were people, though I’d noticed society did everything they could to tell us otherwise.

“What they in for?” I asked.

Maybe Cassandra was right. This was interesting. Maybe too interesting. Especially to someone whose life was all picture books about talking rabbits for my daughter, Tallulah, and large iced coffee with almond milk, please to the same cute barista at Blue Bottle who never remembered my name. And true crime documentaries, so many true crime documentaries, especially the ones about Mormons, that kept me up at night.

“Just treatment. No talk therapy,” Cassandra said.

Always push treatment first before compensation, they’d told us. If someone hadn’t been around when the Bureaus were first established, they might have mistaken the thirty-second ads of readjusted people playing on water-sucking lawns for government propaganda about antidepressants.

You’re entitled to another shot at life after trauma. You deserve a life free of the memories holding you back, the very white people in the very white commercials said, even though, statistically, trauma disproportionately impacted minorities and those in lower socio-economic groups.

But clearly, that wasn’t an option.