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Night after night, Kraus dreamt of a woman with a normal leg and a baby leg. In the dream, she clomped about on her adult-sized knee and the baby leg, wielding an axe, lurching. He kept watching her pass, yawing with each step. He would hear her first, the thud of the knee and the soft slap of the baby foot, and then see her come by, slow and off-kilter, the sound of her slowly fading. He couldn't move, not even his eyes. He had to lie there, listening to his own breathing, until he heard her coming back. She kept coming and going, until finally, shaken, he managed to wake up.His eyes during these days grew more and more hollow, as if he weren't sleeping at all. He stared at his face in the mirror, at the angry scar in the center of his forehead which, when he had first arrived, had been a bleeding gash. He rubbed at his eyesockets, wondered if perhaps it would be better not to sleep at all.He turned on the faucet with his remaining hand, then dipped his stump in water and rubbed it all over his face. Then he took a drink and went back to bed.Most nights he just lay there, staring up at the ceiling, nodding in and out, waiting for dawn to arrive. When it grew pale outside, he stumbled out of bed and sat near the window, staring out into the woods until full light.The worst nights, though, after an hour or two he fell back asleep and there she was again, clomping and lurching, axe in hand.
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