The Strange Case of Christine Hodge’s Pica

Around the first indication of seasonal change — in this case, a stronger than usual wave issuing through Y-shaped weeds on the Academy lawn — Christine became able to put her strange feeling into words.  Doctor Frankland agreed to conduct their session outdoors, conceding that the summer had been too boilingly peevish to allow even the stroll beneath oaks and evergreens she’d asked him for several times, with so little variation in her tone of voice.  Now, they spread a lilac-and-white checkered blanket on the ground just before an unruly hump of grass that gave way, on its other side, to a downward coast that tumbled eventually into the Academy’s fence.

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