The girls, uncomfortable in their starched white Sunday dresses, sat on uncomfortable folding chairs in the front row of a large room that was full of other uncomfortable folding chairs, and filled with gray-haired old ladies who wore pretty floral print dresses with too much lace.

The smell of mothballs was everywhere. At the front of the room stood Miss Ida, reciting a poem...

"'Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took, and each doth good turns now unto the other;" Miss Ida strolled over to the podium with a book in hand, wearing her blue chiffon dress and a hat garnished with an unlikely stalk of two purplish looking cherries which bobbed hypnotically in the air as she spoke.

The girls sat uncomfortably, arms hanging limply, eyes glazed, slowly fading into the dreaded death-by-boredom.

"I would rather have been hung," whispered Kay.

"When that mine eye is famished for a look, Or heart in love with sighs himself doth smother," continued Miss Ida.

"Smother!" whispered Carol to Mary.

"Sshhh!" said Mary.

"With my love's picture then my eye doth feast, And to the painted banquet bids my heart," recited Miss Ida.

The other women smiled, listened, and worked on needlepoint. This was the social event of the week.

Olivia stared at Miss Ida, the glaze in her eyes beginning to recede, replaced by an icy dread, as she watched Miss Ida the doppelgänger, become a monstrous, tentacled blob in blue chiffon, wearing a pretty little hat wedged between the bulging eye stalks that waved about on her head.

"Another time mine eye's my heart's guest, And in his thought of love doth share apart."

Olivia watched as one of Miss Ida's slithering tentacles reached over to the book, and gracefully turned the page...