There was a woman who could take a belief out of a person as cleanly as a physician draws a splinter. She did not advertise this. Those who needed her found their way to her door.
She charged nothing. She asked only that you tell her the belief you wanted removed and why you wanted it gone. She said the why was not a condition but a practice: people who could not say why were rarely ready. Most came back a second time able to answer. Some came back a third time with a different belief entirely, which she found instructive.
The beliefs she removed she kept in a room at the back of the house. She did not destroy them. She catalogued them. Over twenty years the catalogue ran to four volumes. The room was full. She did not find this troubling. She had seen what people carried in and watched them walk out lighter, and the weight had to go somewhere, and she was willing to be where it went.
In her forty-seventh year she began a fifth volume for herself. She had seen enough by then to believe that no practitioner should do work she was unwilling to accept on her own terms. She set herself the same conditions she gave everyone: state the belief, state the reason.
She worked through the fifth volume slowly. Forty-one entries over eleven years. The last entry was made in a different hand. A neighbor found her at the desk and wrote it down at her instruction.
The entry reads: removed: the belief that the room at the back contained anything of value.
Below it, in her own handwriting, she had added: notes: the door is open now.
The neighbor looked into the room. The room was the same as it had always been. The neighbor closed the door and sat with her until morning.