Veracity

The psychic told him very seriously, "Your internal atomic clock ticks away inside you at a pace no one else can keep step to."

For $28 she told him this, rubbed his hand in between her hands, and offered him a soothing cup of pungent tea she said would clear his head before her reading. It smelled of dirt and brought him back to memories of going to the county fair as a teenager, kicking through the crowd as dust clouded his feet and swelled up to his nostrils.

He closed his eyes and thought of these moments, several years of random county fair nights bleeding into one vivid image of being in the middle of a crowd all alone, sweating in the August heat, a soda in one hand as his other fanned the dust from his face. A band was playing a bad cover of some country song. A man carrying balloons walked past. Couples in the nearby beer garden swayed to music, their arms around each other’s waists clinging tight to loose fabric and old denim.

He took another sip of the tea and cleared his head like the psychic instructed. “Are you feeling calm now?” she asked him.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said dryly.

“I mean, do you feel calm?” she said again, cooing the last word slowly as she leaned toward him, close enough so he could see the creases in her thick makeup.

“I guess so,” he said. “I’m just kind of a calm person by nature, so I don’t know if I can get any calmer.”

“Ok then. We’ll begin.” The psychic sat back in her chair and closed her eyes, stroking his hand with her long cold fingers and humming quietly as he looked on. “You’ll have no children,” she said, her eyes fluttering open to meet his in the dim light.

“You’ll have no children and your home…your home will be engulfed in flames.”

He imagined the tiny apartment he lived in now burning to the ground. The couch would go first since it’s made of entirely cheap synthetic fabrics, then the carpet would catch fire, igniting the rest of the place like a line of gun powder set off by a single spark. This made him incredibly happy.

“You will meet many people in your life, many people who will harm you. They will not understand you and…they will blame you for this.”

He thought of his mother and the sound of her glass clinking to her lips as she told him she was moving to Florida to be with Benny, their old neighbor who’d left his wife for his secretary. He thought of his mother saying this with such resolve, he realized she was just too tired to hide things from him anymore.

The psychic closed her eyes again and took a breath, then said, “Your loneliness is not over yet. You will have seven more years of sadness.”

He thanked her, paid her, and left.