Psychic Junkie by Sarah Lassez Read Free Book Online Page A

We started to cough. I doused the sage in water, we fanned at the smoke, but it was no use. The room was a dense haze.
    And then the fire alarm went off. We both stood there, fixated by the blaring contraption at the top of the wall, until finally Gina was spurred into action and grabbed a broom. Furiously she beat the thing, yelling at it to shut up, while in the background I heard my neighbors stirring. People were smelling the smoke. There were sounds in the hallway. Knocks on doors. I could only imagine that the fire department was already howling up the street.
    Sage extinguished, every window open, we eventually had no choice but to join my neighbors on the sidewalk. As my unit faced the street and had windows through which smoke was still drifting, it was pretty obvious who had some explaining to do.

    A couple months later I had no proof the sage had done anything. The only change in my life seemed to be the addition of a new cat—which was then accompanied by the fear that I was on my way to becoming Crazy Cat Lady. Though, really, to be a Crazy Cat Lady you must live in an old wood house with chipped gray paint and an unkempt yard. Crazy Cat Ladies mutter strange things from their porches, and kids dare each other to approach on Halloween, spooked by creepy feline silhouettes in the windows. I had no house, and thus no porch, no yard, nothing—so, in truth, being a Crazy Cat Lady would’ve been a step up .
    The bottom line was, China wasn’t living up to her catly duties. Everyone else had cats that cuddled and nestled and purred, while mine did nothing but judge me and piss in the tub. Actually, that’s a lie. She’d started doing more than just piss in the tub; she’d started doing another little number that seriously challenged the pledges of Clorox. So, with hopes of having a normal cat, I adopted Onyx, a tattered little black kitten from the pound. As we pulled out of the parking lot, Onyx wailing in a box beside me, I knew soon she’d be the cat I’d always wanted. Happy, curled next to me at night, and greeting me with meows of love when I returned home. Versus China, who howled from the window when she saw me approach, a cry I’d long ago learned could be translated as “Are you trying to kill me? It’s been almost two hours since I’ve eaten!”
    So yes, I had high hopes for Onyx. Yet this sweet little kitten must have read some instruction booklet on how my luck tends to go, and in accordance immediately took up residence inside my closet and refused to leave. My only Onyx sightings involved glimpses of her sprints to the food bowl or her stealthy endeavors to the bathroom, where she’d gnaw on the toilet paper’s plastic wrapper, her eye on the door.
    I hoped this wasn’t an indication of my future as a mother to human children. Who was to say it wouldn’t be the same? One daughter rebelling against toilet training altogether, the other sneaking food at the crack of dawn and then hiding out in darkness, nestling in shoes.
    Not that I needed to worry about kids, as I was still in my midtwenties, and the children bridge wasn’t one I’d be crossing for quite some time. No, at that point I was even afraid of dating, in part due to the dreadful luck I’d been having in that department. The last time I’d gone out was with a man who’d told me I reminded him of his mother, and that his father had proposed after having known her for only one day. Red flags began to wave, bells and whistles began to chorus, and the sky practically lit up with stars that spelled “Run!” But I saw the date through to the end, even resisting the urge to leap from the car when he turned to me with a syrupy gaze and pronounced that my skin was “like a song.” In case I hadn’t heard him, he then proceeded to demonstrate how my skin was like a song—by bellowing in full operatic grandeur “Your skin is like a song… ahhh-ahhhh-AHHHH !” My knuckles were white as my grip on the door handle became deadly.