A Scrying Shame

by Donna White Glaser

  “What the heck happened?” Grady asked.

  “Uh . . . I saw a spider.” Arie hauled herself to her feet, not an easy feat in a banana suit.

  A forty-something man dressed in slacks and short-sleeved button-down shirt followed on Grady’s heels.

  Grady’s head tilted in an are-you-nuts expression. The client, Arie presumed, looked even more concerned. He glanced around in distaste at the piles of trash, and pulled his narrow shoulders in a little tighter. He held the Rubik’s Cube in his hand, twisting it nervously.

  “I’m afraid of spiders,” Arie said. “It’s a phobia. I’m okay now.”

  “Why don’t you go take a break?” Grady said.

  Arie saw that he had shed his banana suit for a white lab coat. He held a clipboard filled with forms—the contract, maybe. Grady was probably writing up a new estimate to include dealing with Mount Saint Trash Heap all around them.

  Memories.

  Arie’s gut heaved at the reappearance of intrusive thought. She shook her head, trying to rattle the voice out of her skull.

  “Take it,” Grady said in a no-nonsense voice.

  She hadn’t meant to decline the offer. As Arie shuffled past the client, he shot her another nervous smile. A gap separated his front teeth.

  Just like his mama’s.

  Breaking out in another deluge of sweat, Arie scurried out the door to the van, where she stripped out of her suit and gloves, disinfected, and grabbed a sports drink from the cooler in the front compartment of the cab. She lowered herself to the ground next to the van and sipped her drink. Chills documented the history of her fear in goose-bump Braille all over her body.

  What the heck just happened? At least that thought was all her own.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “I thought I wouldn’t mind cleaning up after other dead people, ones who stay dead, I mean. Not like me. I thought the ick factor wouldn’t be an issue, you know?”

  Arie was avoiding her landlord, so she hid out at Chandra’s. After listening to Arie whine about her lack of furniture, Chandra had splurged on a bright yellow beanbag chair from Target. It reminded Arie uncomfortably of the banana suit, but she didn’t have the heart to tell her friend that her new furniture triggered thoughts of decomposing bodies. Also, since her body ran to the Dolly-Parton-style of womanhood, her scrunched position forced her knees up to her chest and her chest up to her face, threatening her next death to be attributed to asphyxiation by décolletage.

  “You really don’t mind cleaning up blood and stuff?” Chandra sounded dubious. In addition to the new “furniture,” she’d indulged in a new hairstyle—raven black and very short with bangs. The ends curled around her jaw, and she kept jiggling her head so that they swished around her face.

  Cleopatra with a twitch.

  “I don’t like the smells or the flies,” Arie said. “Those really are hard to get used to, but the rest . . . I just remind myself that it’s all part of biology. The real person isn’t there, anyway. I think dead bodies freak people out because we’re still thinking of them as people. They’re not. They really are just . . . meat, I guess. What’s left of them, anyway.”

  Chandra gasped. “Are their bodies still there?”

  “No, not their whole bodies, but . . . well, there are always pieces, you know? Especially if they’ve been decomposing.”

  “If the people aren’t still there, then how do you explain what happened with the hoarder dude? I mean, that is some freaky shit.” Chandra’s eyes sparkled.

  Arie couldn’t answer that.

  “Okay!” Chandra said. “So, this vision. You saw stuff and felt it, too?”

  Arie nodded. “The Rubik’s cube, a pretty woman, and two kids. But I’ll be honest. The thing that really freaked me out was the emotions. They took over my body. I can’t even explain it. I was feeling this horrible despair, but at the same time, I knew it wasn’t mine.”

  “Kind of like being possessed?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far.” Arie shuddered. “But what I can’t figure out is why did that happen to me? I mean, I’ve had already had a Near Death Experience. Isn’t that enough weirdness for one lifetime?”

  “Two lifetimes, technically. But maybe,” Chandra said, “they aren’t two separate things.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Maybe the NDE and the psychic stuff are both part of one thing. Maybe you were led to working with these dead people.”

  Chandra loved woo-woo stuff. Arie never really paid attention to that kind of thing. For starters, her mother would have killed her. Chandra turned to a cheap particleboard bookshelf against the wall. The top two rows sagged with fantasy and mystery books and a whole section of angsty werewolf and vampire young adult novels. The bottom shelf had been set aside for nonfiction: a few leftover college texts, but mainly paranormal and psychic related tomes.

  Woo-woo stuff.

  Chandra pulled out a volume and paged through it. Shaking her head, she stuck it back and grabbed another. She must have found what she’d been looking for because a beatific smile lit her face.

  “Scrying,” she said.

  “Gesundheit.”

  Chandra rolled her eyes. “Scrying is the practice of using reflective surfaces to see clairvoyantly. You know? Like seeing images or visions by using crystal balls or bowls of water.”

  “Are you suggesting I’m psychic or whatever?”

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” Chandra said. “What were you doing right before the vision hit?”

  “Can we order a pizza first?”

  “Focus. What were you doing?”

  “Cleaning. Wiping blood off the tiled walls. That was it.”

  Chandra heaved a sigh. “I need more detail. Tell you what. Close your eyes.”

  “Chandra—”

  “Close. Your. Eyes.”

  Arie complied.

  “What does the tile look like?” Chandra softened her voice into a soothing tone. “Like, what color?”

  “White,” Arie said. “Except for the blood, of course. That’s what made the blood stand out so much. It was stark, you know?”

  “Good. Keep going.”

  “I’d already cleaned one of the walls, the one with the lightest spatter. I figured I’d start there and kind of work up to the others. It was on the second wall that it happened. There was more blood, lots more in some places. Streaks of it, instead of just dots or a mist.”

  “What did the streaks look like?” Chandra’s voice grew weaker.

  Arie couldn’t help smiling. For all her friend’s fascination with vampires and paranormal activity, she seemed a little squeamish on the matter of blood. Arie considered giving her a break and keeping it as gore-free as possible.

  Still, Chandra had asked for details.

  “The wall I was working on and the one behind him were the worst,” Arie said. “I think he must have hit a vein or an artery or whatever. The streaks were pretty wide, kind of like ribbons, but starting thick and then getting thinner, and all kind of crisscrossing each other.”

  Arie opened her eyes. Chandra had turned green and seemed to be swallowing a lot more than usual.

  “Don’t you barf on me.” Arie flailed around in her squishy pillow prison, but Chandra waved her back.

  “I’m fine,” she said, in a definitely not fine voice. “Okay. You’re scrubbing away at the . . . uh . . . ribbons, and then what?”

  Once again, Arie tried to picture it. “I was getting really hot and sweaty. Obviously, the suits have no airflow. I mean, that’s the point. Guts makes us take water breaks every hour if possible, but I hadn’t even been working twenty minutes. The first side cleaned up pretty easy. The second wall, though . . . It was a lot harder. I was concentrating. I really wanted to do a good job, especially since I’d passed their barf test.”

  “Their barf test?”

  “Everyone pukes on their first job. Except I hadn’t, and Grady was going to win the bet he’d made with Guts. Twenty bucks.”


  “Your coworkers have some serious issues. You know that, right?”

  Arie sighed and felt compelled to point out the obvious. “They aren’t the ones getting sneak peeks at heaven or having their bodies taken over by dead people.”

  “Not that you know of, anyway.”

  That wasn’t as reassuring as she might have thought it would be.

  “Okay,” Chandra continued, “so getting back to this. You were hot and sweaty and concentrating. Then what?”

  “Then, what I already told you: this awful rush of sadness. I sat down and . . . and then I started seeing the stuff. That’s when I freaked out and made a fool of myself in front of Grady and the client.”

  Arie flopped out of the beanbag and lay face down on the floor. “Chan, I can’t lose this job. I just can’t. In fact, I’m probably going to have to take another job, too, because Grady and I only get called out if Rich and Bruno can’t make the job. They get first choice. As soon as my landlord catches up with me, I’m going to be evicted. And the hospital bills? I can’t even imagine how long it will take me to pay those off.”

  “I thought your parents were helping with those.”

  Arie rolled her head to look at her friend. “They are. But Chan, come on. I’m supposed to be a grown up. How many twenty-five-year-olds are still trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up? I quit college to work in a bar, for crying out loud.”

  “You loved your job.”

  “My job killed me. Literally.”

  “Technically, that was the creep in the parking lot, and he only killed you a little bit.” At Arie’s glare, she amended her statement. “Well, not permanently, anyway.”

  “Benefits. Retirement. Investments. Savings. Why didn’t I ever think about those?”

  “Because, duh. You’re in your twenties. Who does that?”

  “Brant,” Arie said, which wasn’t really fair because, for her first child, Evelyn Stiles had apparently given birth to a forty-five-year-old in a baby costume. “You could already see it in his baby pictures. He’s sitting there in his diapers, but it’s obvious he was already comparing insurance quotes or analyzing stock dividends or something financial and prudent.”

  “I’ve seen the pictures. He looks constipated. He always does.”

  “But he’s a grown-up,” Arie persisted. “He didn’t wipe out my parents’ retirement savings in a single blow. I mean, even you! You’re more of a grown-up than me.”

  “Okay, I’m not sure how to take that ‘even you’ part, but how am I a grown up? I make cakes all day. Believe me, I’m definitely not thinking about pensions or whatever while I’m doing it.”

  Arie turned to look at her friend. “You should, though. We both should. And you don’t just make cakes. You design amazing, one-of-a-kind pieces of edible art. You’re following your dream, but you’re still being practical about it.”

  “I am not. I’m an artist. I’m only doing this stupid cake job until I get enough paintings to do a show. It pays the rent. That’s it.”

  “I’m just pointing out that you can pay your rent. You, um, wisely took a job so that you could still follow your dream. You’re making it work. That’s awesome.”

  Chandra’s kohl-lined eyes had narrowed at “wisely,” but she seemed to accept it. Then she gasped and sat up straight. Her eyes looked like golf balls with little green dots.

  “We should experiment,” she said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Arie’s mind scrambled to catch up with her friend’s grasshopper-flitting ideas. “What are you talking about?”

  “Let’s see if we can coax a little psychic vision out of you right now.” Chandra smiled like a little girl who’d been promised that Christmas would come every day from now on.

  “And just how are we going to do that?” Arie could almost hear the clicks and whirs as Chandra’s brain buzzed with ideas.

  “Let’s start out with something simple, like just concentrating.”

  Chandra plumped the yellow beanbag and waved her friend back into it, claiming a pumpkin-orange floor pillow for herself. Sitting crisscross, she rested her hands softly on her knees, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply. A little Egyptian hippy. She looked so earnest, Arie struggled not to smile. When she tried to copy Chandra’s pose, her foot instantly cramped. She settled for sticking her legs out in front of her.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  Chandra cracked her eyes open and frowned at Arie’s un-Zen posture. Arie obediently crossed her legs again.

  “Close your eyes, and take deep, cleansing breaths,” Chandra intoned. “Let your aura unfold.”

  “My aura is folded?” That question earned Arie a dirty look. “All right, all right.” Arie relaxed, letting her aura do whatever auras did.

  “For now, concentrate on your breathing,” Chandra said. “In and out. Nice and slow. Release your negative energy on the exhale. Breath in peace on the inhale.”

  Wondering when an automatic body function had gotten so complicated, Arie breathed. Her right foot started to tingle. She wiggled it and breathed some more.

  Ice clunked down into the refrigerator’s icemaker, making Arie jump. Chandra’s breathing remained as steady as if she’d fallen asleep sitting up.

  Arie made an effort to sync her breathing with the Dalai Chandra. In and out. Slow and deep. She wasn’t sure whether it was peace she was breathing in or dust. Chandra wasn’t big on cleaning. Arie’s other foot tingled. She ignored it for as long as she could before wiggling the blood back into it.

  The blood . . .

  Chandra made a gurgling sound, and Arie peeked at her. She decided it must have been a stifled burp, so she closed her eyes again and went back to breathing, letting her aura unfold. Relaxed but concentrating.

  Arie’s nose itched.

  Outside in the corridor, someone walked past Chandra’s apartment, and Arie wondered if they were delivering pizza. Or Chinese. It had been a long time since she’d eaten Chinese.

  “This isn’t working,” Arie said.

  Chandra sighed and opened her eyes. “Did you feel anything?”

  “My nose itched. That’s about it.”

  A bigger, more exasperated sigh. “Were you even trying?”

  “Maybe that’s what’s wrong. I wasn’t trying when I was cleaning. It just happened.”

  A thoughtful look came over Chandra’s face. “That’s a surprisingly good point. Are you guys done with that job?”

  “No, we go back tomorrow and should finish up, at least, unless the client wants us to empty out all the junk.”

  “Is the blood all cleaned up?”

  “Yeah,” Arie said. She straightened her legs and tried to wiggle the blood back into them. “We’ll disinfect one more time, then do the walk-through with the client. Guts wants me there so I can watch Grady in case I ever have to do it.”

  “See if you can get some time alone in the bathroom. Then go to that same spot, and see what happens. Try using the tile as a reflective surface. Think you can do that?”

  Arie gave Chandra her best “duh” look. “I’ve been going to the bathroom by myself for over twenty years. I can manage.” The doubtful look plastered to Chandra’s face was not reassuring.

  The next morning, Arie made it to the job site before Grady and found Neal, the hoarder’s son, waiting next to his car in the driveway. She knew better than to take him on a tour of the cleanup, but there was no reason she shouldn’t make polite conversation while they waited.

  Arie introduced herself, something she had skipped during her freak out the day before. When she held her hand out to shake, the man gave a moue of disgust and turned away as if he didn’t see the appendage dangling there, all friendly and professional. Arie’s first reaction was to be offended, but she remembered in time that the man had seen her scraping fragments of his daddy off a wall with a putty knife just the day before. She decided to cut him some slack.

  “This must be so difficult for you, Mr. Petranik,�
� Arie ventured. “Do you have any other family to help with everything?”

  Besides the sister I only know about because your father keeps playing “This Is My Life” in my head, I mean?

  “Call me Neal, please. Mr. Petranik is my father.” Neal blanched. “Was.” He cast a despairing look at the house where his father had died.

  “It must be pretty overwhelming, Neal. Did you grow up here?”

  He nodded, still staring at the house.

  He hadn’t answered the question about family members, so Arie decided to try again. “Did you have siblings?”

  Neal still looked distracted. “My sister is coming in from Detroit, but she had to take care of some things before she could set out. I don’t know what we’re going to do with all of this. We can’t sell it in this condition, can we?”

  “Uh, I’m not sure. Grady will be the one to ask. He should be here any minute.”

  Just then, Grady pulled up in a BioClean truck. When he saw Arie standing next to the client, he frowned. She waved cheerfully, then hurried to get in another question before Grady caught up to them.

  “Did your dad give you that Rubik’s Cube?” Arie asked. “The one I saw you holding yesterday?”

  Now, Neal looked a lot confused. “What a strange . . . the Rubik’s Cube?”

  Grady appeared at their side.

  “I saw you with the Cube yesterday. I thought maybe it was a, um, talisman or something. A keepsake.”

  Grady’s eyes widened at the unusual topic. He frowned at Arie, then reached forward and shook Neal’s hand. Neal, so distracted he actually consented to the skin contact, continued staring at Arie like the imbecile she already felt like. Clipboard in one hand, Grady put his other on Neal’s shoulder, guiding him toward the front door. They’d gone about three feet when Neal stopped and turned back.

  “It was a Christmas present.”

  They stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment, then Grady nudged him forward, casting a distinct WTF glare over his shoulder. Arie slunk behind, but Grady stopped her.