“Are you an angel?” she asked. Her nose was wrinkled and she wore a slight frown as if she hoped the answer was no. Angels couldn’t simply wear old sweats and sit in the dirt.
“Uh, no, I’m actually a magician,” she quickly covered. She sat up and tried to dust herself off. “I was just working on some magic tricks. Ha, ha. You’re the first person to see my flying trick. What did you think?”
“Oh, it was a trick!” The little girl looked relieved. Her image of angels remained unmarred by a sweaty runner. “Yes, it was great. It looked like you were really flying.”
“Thank you, my dear! Well, I believe that I am done for the day. I shall be off now!” Memphis tried not to cringe at the fact that she was talking like a coked up Mary Poppins. Children always made her nervous, even when she was one herself.
She quickly walked away before the little girl could ask her to explain her “trick.” She headed south toward her apartment, but stopped and turned to look behind her. The little girl was with a woman; she pointed in the air and then in her direction. Memphis turned away and ran home.
By the time she got to her room, she was sweaty and her heart was racing. She was actually flying. Well, technically she was floating, but still. She kicked off her sneakers and removed her clothes, and then she noticed that her computer was still on. She thought she had turned it off the night before. It was old and temperamental; it didn’t appreciate being left running for long periods, so she always turned it off when she wasn’t using it.
The window contained her inbox. She had a new e-mail labeled, “Personalized Horoscope for Memphis Holland.” That was strange. She didn’t remember filling out a form last night while she was searching the astrology websites. It wasn’t from Virgil, the host of The Universe Now. The sender’s e-mail address was [email protected].
She was about to open it when her cell phone rang. She went to answer it. Jill needed to see her immediately and invited her to meet for lunch at their favorite place on Bowery in an hour. Memphis agreed and said good-bye. She rushed to shower, get dressed and catch the train. She needed to straighten her hair. In her haste, she forgot all about her mystery mail.
Jill was sitting at a booth in the middle of the restaurant. It was the most coveted table in the most coveted restaurant on Bowery.
“How did you manage to get this table?” she asked as she gave her a tight hug.
It felt as if she hadn’t seen her in years. It was nice to see someone from the real world. The past few days had felt a bit surreal. Did she actually just fly? Memphis shook the crazy thought from her mind. That little girl must have been mistaken. She focused her attention back to the present and a less bizarre conversation. “How did you manage to get this table?” she asked Jill asked as she gave her a tight hug.
“Oh, well, you know, they usually reserve this table for special occasions. For people celebrating their anniversaries, birthdays, or engagements.” She dramatically put her hand to her forehead.
That was when Memphis noticed the large, sparkly object on her finger. “You’re engaged!”
Her outburst brought about a round of applause from the other diners. Jill soaked in all the attention before she sat back down. Memphis followed suit. She moved their glasses and silverware out of the way so she could better inspect the stone.
“Jill, is this…?”
“Yes, it’s his grandmother’s engagement ring.”
The famous Herman diamond was in their midst. Jill’s boyfriend—er, fiancé—Wesley, was a Herman. They owned half of the island. Their properties spanned from bodegas to luxury condominiums.
“Wow, Jill, I’m so happy for you!”
It was about time. They’d been together forever; they were the happiest couple Memphis knew. They balanced each other perfectly.
“So, how did he propose? Were you surprised?”
Jill went on to describe how their usual night of bowling actually turned into a private dinner on the lanes and then a boat ride where he hid her ring in her champagne glass. Memphis had never seen Jill happier than she was at that moment. With the promotion and now her pending nuptials, her future was as bright as the sparkle from her rock. Memphis examined the diamond. It was a lovely princess cut; the edges were smooth, yet defined. It caught the light no matter where she moved her hand. So sparkly, it seemed to meld with the lights and dance. Memphis stared at the ring.
She could just picture Jill on her wedding day, in a beautiful Vera Wang dress, crying on the floor. Wait—Memphis was confused. It was as if she were watching a movie with the ring acting as a projector. Jill was wearing a wedding gown, but she wasn’t happy or blushing. Her green eyes were red rimmed and the tears spilled down her cheeks.
“Jill?” she called out to her. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing! Silly,” Jill answered. The image disappeared and Memphis was faced with a confused expression rather than tears.
“Everything is perfect! Knock on wood.” She knocked on the table.
“Yes, of course it is!” Memphis nodded her head enthusiastically. “So, are we having drinks to celebrate?”
“Memphis, it’s not even noon.”
“Oh, c’mon, we’re celebrating! We have to toast to that.” The truth was, Memphis badly needed a drink. First the flying, now she was seeing things—terrible things.
She and Jill parted ways in front of the restaurant. They agreed to meet at Jill’s apartment to get dressed before the Halloween party—now doubling as an engagement party—she would throw the next weekend. Memphis didn’t tell Jill about her vision. It must have been hunger or envy that caused her to hallucinate a not-so-happy ending for her friend.
Now slightly buzzed, she made her way to the office. With the added liquid courage, she was ready to face Jonathan. He had called and left several messages since she caught him and Troy reenacting a scene from Brokeback Mountain.
Memphis sat down at her desk and turned on her computer. She looked through her snail mail as the computer started up. Jonathan hadn’t left her his referral letter; she felt slightly panicked. Hopefully he hadn’t changed his mind. Panic turned to anger; it was the least he could do for her. She grabbed her mouse. She would send him an e-mail.
She had few new messages in her inbox—mostly junk. She quickly went through the list and deleted them, and then she came to the horoscope e-mail from earlier that day. It was sent at 4:43 a.m., a strange time to be sending e-mails. She opened it, praying it wasn’t a virus.
Today you will hear good news from a close friend. At the same time, you will have to prevent them from hearing the bad and seeing what is true.
Memphis stared at her computer screen, then around her as if someone was about to sneak up on her. This was eerily accurate. She copied and pasted the e-mail address of the sender into her search engine. Who was this astrogirl88?
There were no results with the exact wording. There was a site called Astrogirl, but it was just a sexist comic book site featuring a cartoon blonde with huge breasts, her nipples barely covered by purple stars. She was a superhero who visited guys while they were asleep and, from the graphic stills, made their dreams come true. Yuck. Memphis closed the window. She clicked through the other search results, but none of the sites seemed to be sources of strange daily predictions.
She returned to her e-mail and composed one to Jonathan, requesting the status of her referral letter. She spent the rest of the day working on her dissertation.
Chapter 7
The next morning, Memphis arose when her alarm buzzed. She found her computer turned on again, with the screen showing her inbox. She had received another e-mail from astrogirl88 and a response from Jonathan. She ignored astrogirl88’s message and read Jonathan’s. It was actually a calendar invite to a breakfast meeting with him. He titled it “Referral Discussion.” Yeah, she was sure her application would not be the subject of the discussion. The bastard scheduled it for nine that morning, and it was already a quarter past eight.
She rushed through her morning routine, including a few extra steps such as applying makeup and perfume. She didn’t want Jonathan to see her looking downtrodden, especially since she didn’t feel that way; she’d never felt better. She twirled and skipped out the door as if to prove it.
Jonathan arrived at the restaurant shortly after her. “I can always count on you to arrive early—to be where you’re supposed to be.”
She just nodded in acknowledgement. She had ordered a coffee while she waited. The waitress placed it in front of her and then took Jonathan’s order. He didn’t order a meal, either—just coffee. They both knew this would be a short meeting.
“Well, Memphis, thank you for meeting me.”
She simply nodded again. He was calling her Memphis instead of “Memy” like he usually did, to emphasize that this was a professional meal. Of course she was going to meet him; her future was literally in his hands. She spied an envelope resting under his wrist and hoped it contained her reference.
“I wanted to discuss what happened the other night when you found Troy and me working together.”
Working together? Is that what they call it these days?
“You see, Troy is here in the States all alone, and he reminds me of when I was young and studying in the UK. We have become very close recently.”
Yes, his head was very close to your privates. Memphis allowed him to continue with a long-winded explanation for why he didn’t tell her about them. Since they had ended their relationship, he didn’t see the point. And it wasn’t as if he and Troy were involved; it was really a one-off kind of thing—not a part of his usual routine. He was going off into a tangent about Kinsley’s sexuality meter when Memphis interrupted him.
“Jonathan, do you have the referral letter that I asked you to write for me?”
“Oh, no, I don’t, but I have even better news for you. You received the fellowship! Here is your acceptance letter.” He handed the envelope to her.
She stared at the envelope as if she’d never seen one before. “I don’t understand. I didn’t complete my application.”
“Oh, I handed it in for you. The board agreed that the work you’ve done with me has been exceptional and they would love to offer you a position. Isn’t that brilliant? We will continue working together. We can even go out after hours and have a laugh, like old times.”
He reached across the table to hold her hand, but Memphis pulled away. She had forgotten that the reason she wanted the fellowship wasn’t for just the money. She also wanted to continue to work with Jonathan. She fantasized that they would make a major discovery together and he would fall as madly in love with her as she had with him. He would marvel at her brilliance and propose to her right before they went to the major conference in Phoenix, Arizona to present their findings. They would get married and raise little baby astronomers. They would co-author a book titled, Love and the Stars: How to Find Your Mate in the Sky. It would be a national bestseller. She would cut her hair into a cute little bob—
“Memphis?”
Jonathan’s voice brought her back to the present—and to the reality that she did not want to work with him or see him ever again.
“Aren’t you happy?” He attempted to grab her hand again.
This time, Memphis flicked away his grubby fingers. “Look, I don’t know how you managed this, but I wanted to get the fellowship on my own merit. I no longer want it to be in your department.” She rose out of her seat.
Jonathan just looked up at her, obviously shocked that she wouldn’t just follow along with his plan.
“No, you’re just upset and not thinking clearly,” he said through gritted teeth. Now he seemed angry at her noncompliance. “Don’t be a silly girl.”
“Jonathan, I am not, nor will I ever be, a silly girl.”
With that, she turned and left the building. She couldn’t help but feel a little like Elvis.
When she arrived on campus, she found that she had been locked out of her office. She checked her e-mail on her phone. Jonathan had fired her and was holding her research hostage. She sank to the ground in front of her former workspace. She heard footsteps coming down the hall.
“Hello, Memphis.”
She looked up and was nearly blinded by the bright gold locks of Troy. “Would you mind moving? I need to get into my office.”
She quickly got up, afraid that he would kick her out of the way with his pointy, handmade shoes if she didn’t.
“Your office?” she repeated.
“Yes. It seems a spot on Dr. Roth’s team has opened up.”
“Yup, it’s wide open; he fired me. It was my position.”
“Oh, did he? Well, that’s a shame. I hate that I received this job under such circumstances.” His expression didn’t match his sympathetic words.
Who was this guy? Memphis felt as if she were starring in an even more twisted version of Single White Female. A version titled, Single-Recently-Found-Out –That-She-Was-Black Female-Whose-Boyfriend-and–Job-Were-Stolen-by-a–Single-White-Male. Okay, a much longer title, but this felt personal. Troy’s bright blue eyes were cold and his bee-stung lips formed a sneer. That was her cue to leave.
“Yes, I’m sure you feel badly about it all,” she said. She slowly backed away from Troy and ended up walking backwards down the entire hallway. She definitely didn’t want to leave with her back exposed.
On her way to the subway, she checked the rest of her e-mails. She saw the unopened horoscope from astrogirl88. She opened it and what she read stopped her dead in her tracks.
Today you shall reach one of your major goals, only to then realize that it is no longer your dream. This will lead to the end of a toxic situation and the beginning of something greater.
This was ridiculous. She had to find out who was sending these prophetic messages. She exited from her e-mail screen and called Jill. She asked her if she knew anyone who could trace the chain of e-mails. She explained everything that happened the past few days and how the horoscope predicted Jill’s engagement and her job loss. After Jill got over the shock of hearing the news of her termination, she recommended a guy in her newspaper’s IT department. She instructed Memphis to forward her all the correspondence. They would get to the bottom of this.
Memphis arrived home and headed straight for the bathroom. She needed a nice long bath. She soaked for an hour and got out when her extremities began to prune. After putting on her old and worn robe and Little Dipper pajamas, she grabbed some snacks from the kitchen and settled on the sofa for another night of television.
The Universe Now was on again. It seemed to be on no matter the time. Maybe it was a marathon. She decided to watch it; it was quickly becoming her favorite show. The focus of today’s episode wasn’t on the stars, but on a faraway region nonetheless: the country of Egypt. It was well known among astronomers that Egyptians were very advanced and their myths and religions were based on astronomical and astrological facts.
During her own research on the elliptical, she came across an actual historical figure who was tied to the constellation Ophiuchus; his name was Imhotep. She didn’t know why, but she felt a spark of recognition. She’d been a bit sidetracked from her actual research, but wanted to find out more about this man. Imhotep was the world’s first named physician and the architect who built Egypt’s first pyramid. He was undisputedly the world’s first doctor as well as priest, scribe, sage, poet, and astrologer. Imhotep was also the first known medical professor and a prestigious writer of medical books. As the first medical professor, Imhotep was believed to have been the author of the Edwin Smith Papyrus in which more than ninety anatomical terms and forty-eight injuries were described. He also founded a school of medicine in Memphis, possibly known as “Asklepion,” which remained famous for two thousand years. All of this occurred some 2,200 years before Hippocrates—the western father of medicine—was born.
Virgil was going back further than that in history, to the time of the Gods—the Neteru—who adopted planets to
share messages with humans on Earth so they would continue to evolve. He began to tell their story, with which Memphis was familiar.
“At first there was only Nun. Nun was the dark waters of chaos. One day, a mound rose up out of the waters. This mass was called Ben-Ben. On this mass stood Ra, the first God. A self-centered deity, he was the first being to emerge from the darkness and endless watery abyss that surrounded the world before creation. A product of the energy and matter contained in this chaos, he created divine and human beings in search of love.
“Alone in the universe with his mind, he created Shu, the God of Air, and Tefnut, the Goddess of Moisture. Shu and Tefnut had two children. They were the first divine couple, and the cosmos were now formed. Their firstborn was Geb, the God of the Earth. Then came Nut, the Goddess of the Sky. Nut and Geb had four children named Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephthys; they were to be mediators between humans and the cosmos.
“Osiris was the King of the Earth and Isis was the Queen. Since they were divine without real bloodlines, incest was acceptable. Osiris was a good king and ruled over the Earth for many years. He was to take over Ra’s reign among men. At the time, humans were killing and eating each other. Isis discovered wheat and barley, which grew wild over the land with the other plants and was unknown to man at the time. They taught the people of Egypt to make bread and cut only the flesh of such animals as they taught them were suitable. Osiris went on to teach them laws, and how to live peacefully and happily together.
“In the meanwhile, his brother Seth was jealous of him and of man. He became a serpent and began to cause trouble among men. The knowledge they received from Osiris began to ebb. Osiris was away, spreading his knowledge and laws around the world, but was alerted by Isis to return home.
“By the time Osiris returned, his people were no longer walking the path of the divine. They were fighting again. Osiris needed to rest before going forward with a new plan to bring peace among men, but Seth had devised a plan of his own—a plan to kill Osiris and become ruler of Earth, to bring back the chaos which he loved. He devised a plan to trap and suffocate him in a cedar chest. Seth held a feast in honor of Osiris, with the other seventy-two guests being conspirators. During the dinner, he presented the chest to Osiris and told him that he could only have this rare and beautiful piece if he could fit in it. Osiris entered to see if he could fit and was trapped.
Written in the Sky* Rise of the Wadjet Witch Page 5
