“What the hell?” I whispered. My mother never, never read for herself, asking me to do it when she had something important to ask, because reading for yourself was dangerous, especially for psychics like my mother. It was kind of like using an ouija board; you were opening yourself up to the spiritual world, practically inviting anything within hearing distance to latch on to you. You risked having your own personal ghost haunting you or a poltergeist determined to drive you and you alone crazy.
“Mom!” I said more firmly, hitting the table with the flat of my hand to shock her back to reality. A knot in my chest loosened when she started, blinking rapidly before realizing I was standing in front of her.
“Jesus Christ!” she swore, bringing her free hand to her chest as if her heart would burst through and she could stop it. “Shay, don’t do that!”
“Don’t do that?” I set my cup down, afraid I’d spill it as a wave of impatience hit me from her. “What the hell are you doing reading for yourself?” I demanded, waving my hand at the table. Her wave of impatience washed away from me just as quickly as she glanced down at the cards in front of her. For a moment, I had a strange feeling of disconnect as if she were the child and I were the adult and I had caught her breaking a rule.
“Right,” she said slowly, switching the remaining cards from her right hand to her left. She reached for her cigarette, bringing it to her lips before she realized it wasn’t lit anymore.
“Well?” I pressed, grabbing a chair and pulling it out so I could sit down. “What the hell?” She had stopped berating me for swearing when I turned eighteen, both her and my dad more comfortable with it all of a sudden; it was nice not having to censor myself so much anymore. She reached for the open pack of menthol cigarettes, pulling one out and lighting it all in swift, practiced motions with one hand before she answered me.
“I just had this weird dream last night,” she finally said after taking a long drag from her cigarette, careful to blow the smoke away from me. She lifted her left hand and set the cards on the table and leaned her shoulders back against her chair, crossing her left arm over her chest and resting her right elbow on her left hand, holding the cigarette up and out of her face.
“So?” I asked, sliding my cup in front of me to take a sip, watching her over the rim, making sure she didn’t slip back into the reading trance. I probably should have been more careful getting her attention, but seeing her with her cards after so many years was almost disturbing.
“I don’t know,” she said softly, still looking at the cards, but not actually trying to read them. “It just really bothered me, more of a nightmare really; I guess I was just afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“I don’t know.” She lifted a shoulder and let it fall in a half shrug before taking another drag.
“Bullshit,” I said, setting my cup down and raising halfway out of my chair to reach across the table to grab the remaining cards and start shuffling them almost before I was back in the seat.
The cards were so old they were practically soft to the touch, more like cloth now than paper. They had belonged to my grandmother’s grandmother, but amazingly the pictures depicted on their faces were still as bright as if a modern day press had stamped them. The edges were outlined in gold and when I tranced out to read them, I swear the gold turned to liquid fire and danced on the paper.
I didn’t read much; my dreams were always a stronger conduit for my prophetic gifts passed down to me and I didn’t like the vulnerable feeling of being lost in thought with someone else sitting there with me. But even though it had been awhile for me, the magic in the cards still answered my call and I felt it tingle in my hands. After a few deft shuffles, I felt the distinct tremble telling me to stop, so I did.
I laid out five cards in the shape of a cross without really looking at them and then two more on either side of the bottom card. I blinked and looked down at the cards, watching the gold lines quiver as my second sight kicked in and the pictures leapt up at me. I read them as quickly as reading a child’s picture book. I was reading for my mother, which kept me safe and closed off to the entities that might have been drawn in by my mother’s first reading. I didn’t really think anything could breach my shields on the house, but with magic, it was always better to be safe than sorry. Just because you’ve never been in a car accident doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time to buckle your seatbelt.
“You dreamt of me,” I said matter-of-factly and didn’t need to look at her to see if I was right. “And of fire,” I said more softly this time, remembering the heat from my dreams last night.
Although I was more closed off because I was reading the cards, I could feel my mother’s anxiety crawling on my left arm, the one closest to her. I blocked out the sensation and laid out two cards, one crossing on top of the other.
“Pain,” I said, my voice a breathy whisper. “You dreamt of losing me in a fire,” I said finally and set the remaining cards down, not wanting the horrific details of death by fire and a mother’s pain of losing a child. My imagination was good enough for that. I glanced at the card representing my mother for the final piece and I nodded in understanding. “You wanted to know if it was just a nightmare or something more.”
My mother didn’t have prophetic dreams like I did; that ability had skipped both her and her mother. It was rough on me growing up because my great-grandmother passed away before I was born, so my mother didn’t know how to help me control the dreams, or at least deal with them, since she’d never had them. This had to have been a really bad nightmare for her to worry that it was possibly a warning of something to come.
“It’s silly,” she said finally, tapping the ashes of her cigarette on the edge of her ashtray.
“It’s not silly,” I said, scooping up the cards I had laid out, putting them back into the deck, and giving it a quick shuffle, trying to erase what I had seen. “Do you mind?” I asked, motioning to the wheel layout in front of her.
“What?” She blinked at me and then looked back at the table. “Oh, yeah, I guess you should.” I leaned forward and started dragging the cards towards me, breaking the layout she had drawn, and reformed the deck, tapping it on the table to straighten out the cards.
“Mom, you know you’re not supposed to read for yourself,” I said as I managed to get all of the cards going in the same direction and started shuffling again.
“I know,” she said blandly, as if just answering because she was expected to.
“Mom,” I said, making my voice a little harsher. I could have tried to open the channel between us and compelled her out of this state, but having just read for herself, she’d be more vulnerable and I didn’t want to hurt her. “Fine,” I said with an exasperated sigh, “do you want me to read for you?”
“Maybe,” she answered after a moment. I could hear the question in her voice. I reached for my cup and took a sip of the coffee, realizing it was hotter now than when I poured it.
“Don’t really want to know if it was real, right?” I said, quirking an eyebrow at her. “If it’s not real, that would be great, just a terrible nightmare, but,” I paused, shuffling the cards, feeling the tingle growing in my hands, “if it was real, would it be better to know or not know?”
“That’s always the question,” she said, pressing her cigarette to her lips again. “Fine,” she said as she exhaled the smoke, again turning her face away from me as she did.
“If you’re sure,” I said, but the sensation telling me to stop shuffling had already hit me. I set the deck between us and my mother reached out to cut the deck like we were just going to play a simple game. I picked the deck back up and began to lay them out, with no particular layout in mind, but once I was done, I saw I had laid out a wheel just like my mother had. Now came the weird part: letting my consciousness slip into the fuzzy state – that’s what I’d called it when I was child.
The gold ticking shimmered before me and the pictures danced just above the cards as I looked at them. I
realized a knot had started to form in my stomach, and I knew it had nothing to do with the knot in my mother’s stomach. Did I want to know my mother had a prophetic dream about me dying in a fire?
“Yes,” I answered out loud, hearing my voice like a whisper through a wall. That was another weird thing about reading; it was like separating from your physical self.
“Yes, what?” my mother asked, her voice pitching in worry.
“Sorry,” I said with a slow shake of my head, “talking to myself.” Or was I? I wondered if sometimes the questions that came to mind when reading the cards were the cards asking for permission to reveal their secrets, not wanting to give them away to someone who wouldn’t heed their warnings. But I had said yes, and just as quickly as I gave that answer did the cards speak to me. I could hear a low noise somewhere in the distance, like a violin being strummed slowly, and the pictures on the cards sharpened as I watched, waiting patiently for the answers to come.
“You dreamt of fire and pain, terrible fears you harbor in your mind,” I said and felt my mother sit up straighter as I spoke. “Even more terrible is the thought of losing your only child. What worse way to lose her than through pain?” I heard my mother hiss at my words, but it was as if I wasn’t the one speaking.
“Was it a warning? Could that really happen?” she asked, leaning closer towards me.
“Anything can happen,” I said, again feeling like I wasn’t the one speaking.
“I know that,” she responded impatiently.
“Then you must ask the right questions,” I corrected her, and I could almost hear her grinding her teeth.
“Is it a warning?”
“Yes.”
“Will what I saw happen?”
“That is yet to be seen,” I said, and my stomach flipped. “There are many paths for your daughter, the Earth Mother, to follow. Her destiny is not written, for each day she changes paths, changing her future.”
“Can she do something to make sure she doesn’t take the path that leads to pain and fire?” she asked, and I realized we were speaking as if I wasn’t really there. I felt like my consciousness was split in two and I was separate from this, like I was listening through a closed door.
“Meddling in the future is dangerous,” came my vague reply.
“But I’m a mother, I meddle,” she said, trying to lighten the mood, but failing as her heart sped up and her breath caught.
“She will have to choose whether or not saving another is as important as keeping herself safe. You would choose that she keep herself safe, but she would choose danger and risk to try and save another life.”
“But she’ll die!” My mother almost stood up, but caught herself and stayed seated, afraid to break my trance.
“Perhaps; it is not known. You only dreamt of one possibility.” My mother’s hands were trembling. I didn’t really want to hear much more, but temptation is the root of all evil, so I let the trance have its way with me to hear the rest.
“It will be a hard road to travel, with many twists and turns; each choice will provide a new twist, a different turn. She will have to decide without your influence because if she ignores the cries of help, she will surely go mad with guilt long before her days are over. You know this; it was the risk you took having this child. Tell her of your dream; let her hear the warning, let her make her own choices.”
Slowly my senses came back to me as the trance began to wear off. The pictures faded back to their cards and the gold around the edges stilled and lost their glow, leaving flat, unmoving cards laid out in front of me. The feeling of sharing my consciousness with another faded as well, leaving me alone in my head and the far off sound of music was gone. I blinked and shook my head to clear out the fuzzy feeling left and then looked at my mother.
“So, what was the dream?” I asked, taking the direct route.
“Yes,” she said reluctantly. She cleared her throat and took a sip of her cold coffee, snubbing out her cigarette with her other hand. I watched and knew she was itching to light another, but she didn’t chain smoke, so she stilled her hands and reined in the craving. She really only wanted it because of her nerves.
“Just do it fast, like a Band-Aid,” I suggested.
“Well, the end of it, you didn’t make it out of the fire,” she said and her voice threatened to break at the end. “I didn’t see you burn, thank god, but I think I heard you scream.”
“You think?”
“Well, I’m not sure if it was you screaming or me, so yeah, I think I heard you screaming,” she explained and I watched as a shiver ran up her body. “But I don’t really remember most of it. I know it was a much longer dream than I can remember, but I just can’t get it all.”
“The harder you try, the less you remember,” I said, wrapping my trembling fingers around my coffee cup, grateful it was still hot.
“Right,” she said with a sigh and finally gave into the urge and pulled out another cigarette and lit it before going on. “Anyway, I don’t think you were alone.” A sweat broke out on the small of my back.
“Was I being chased?”
“No, no,” she said, shaking her head. “I think you were trying to get to someone, someone trapped in the fire. That’s probably what the reading meant. You knew someone was in the fire and you were close enough to try to save them, so you did, but you didn’t make it out.”
“Did whoever it was I was going after?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered that, as if it hurt to realize my sacrifice might’ve been for nothing. But I knew better; I was an empath and could feel peoples’ emotions. Pain and fear are the two headiest emotions. If I knew someone was burning alive, I would have no choice but to try and help them. The reading was right about that. If I stood by and listened to someone die while their skin bubbled off of their bones, I would lose my mind; it would destroy me.
“Okay, well, that doesn’t give us much to go on,” I said, remembering the tricks to working out my own prophetic dreams. It was best to try and analyze them with as little emotion as possible so you could separate yourself from them.
“How old did I look?” I asked, looking up at her. “Did I look the same as I do now? Anything different, like length of hair maybe?”
“Actually, a bit,” she said with a nod.
“How so?”
“You looked thinner, like you’d lost your baby fat, and I think there was something a little different about your hair, but I’m not sure what,” she said, her brows drawn together as she looked me over.
“Baby fat?” I demanded, glancing down at myself.
“Shayna,” my mom said, rolling her eyes at me.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “All right, thinner and my hair was a little different. So it probably wasn’t anytime soon.” I took a sip of my coffee before saying, “Do you know what the weather was like?”
“No, but it was nighttime,” she offered. “At least, it looked like nighttime; the fire could’ve played tricks with the light.”
“Yeah, the smoke could make the sky look dark.”
“Exactly,” she nodded.
“Was anyone running with me?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head and closed her eyes, rubbing them with her forefinger and thumb.
“Not much to go on,” I said and she let out a laugh, but it wasn’t a pretty sound. “It’s fine, mom,” I said, reaching out to take her hand and give it a squeeze before I pushed away from the table to stand up. “It’s not like there’s a fire raging anywhere nearby anyway, right?”
“Right,” she agreed, but as I looked down into her face, I knew neither one of us felt fine about the situation at all. The sound of my own voice warning my mother to let me make my own decisions echoed in my mind. Let me risk my life to save someone with the possibility of being swallowed up by an inferno or risk my sanity. Some days it just didn’t pay to get out of bed.
“I’m always careful,” I said, bending to give her a hug around her shoulders, “you know t
hat.”
“I know, baby,” she said quietly, hugging me back. “But if you kill yourself, you better believe I’ll be following you to the afterlife to kick your skinny butt.”
“I know it, mom,” I said with a smile and grabbed my coffee to head back to my room. After a morning like that, or was it midday now, I needed to meditate and get my center back. Nothing like a cup of coffee and possibility of death by fire to wake you up in the morning.
Chapter 5
Now one would think the end of December was one of the months in the year where you would worry the least about fires, but in Southern California, fires raged all year long. Part of summer was the official “fire season,” but because of the droughts we always seemed to be going through, a lot of the mountains were just covered in kindling. Sadly, nine out of every ten fires were caused by humans, more often than not by their carelessness rather than malicious intent, though there was some of that as well.
Death by fire was my secret greatest fear. I’ve seen more than my fair share of mortal danger, so I had taken time to contemplate death and really decide if I was afraid of it. I was surprised to find out that I wasn’t afraid to die and it had nothing to do with that strange sense of invincibility most teenagers possessed. I wasn’t afraid to die because I had faith in something greater than myself.
Now even though I wasn’t afraid of actually leaving this life behind, I was very concerned about how I exited. Drowning, they say, can be almost euphoric, but I didn’t fancy the panic that would set in when I knew I couldn’t draw a breath. Freezing was supposed to be fairly painless, more like falling asleep, but again the panic of waiting to just fall asleep and the pain of ice eating my skin wasn’t ideal. Obviously we all want to die of old age and in our sleep after eighty or more years of life, but I learned we very rarely get just what we wanted in life. Burning to death though, now that was a special kind of fear.
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