At first it seemed like a harmless diversion, a bit of fun on a lunch date with the girls, but when my wife started seeing the psychic on a weekly basis, I couldn’t help but turn skeptical.
“What do you need a psychic for?” I asked her. “You do understand it’s a load of horse shit, don’t you?”
But apparently she did not, because soon her visits went from once to twice a week.
“It’s a waste of money,” I complained.
My wife didn’t seem to care. She began to depend on her psychic in what I considered to be an unhealthy way. She couldn’t make a decision without psychic consultation, be it where to allocate her 401k contributions, which shade to dye her hair, or what to make me for dinner. On the advice of her psychic, she quit her job, insisting that both the cards and the crystals augured only ill omens from her continued employment. When I countered that our swiftly depleting bank account wasn’t exactly a harbinger of good times to come, she simply shrugged.
Soon she was seeing her psychic daily.
“Where’s my dinner?” I asked her. “Did you wash my blue dress shirt? What’s with all the dust around here? When is somebody going to clean the toilet bowl?”
But she just smiled dreamily and turned away, ignoring me as usual.
Then one day she went to an appointment with her psychic and didn’t come home. Not that day. Not that night. Another day and a night went by. A week. I ran out of clean underwear. Pizza boxes and Chinese take-out cartons covered the coffee table.
Enough was enough.
One evening after work I drove cross-town to the address I had from the psychic’s monthly invoices. It was a dark and dreary neighborhood of trashy-looking rowhouses. I found the place, a wide brown eye painted on the front door, and knocked. I knocked again. I banged my fist repeatedly.
Finally, slowly, the door opened. A buxom young woman in short shorts and a skimpy tank top stood staring at me. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a tiny black mole at the corner of a wide mouth and a row of piercings laddering their way up an arched eyebrow. I could smell my wife’s perfume mixed with another strange smoky fragrance, and my heart skipped a beat. I tried peering into the room behind her, but it was dark, too dark to see anything.
I folded my arms and glared at the girl. “This has gone far enough, young lady!” I began, voice stern. “Where the hell is my –”
Her icy little hand gripped my arm, taking my breath away mid-sentence.
“Watch yourself,” she said, dark eyes glittering crystal, and now I could see nothing but those shining black eyes burning into me. “I know all about you,” she purred.
