One day, I wake up with $40,000 in the bank where I used to have none. Well, none is a bit hyperbolic but not a lot. Sometimes I’d be able to scrape together a grand that I inevitably needed all at once later, for a deposit or critical emergency or the beginning of luxury. The poor understood crisis differently; it existed in a constant loop and you can never leave so you adjust to seeing the statement say 200.00 every month and you try not to think about it.  Sometimes you have to take a trip to spain and forget about the medicine.

I don’t like to gloat unless it’s about being right and then I am loud. One time, a friend texted me after a tarot reading, maybe only a couple weeks later, and I had noticed she was put off by it at first but she wrote,
“And I met someone, I really like him, it’s super secret and you were right! I know you like being right so I wanted to tell you.”

I did enjoy it. I liked being right, rich, well fed, skinny, opulent, buoyant, busy and in love. I had been saving carefully to buy three medical procedures and two new houses: for myself, my mother and my father.  My father had a heart attack that almost killed him.
“How do you convince someone their house isn’t haunted?”

I was talking to my friend about the fine line art of “reality testing.”
“Or that they are not haunted?”
I was explaining how to hold two things at once without favor.
“Or that people aren’t watching them online?”
We were at the beach.
“Reality testing is a common practice for people experiencing psychosis in which they talk to another person about the delusion and most people do it with a psychiatrist. BUT,” I suddenly project my voice, eager to keep the attention, “You can also try to test with the person you are having the delusion about but it only works with the person if you get an affirmative answer.”
He was gazing at the waves but engrossed.
“You mean you only believe them if they say yes?”
“YES.”
I dig my toe into the sand.
“Imagine deliberately asking someone if they were stalking you or watching you. You would only believe them if they say yes because otherwise you would always think they are protecting themselves.”
He nodded, looking at me, “That makes sense.”
“So I had a ton of clients that believed their neighbors were spying on them. I could tell them they weren’t but only their neighbors could admit it. And no one would do that. And in our world, people are being stalked online. So people kind of spiral,” I make that perpetual motion with my hands, “And you don’t get any definitive answers because the truth is we are all being spied on.”
I watch a wave crash.
“It’s not just in our heads. Some people are just really sensitive.”
“Hmm,” he started. “So how would you ever reality test?”
“You don’t. I mean, you try. Bring statistics and probability into it.
The likelihood of the TV being directed at you is high because of the way advertising works now, but it’s also not sentient so to break the pattern of thinking electronics are talking to you, you first have to accept they were programmed to cater to your desires, and then to ignore them. But the likelihood of your neighbors watching you is less. Your crush, maybe. An abusive ex, probably. The mailman, unlikely. And the internet is father: always watching.”
“The algorithm,” he said.
I was always talking about the algorithm.
“So anyway, you can’t actually tell me that I don’t owe these ghosts a favor because you can’t tell me that my house isn’t haunted, that I didn’t invite them, that I didn’t communicate with them and ask them for help. Only the ghosts can tell me I don’t owe them anything. Only years can tell me. Only no one can tell me because I would only believe the affirmative. You can’t say no.
“I can’t.”
“No, you can’t.”
We both watched my feet in the sand.
“But I can teach you how to kayak down Alligator River.”
“Yeah.”
We both watched the waves crash.

I started guessing with a 98.3% accuracy rate.

“datura moon”

“And what happened when you saw the cricket near the spider’s web?”

“I swore allegiance and provided favor.”

The day all of the computers shut down in the office, only my third day in believe, and yet another blizzard, my new boss said to me
“I think you’re doing it.”

Which didn’t help anything. I would be sent home early for a computer malfunction or the weather or anything really. It didn’t matter. I was paid to walk to and from my house in the middle of a snowstorm. Mania gives you ideas; about thirty a second to be exact, and you can only execute a few at once.

I have a mirror and god in my pocket to find him.
I had a lot of notes like that. And like this:
Sylph storm song soul sign poultice moon poultice sky poultice air
And like this:
Picture book: main characters name is (redacted) book title my book is about my life and fantasy? The dreaming but tell it like it is, yes she fantasizes to survive and we see it play out, does she spiral?

I am sort of skipping home and sort of trudging, always stopping to write something down and now I have another idea for a business and
I write an entire business plan one day, the entire plot to a book the next, about seventeen impassioned letters to a man I don’t know, and then all the card readings. Sometimes I wink at the streetlight, start winking at the microwave. My oven timer is going off again. I go to my new job and the printer won’t start and the power goes out and I am blinking to send a bird to your window.

Dear God, another favor, I begin.
But first I have to take a bath. I take so many baths that winter.
Just drown yourself, Cat, the man with the crooked smile says.

I begin to will the wave. I stare at the drain, patiently. I will the ripple. I sit for forty minutes, shriveling in my skin, watching a candle flicker before I will the wave to move.

“I have another idea!”
I turn to the little girl sitting quietly on the edge of my bed and ask for favor.

“psychokinesis” or “the act of naming things”

I start with the wings: black, silver sparkles dot the lining, and the wig. I practice my eyeliner. I begin to try on masks. I am getting ready and nearer.
I set the candles on the floor carefully. There have been many accidents already but I feel assured that tonight nothing will catch on fire. Pull the lace over my face and coo.

Like rains that fill the oceans wide, I swallow lives with turns of tides. I break men but not my stride.

I begin to charm her.

“the woman who walked out of walls”

“And what did you think when you saw the caterpillar?”

“I swore allegiance to the cricket.”

“I’m gonna take a year off health insurance and see what happens.”

“Do you really not know how thin you are?” a friend asked me, picking through my donation pile.
I shrugged. I lived in a house with four full length mirrors and no concept of self.
“I mean you’re a Leo and I follow you on instagram. Do you not look at the selfies before posting them or Oooh this is cute,” she picked up a pink maxi skirt.
It was a few days before this all really happened. Before it all really coalesced and picked up speed from there. The night I saw a text from my best friend about the sudden surgery she needed and the only reason she wasn’t going in next was because a flight to life had taken precedence. When she said it was ectopic, miscarriage,  I had the flash return. Not that this is how we meet again but how I paid attention again. The way I was scared her whole first pregnancy, rushed to her labor and never told her of the visions of the dead baby, the omens, the death and haunting. I wrapped the house as she rushed to the hospital. I banished the ghost to the basement and the way the fear wrapped my throat like two dark hands. I saw many things. Do I drown my child? I asked the cards. Most of what I have kept hidden is to protect.
But suddenly the word ectopic is in your search engine. Suddenly a flight to life is at the same hospital. Suddenly your mantel is full of black candles again and you’re texting her jokes.
“25% blood. May need a transfusion.”


“We want to do a biopsy to see if it’s cancer. It’s a goiter. If it’s cancerous, we will have to do surgery to remove it. It’s overgrown and obstructive.”
Doctors speak like that; with an ice cold cadence I truly crave. People murmur emotion. Give me facts and statistics and search engines and the frigid whip of a sentence. Life, the ever fucking sadist. I started by guessing. I started taking guesses at people who looked at me longer. I started taking guesses at the timing before I sent that heart. God told me to do this. I start falling fast and hard as promised. I start guessing with a 98% accuracy rate.

“crossing the bridge”

Once or twice a year, I let a man take me on a date. Something fancy that I picked and I take everything out on him. I show up petulant, murder in the eyes and crazy.
“I have to move.”
I pick at my asparagus.
“Oh yeah?”
He is of average build, intelligence and dress.
“My house is haunted.”
He kind of smirked a little and I watched him. I knew
I couldn’t chew and swallow the asparagus in a short enough amount of time that was acceptable on a date so I am suddenly unsure why I ordered it. I am unsure where to take the story but
“It’s the second haunted house I’ve ever lived in.”
I am wearing a low cut red dress and avoiding all eye contact. I am not wearing a wig.
“Why do you think it’s haunted?”
“How do I KNOW it’s haunted?”
I didn’t look at him to know that he was smiling.
“How do you know it’s haunted?”
“A little girl takes over my body at night and whispers secrets in a southern accent.”
I enjoyed recounting all the ways I had been discounted by men in front of them. There are people who pay hundreds of dollars to have mediums enter their house to release spirits. There are people who pay for tarot daily and I know because they pay me. There are people who pay for past life regression therapy in which a stranger tells you that you were once plated in gold before being slaughtered at the throne and then reblooming as a tamarisk in Egypt cut too soon. When you wanted legs, you had to start back over on a slow crawl through Earth as a dung beetle before you would learn to cross a bridge in combat boots. People pay for all of these preternatural things but you are here, ordering a ten course meal you can’t swallow just to be painted as both cross and deceptive for the evening. It is dangerous to believe everything you hear or think. I take a gulp of water. Mental note: this is my fourth glass of the evening and we are only on the fourth course.
“I have an anxiety disorder,” I tell him later.
He nods too expectantly so I throw out some others.
“I can’t have wine because I’m an alcoholic. I once drank so much I threw up on my coffee table and because I had no more liquor left in the house, I slurped it up with my tongue.”
We will not be going home together. He will not be seeing me naked.
“I once came to holding a knife over my wrist apparently about to text someone for help.”
That’s my favorite highlight in the reel. But there is more.
“I am guessing at a 95% accuracy rate.”
He has grown more tepid with time, a little more guarded but still inquisitive. We are eating sorbet now. I know that he will invite me home and I know I will suck his vape on the way towards the corner and part ways last minute. I know what he can’t verbalize.
“ I went to Busch Gardens and I guessed every single color correctly. On the sky tram, there are three different color trains in no particular sequence. Randomized. While Leana and I waited, I would guess which color we would get. I was right every single time.”
“That’s 100 percent,” my genius pointed out.
“Yes, but I am not right all the time and around other people I sometimes acquiesce away from my own favor. i do better alone or in teams in which we both believe strongly. Leana and I played games like that all the time as children and I usually guessed right but as I aged, doubt set in. Confusion,” I wave my hands towards the other patrons. “Like on St. Patricks day, my friend and I bought a lottery ticket and we had to guess the numbers…”
“Wait, you’re mad you didn’t win the lottery?” he interrupted, his mouth full of banana.
Disgusted, I still withdrew a snarl, “I’m not finished.”
Silence from both parties.
“St. Patricks day is considered a lucky day and we both felt lucky. We wanted to play the lottery. Thought it would be lucky. What is the luckiest number of all time?”
He paused, I raised an eyebrow, beckoning, showing there are no tricks.
“Seven?”
“Yep,”
“Is that what you picked?”
“Nope. Guess what I picked? The unluckiest number of all time.”
“Thirteen?”
“Thirteen. We didn’t win. Superstition got the best of me.”
“It’s just numbers,” he shrugged.
“Numbers have meaning and my intuition told me today is my lucky day if
I pick the luckiest number of all time. Thoughts have meaning.”
“So why didn’t you pick seven?”
“Thirteen means a lot to me. I was confused. But anyway, it was the person I was with. We play the lottery together. We do other things too but sometimes I think something and say something else or start walking the wrong direction CONFIDENTLY she would say. And it’s not always like that but when it is, I don’t get it. It comes out around her more.”
“Like she put that thought in her head? That you will lose?”
“No, she told me I have a strong intuition, that in am one of the most self sufficient people she knows and that I should trust myself. More her power. I submit so I can be taken care of in a way. I don’t know. Sometimes I feel pressure to perform a psychic circus. With her, many strange things have happened but she believes in randomness and I believe in other things,” I wave my hands around, catch him peeking at my cleavage. “But something else.”
The waiter drops the check and I make no move.
“The other day I was walking down the street and saw a cricket running.”
He pulls out his card.
“Running?”
“Running, not hopping, which I haven’t seen often. I thought the threat of danger must be upon it to make it move so fast in that direction under the streetlights like that. Kind of out in the open.”
He is leaning forward. The date is over. He will invite me back to his place despite me giving no obvious clues that I want that and he will offer an alternative.
He will want to walk me home.
“So I avoid it, walk over it, thinking it to be a cockroach at first, and I have a good eye. I walk only a few steps further and see a fat ass caterpillar, plump, crossing the sidewalk. That cricket was running towards a mouth, not away from one. It was hungry.”
I am starving. He didn’t blink. I cocked my head slightly, waiting for his friendly incursion which he was sure to give. He blinked and waited.
“So you were…wrong?”
“I am only guessing at a 96% accuracy rate now.”
I held my hands out like the little “duh” emoji.
“I was wrong. I thought the cricket was running from something, not towards something.”
The waiter came back to drop the check for the last time.
“Believe it or not, I used to bat a solid 99 every time. It’s how I made Summa Cum Laude.”
He followed suit, sort of standing to sign for the tip as he could see I was about to dash.
“But you don’t know the cricket went after that caterpillar.”
“There is literally no other explanation for a cricket to leave the cover of leaves on a public sidewalk under that kind of light with those kind of footsteps unless it was after something or fleeing something. Insects are instinctual only. They would never put themselves in such a vulnerable position. That caterpillar was fat and close.
I would have eaten it too I would have definitely stayed on its trail. And why would I have noticed any of these bugs? Why then did I look down to see both in action at that moment?”
Even though I didn’t want to, I flashed a flirty smile. We began to walk. He had no rebuttal. I threw in my penchant for straight As to thwart him. The truth is I didn’t stick around to see the crickets next movement. Stalking prey can take hours and as whimsical as  I can be, my knees are tired. I have let pragmatism envelop me in her warm, protective cape. He handed me his vape.
“So I live around here but no pressure, I know you said you were busy.”
“I am extremely busy and enjoy spending time alone,” I cut in.
“Well, and I know you’re self sufficient and can get…”
“I am completely capable of walking home alone.”
I took his vape again.
“There’s a park around here if you don’t want to go home yet.”
I blow a plume at his face.
“I am looking forward to my long solo walk home.”

I start batting with 97% accuracy.

“datura moon”

the way they lie to women,
cage them.

“gaslighting” or “the act of naming things”