Page 5 of Shadowing My Dreams
“I can… uh… Venmo?”
“That’s fine.” I held up my phone and pulled up the app. He held his phone near mine and grabbed the code. A few seconds later, I heard the tell-tale sound that I had been paid. “If you have any friends with an issue, give them my number.”
“Does this happen that often? I mean, this is your real job?”
That was a loaded question. “Well, you did walk into my shop, didn’t you?”
“But I mean… Your sign says that you deal with hauntings, but you also do a lot of other things, right? Like Tarot cards and crystal balls… I mean all of that stuff.”
“I can read Tarot when somebody wants it. But I’m a psychic, not a fortune teller.”
“Sorry, I… That came out wrong. I think what I was trying to say was – are there that many ghosts?”
“You have no idea.”
I opened his front door and walked out onto his very brown lawn. It had been a hot summer in Los Angeles, and with the drought, the city had really clamped down hard on sprinklers and unnecessary water use. Even his rose bushes were dying from thirst. I could feel their energy waning. The Earth was constantly crying these days.
Crystal balls? Why does every person in the world think that a psychic is a fortune teller? Even my own mother gifted me with a crystal ball one Christmas when she was actually trying to understand what was happening to me. I had a gift, or a curse, as my grandmother called it. She, too, could feel and see spirits. But my gift had quickly grown well past hers. By the time I was thirteen years old, I understood my place in the world. I had stopped being scared of the ghosts who visited me, and my family had finally stopped trying to suppress my talent.
I was born this way – and born gay, too. Ichoseto be flamboyant, but I never brought my gifts out for silly party games or tricks. I wasn’t a psychic who could read minds – they did exist. I could only read and see the energy from the living. It wasn’t always very helpful because people’s energies shifted constantly.
But the dead were alive to me as much as any person whose heart still beat. I saw my first ghost when I was six years old. My grandfather had died recently, and one night, there he was, sitting on my bed the way he always did when it was time for me to sleep. He had read me a story, and I fell asleep in the comfort of his soothing voice – but the first time I saw his ghost… I screamed, and the sad look on his face broke my heart, even at such a young age.
The next night, he came back, and part of me was terrified because I knew he was dead – but another part of me wanted him to appear again. I missed him so much that I lay in bed, hoping I would have one more chance to see him. He came. I could see the mist of him appear slowly in my room. It was fascinating, and my heart raced as his form slowly took shape. I reached out and he did too as he sat down on my bed. There was no shift to the mattress – he had no weight, but my heart leaped, knowing that it was him. My hand slowly went through his.
“Granpa? I’m sorry that I wasn’t there to say goodbye,” my small voice broke.
He pulled his hand back and smiled at me. My gifts were just blossoming, and I didn’t know how to communicate – it washot to listen. But the smile that appeared on his old face let me know that he could hear me.
“Aren’t you in heaven?”
He pointed upward and then pointed to me.
“Is this good… goodbye?”
He nodded, stood up slowly, and walked to where I sat. His hands passed through me, but a ghostly kiss was his last goodbye. I could see the glow, and then he was gone.
I never saw him again.
But it never stopped afterward. The seal had been broken, and my gifts jumped to the forefront of my small, confused brain. The other spirits were not my grandfather, and most of them never tried to contact me as they wafted through our house. I would pretend that I couldn’t see them. It was safer that way. Once they knew, they never forgot.
Growing up was a nightmare until it wasn’t, and I had learned to control it to whatever extent I could. My grandmother finally got my parents to understand, and before I knew what was happening, I met the person who would help me on my way as a psychic medium. She taught me everything and gave melessons to hone my abilities. She helped me be able to control when and what I saw.
She saved my life.
It was a short car ride back to my small office on Santa Monica Boulevard, and I turned my sign on and waited. Someone else would find me soon enough. But for now, I ordered Uber Eats. I couldn’t wait to eat.
3
Jack
Something is off.
It’s Los Angeles in the fall, but the sun is still bright in the sky. Outside, the temperature is almost eighty, but my house is super wonky. Cold spots just appear inside the house, and it’s not the air conditioning that I run throughout the year. I’m incredibly hot-natured, and even in the LA winter, I’m walking around in shorts and a t-shirt. But I actually put a hoodie on today because I’d suddenly get a case of the shivers.
‘Someone walked over your grave,’ as my grandma would have said. She was superstitious. Southern superstitious – they took everything very seriously. Don’t walk over a grave or let a black cat cross your path. Turn and spit if someone gives you the evil eye. What the fuck is the evil eye? No one could ever really tell me.
I’m also sore. My body has been fighting to get back into the kind of shape that I’m used to. I get winded a little faster than normal, and my muscles burn and ache with every circuit I do in the gym. It was lucky that I was in such great shapebefore the accident, but those months of inactivity did take a toll, apparently.
