Jillian was a genuine psychic, but her line of work involved more deception than premonition. She performed all manner of hoaxes: crystal ball communiqués, cartomancy, palm reading; of late, she’d added séance, aura analyses, and crystal healing to her repertoire in response to requests from her younger clients. Her customers liked that they could chart the palm lines she ran her dark, bony fingers across, that her tarot cards were covered in their sharply-outlined futures, that she knew how to make meaning from the formless coloured swirls inside the crystal ball. They liked it when she rolled her eyes back into her head and mumbled the few Latin phrases she retained from high school. Real premonitions came to her like campfire smoke in the eyes—gallingly, without warning. Customers didn’t like those.
Jillian’s aptitude for the day-to-day mundanities of psychic work stemmed, in part, from her ability to keep her finger on the pulse of the town’s gossip. Her true talent was knowing everything about everyone, an art she had spent the last four years perfecting. She passed her mornings in the Foggy Morning Coffeehouse and evenings at the Clawmark Bar. She got manicures at the salon, went to church every Sunday, and volunteered whenever Oxborough needed an extra hand: school events, fundraisers, food drives.
So when Kathy came to Jillian’s shop seeking advice on love, Jillian was prepared. She knew that Kathy’s husband was sleeping with Judy, Kathy’s best friend from high school. Accordingly, Jillian told Kathy that she detected a large disturbance in her love life, and that Kathy could find the answers she sought at the Clawmark. Jillian, of course, had overheard the bartender at the Clawmark telling a work pal of Kathy’s husband that he’d spotted Judy fraternizing with Kathy’s husband in the bar bathroom. Kathy did as Jillian advised; that very evening, she perched at the bar, grew teary after two beers, and heard the news directly from the bartender. Jillian liked to send her customers on little quests like this, because then they did not accuse her of lying, or of being a demonic thing sent from Hell to ruin their marriage. Now, Kathy returned to Jillian’s door once every other week. Good gossip meant repeat customers.
On this particular day, Jillian was exhausted and prayed that no customer would enter the store. She’d been kept awake by old visions, their predicted futures already neatly folded into her past.
Jillian’s prayers, as always, went unanswered. Just before noon, the bell on her shop door jangled, and in walked a customer: Ella Greene. The teen was paler than a ghost, face smattered with freckles, blonde hair buzzed short. Their small body was swallowed by a hoodie and baggy jeans. Their blue eyes locked on Jillian’s as soon as they entered, the intensity of their gaze setting Jillian on edge.
A month ago, on a sticky August day, the teen had flung Jillian’s door open in a panic, flooding the usually moody-dark store with sunlight. They had crouched low, as though hiding from something outside the tinted windows. Then Jillian saw what Ella Greene was afraid of: a pair of menacing shadows looming in the glass: two hulking teenage boys. There came a distant sound of laughing and yelling and whooping, and then the shadows and noise alike faded. In the distance, the boys raced over the nearby hill, toward the woods.
Jillian could taste the sharp sapor of gossip on her tongue. “What are you running from, darling?”
The teen flinched, as if just realizing that Jillian was sitting behind the counter. Their eyes snapped to Jillian’s, only for a moment, before they threw open the door and scrambled back into the light, still gasping for breath.
It had taken roughly ten minutes on social media for Jillian to figure out the teen’s identity. They went by Greene, but their legal name was Ella Greene, and they were a senior at Oxborough Regional High School.
Jillian recalled a particular story she had heard several times before, one only uttered in dark, hushed tones. By age eight, Ella Greene was a habitual runaway. They would spend hours in the woods, staying out so long and so late that they would sleep in the dirt and return home in the morning, their absence not troubling to their famously neglectful mother. One morning, Ella Greene did not come home. Two days later, after the search party had all but given up on finding them, the local police having deemed the case a kidnapping by Ella Greene’s absent, dirtbag father—Greene had shown up on their mother’s doorstep. Their hair was a bird’s nest, their clothes in tatters. Mud was smeared across their face and caked on their body. Their case was closed. And yet, some could not help but notice that the Greene who arrived back at the Birchbark Residential Mobile Home Park was…different. Stranger than ever. They had stopped speaking. Their mother shaved their head instead of brushing out the tangles, and they’d worn it boyishly short ever since. Rumours bred like mosquitos in stagnant water. Some said the new Greene was a ghost—that they had died in those woods and decided to haunt the town as revenge. Some said they were possessed by spirits or demons who used their child body to enact their devilish plans.
Ella Greene’s story was not particularly useful to Jillian, as its rumours had no basis in reality. No one could prove that their father had been involved, much less that the disappearance had turned Greene monstrous.
Today, as Greene stood in the doorway of Jillian’s store for the second time, Jillian considered the teenager. They looked just as afraid as they had last month. Jillian wondered if they were fleeing someone, or something, again.
Greene said nothing, staring Jillian down so severely that she had to resist the urge to squirm. She forced a smile onto her face. “It’s you again,” she said. Her voice ground and sputtered out of her mouth. She cleared her throat. “What brings you back here?”
Greene approached the counter and offered Jillian a flier. Jillian recognized it as her own, one of the many she had tacked up around town.
When Jillian spoke next, she forgot to perform, and used instead her normal, non-psychic voice. “You’re in the right place. What do you need?”
Greene pulled a crumpled twenty from the pocket of their hoodie.
Jillian took the cash and stood, said, “That will do.” She locked the shop door, then flipped the sign so potential customers outside would see: PSYCHIC READING IN PROGRESS—COME BACK LATER. She wasn’t one to turn down business, but she found herself nonetheless lingering by the door. This kid was creeping her out. Plus, how was she supposed to do a reading on someone who didn’t even talk?
Jillian took a deep breath. She should not be afraid of teenagers, no matter how strange this one was.
The psychic led Greene into the back room. Back when this place was a gift shop, the reading room had been a break room; Jillian had dragged a fridge, a water cooler, and a filing cabinet out of there and down to the road herself. Now, the walls were painted black and lined with bookshelves, displaying Jillian’s mother’s Halloween decorations from the 90s, leather-bound tomes from the used bookstore on Main Street, and plastic flora: creeping vines, foxglove, and lily of the valley. The crystal ball sat in the corner, draped, when not in use, with a purple velvet cloth that matched the curtains and the tablecloth. Jillian sat in the chair farthest from the door, and Greene took the seat across from her.
Jillian avoided eye contact by lighting the candles on the shelf next to her. “What kind of reading are you looking for today?”
Greene placed the poster on the circular card table Jillian used for her readings. They surveyed their options for a moment, then pointed to Palm Readings.
“Anything you’d like me to focus on?”
There was a long pause as Greene scanned the options—Love, Power, Success, Money—and finally settled on and pointed to the last word—Life.
Jillian laughed, half-nervous and half-amused. The word, simple and broad as it was, functioned more as a catch-all than a category. “That doesn’t narrow it down all that much.”
Greene finally caught Jillian’s gaze and frowned at her.
“You have to have something specific in mind,” she pushed.
Greene placed both hands palms-up on the table. The gesture was pleading.
Jillian obliged, taking both of their small, pale hands in hers. Their nails were gnawed to the quick. They were cold, as if bloodless, somehow inhuman. The fingertips on their left hand were thickly calloused.
“You’re a guitar player,” she observed. When they didn’t indicate that was true, Jillian continued, touching the lines as she spoke, “You’re an independent person at heart. You want to take control of your life.” The short, broken life line on their left hand. “But there are other, strong influences on your life path.” The long life line on their right hand. “These external influences—they will have a big impact on your future.” The deep lines of fate on both hands. The sun line crossing the fate line on their right hand. The—
And then—Jillian could still feel Greene’s hands, but she could no longer see them. She could no longer see the purple curtains, or the shelves, or her plastic plants. Her eyes were somewhere else entirely.
Jillian was in the woods. The ground was soaked, puddles forming in the mud, the air thick with rain. It was bright out despite the storm’s drabness, and the trees were stark and naked—winter. Jillian understood, in her blood, that what she was seeing was not past but future.
A blonde, waifish figure stood, back to Jillian, trembling. Jillian knew this was Greene with a certainty she was unable to justify.
Something especially strange came next: Greene lifted a rock above their head and brought it down, summoning a high-pitched wail from something Jillian could not see. They performed the gesture again, lifting the rock then slamming it down again, and again, and again.
Greene was about to move, about to step out of the way and allow Jillian to see more, but then they turned, sharply, and Jillian finally saw their face. They wore the same baby face they had in the psychic shop, but the expression was different—manic, affronting, somehow creature-like. And they were looking at Jillian with a terrifying insight, directly at her, eyes narrowing, as though they were seeing her not just there, in the woods, which would have been strange enough, but all the way back into the past where Jillian was sitting in her little reading room, clasping hands with a teenager.
Greene yanked their hands out of Jillian’s. The vision faded, and Jillian felt like she’d emerged from the icy depths of a half-frozen lake. Jillian knew immediately that the vision had ended prematurely. There was something else, something important about this vision that she had missed entirely.
She looked up at Greene in horror, but this Greene was not the one from her vision. This Greene was crying. Had Greene somehow seen what Jillian had seen? Did they sense that Jillian saw them as a monster? Or was Jillian the monster for hating a child who had not yet done anything wrong? All Jillian could be sure of was that they were equally terrified of each other.
It reminded Jillian of her first vision—which had struck her, as they always did, with uncanny clarity. She’d been nine years old; moments before, her mother had kissed her on the cheek, tucked her into bed, and shut off the lights. Suddenly, she was somewhere else entirely: the front seat of her father’s car, speeding down a local road in the dark. She wanted to ask why she was there, late at night, going too fast, in the seat always occupied by her mother, but she was unable to move her lips. Her father did not look okay. There was a wildness to him that Jillian had never seen before. Then there was a bright light shining through the windshield and a bone-crunching impact that jolted her back to her body, to her bed. She’d sat bolt upright and prayed that her father was safe, that her vision was nothing but a nightmare. The next morning, her father was in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading the paper just as he always was. Something tight and terrible in Jillian’s chest had eased, though she continued to pray, every night, for the safety of her father. As a child, she’d thought God had not heard her. Jillian understood now that the crash (which happened one month later, almost to the day) had been her father’s fault, as he had been drunk, and that God didn’t exist. Still, she couldn’t help but feel like there was something out there, that whatever it was had heard her, that whatever it was detected something wrong inside of Jillian, and because of this wrongness had decided not to save her father.
Now, as Jillian looked at Greene, she could see the teen’s life stretch out in both directions, this time not as a premonition: the past in front of them, perfectly visible, and the future behind them, unknown and mysterious as they fell backwards through time, rocketing toward that moment in the woods where they beat some living thing into the mud.
Greene stood and moved toward the door. They were gone before Jillian rose to her feet to stop them.
“Wait,” she eked out, but Greene didn’t wait, and the door slammed behind them.
They were already partway down the hill when Jillian finally made it outside. Jillian felt foolish at the thought of running after them, so she stood on the threshold of her shop, squinting in the light, her eyes too accustomed to the dark.
She called after Greene:
“Did you see it too?”
Greene paused for a moment but didn’t look back at her before disappearing around the corner onto Main Street.
Alone, Jillian didn’t bother to flip the sign in the window back to OPEN. Her hands started to shake, as they always did immediately after a vision. Her heart pounded, pulse thrumming in her ears, breath shortening.
Jillian hated to mix her work as a psychic with her actual psychic abilities. Part of her wanted to run outside and drag Greene back into the reading room and warn them about the vision. Her heart flung itself back toward the door, toward Greene, desperate with a need to protect them from their fate. For a moment, it felt possible. But then the weight of reality pressed down on her chest. She could not help Greene with the knowledge of their future; there was no point. The future never changed, and her visions were never wrong. This certainty made Jillian feel wretched and beastly, and she wondered what purpose she served at all.
She clutched at her stomach, wishing she could silence the slimy, thrashing monster inside of her.
Sofia Alice Gukelberger is a writer from New England. In 2024, she graduated with high honors from Emory University with degrees in Computer Science and Creative Writing. She now lives in New Hampshire and works as a Software Engineer. You can learn more about Sofia and her work at SofiaAlice.com.