Nebraska

The sleepless boy didn't speak.

Avis said, “Just tell me what you see.”

“Just the rooms and some people.”

“You mean, people you know?”

He didn't say.

“How do they react toward you?”

“Afraid.”

“And why is that?”

She heard nothing.

“Hello?”

Priscilla was in an apron and cranking an opener around a can of tomato paste. Without looking up, she asked, “Is he still on the phone?”

“Are you there?”

Gary sighed. “I just wish I could sleep.”

“I know.” She jotted Willa on the notepad.

“Could you help me sleep?”

“I'll try.”

Priscilla tipped the can and spooned the tomato paste into a bowl.

Gary asked, “Is she your daughter?” and then, as if he'd overstepped, Gary hung up the phone.

She attempted to get a promotional interview at an Omaha weekly newspaper and was introduced to a Scorpio named Ed who admitted to writing “hash and thumbsucker pieces” that he could probably fit her story into. She could smell his prejudice like onions as his yellow eyes skirted away from hers and cigarette ash dripped onto his notebook and she was cornered and misinterpreted and preposterous words were put in her mouth. She heard herself saying she could predict a baby's sex from skin temperature. She got a sick feeling whenever she got too close to a Ouija board. Auras were usually pineapple-colored. She said a psychic was someone who saw the world just like an educated person could see the word dear, say, in read. She said she'd get herself into an altered state between consciousness and sleep and house ghosts and spirits would grayly appear in the corner of her eye.

“And you talk to them?”

“Yes.”

“In English?”

She didn't say.

Ed showed his tan teeth in a skeptical smile. “I take it, then, you're sort of a spook psychiatrist.”

Avis said, “I try to route them toward the God-spirit to seek peace and love.”

“You ever get laughed at when you say that?”

She scowled in an august and sovereign way. “I have been brought to test by ugliness of all kinds.”

Ed jotted a note and then cagily thought for a second or two, tapping his thin lips with his pen. “And how would you describe this God-spirit?”

She said, “The Holy Trinity of the Father, Son, and Comforter, plus the twelve high spirits that help govern the universe.”

Ed hurriedly scratched his pen across his notepad and shook his head in rich amusement. “Avis, you're almost too good to be true.”