It must have been summer. I had no sense of time passing in the white world, the place after death. It wasn’t heaven or hell as I had been taught about them – no fluffy clouds and choirs of angels, no fire and brimstone. Everything was just white: a lack of color and existence. But the crowded boardwalk told me that here it was still summer. It had been summer when I died, riding home from this boardwalk. Someone had run me down and I became mangled with my bike. That was the last thing I remembered. Being punctured like a balloon. Then white.
As I drifted down the boardwalk, a couple in tears ploughed through me. Their arms were wrapped around each other so they formed an amorphous, snotty blob. Turning around to see what could have possibly caused such a disgusting display of public emotion, a storefront stood out to me. Above it was a sign, swinging in the sea breeze that read “P.M. Psychics”.
I backtracked and stood in front of the stall. The entrance was covered with black curtains, embroidered with silver stars.
It couldn’t be him, could it?
I shrugged, shaking my head at myself before stepping inside.
The room behind the curtain made me claustrophobic. The walls were draped in the same black starry fabric as the door. A small, solitary chandelier with one light bulb missing cast a dim glow around the room and made the metallic thread in the curtains glitter. The twenty-one-year-old mystic man sat on the far side of a table. He didn’t look like gypsies typically do. His dark hair had a cowlick in front, the bane of my mother’s existence on school picture day. Even though his face was down, shadowed in the poor light, I knew that when