Later, when I was a child and we had come to this country, my oma would sit out on the front stoop of our house, sharpening her knives across the sidewalk and steps. She would hull peas or break beans and close her eyes to see what they might tell her. By old age, Oma was small and withered, a bent stick with arthritic claws and a nose like a fish hook, and the neighbors thought her strange the way she babbled, and so they called her a witch.

They called her a witch as an insult. They did not know she had visions. They did not know the truth of it.

They would come to learn it.

There came a day when I had been abused at school again. I was a thin child, sickly, and it did not help that I had been born without a single sprout of hair on my worm's body. It also did not help that my English was not particularly good at the time, and I often had trouble speaking as well as the other children.

The boy who bullied me, a boy named Aaron, was a Jew. He was fat in the stomach, and had big muscles and curly hair, and he said he hated me because I was a German, a "fuckin' Nazi," even though I was not German. I am Dutch, I would tell him, Dutch.

It did not matter. At first the abuse was what you would expect. He would hold me down and beat on me until my nose bled and bruises covered my body.

But as the days went on, he did worse things.

He burned my arm with match-tips. He pushed things into my ears – little stones, sticks, ants – until I suffered from infections. He grew more brazen, crueler. He had me pull down my pants and he did things to me – he cut my inner thighs with a knife, and stabbed at my buttocks with it.

So I went to my grandmother. I wanted to know when this would all end. I said to her, show me, show me how it ends. I knew what she was, what she could do, but I had always been too afraid of it – too afraid of her – to ask. But now I was desperate.

Oma told me she would help me. She sat me down and said, "Do not be scared of what I can see, because what I can see is part of nature. It is natural. I read natural things, like bones or leaves or fly wings, and they tell me what is coming. The world has its strange balance, and what I can see is no more magic than how you look down the road and see a mailbox or a man walking – I simply see how everything will balance out."

Oma had a jar of teeth, teeth she had collected from many animals over many years, and she emptied that jar in front of me. She had me open one of the scabs on my arms from the burning matches, and she took some of my blood on her fingertips and ran them across the scattered teeth.