When the Interim Administration collapsed and the soldiers withdrew she was hunted as a collaborator and many of her compatriots and associates from the Hotel old days were killed, brought to justice or forced to live in the mountains as vagabonds or anonymous creatures. Joanne survived though and even prospered. She soon found the patronage of a certain powerful man ( ________ _______ ) who had her do futures for him and the members of his Entourage. The futures she did were still pleasing; warm like the sun, soft like the breathing of a feverish child, sharp like the tongue of a whore.

One day they brought a man by force to her apartments and bade her do futures on him. It was a weird gig – the guy was bound and smelled of fear and possibly faeces, they kept a bag on his head and a gun to his back.

I cannot do futures on a man I cannot see, she said. That is not the way.

So the warriors removed the bindings, and the bag from this man’s head.

The man was very beautiful.

I cannot do futures on a man that has a gun to his back she said.

So the warriors took the gun away and returned it to the locked metal cabinet where weapons were stored.

Then Joanne was nervous. She stepped forwards and laid her fingers at the skin of the captive’s neck whereupon the man stirred and made a animal sound. He looked up and in her eyes but she swiftly looked away. She could feel his futures then, strong like the pulse in his neck but when she spoke she lied, and said no, that she could not find it, that the captive had no futures she could see, only something murky and opaque.

Her patron laughed at this and commanded that she give up nonsense and tell the truth.

Joanne refused.

Six nights they gave her in a prison cell at the Radisson to change her mind and in those nights she thought about her old teachers’ words that her talents might bring both riches and trouble.

On the next day she was taken once again to tell the futures of the captive but the outcome of that meeting is itself murky and opaque, lost in the passage of time, unknown to the poets and in any case not recorded in any version of her tale.

intentions seem good

intentions seem good

Charlene lived her whole life near a park and sometimes if the grass was not turned into mud by rain and if the noise of machinery was not too bad she sat in it and enjoyed the ‘Sunshine’ ©. That was a big pleasure in her life.

One day her life changed tho cos she met a man. That night after she met him she wrote on her hand three words:

intentions seem good

One month later she figured out she was wrong.