In the history of visions, this is not an uncommon position. Almost nobody in the Bible likes being a prophet. Isaiah initially refused his anointing from God, and Moses tried to get out of it by saying he sounded dumb when he talked. Jonah turned tail and bolted, and you know what happened to him. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. Even William Blake’s mom spanked him every time he had a vision of God, and when he grew up, everybody walked around giving him shit, calling him a loony.

I mean, I’m not even sure these visions are from God. (Mom didn’t believe in God, and Murphy doesn’t either. But I do—always have. It’s like I was born with faith, knowing that God was in the world, same as oxygen and gravity. God was just a part of things, and it didn’t do any good for me to deny it.) There was a demon-possessed woman in Acts who could tell the future and who Paul exorcised just because she was annoying. What if I just have an annoying demon? Or worse, some mysterious tumor in my brain that no one has bothered to check for yet?

I always wanted there to be some kind of purpose for the visions, you know? I wanted them to be of real use to someone, to have been chosen for all this.

Or what if I’m just fucking crazy, huh? That occurred to you yet?

So I don’t know what to do with my visions.

I don’t know what to do with myself.

Grandma’s house was all creaking wood floors and tall ceilings and antique faded peeling wallpaper. Framed photos were nailed to the wall everywhere—old ones, black-and-white, and nothing in color. I didn’t recognize anybody from the photos. They seemed ancient and severe, women in gray dresses and men with big white mustaches in suits. I didn’t really know where our family was from, what our heritage was—Mom always said she was born without a past and it suited her fine—but I figured all these strange geriatrics were our ancestors. It was wild to see a hallway full of where you came from, like time was one long consecutive gallery that we were all a part of. There were a few bleary snapshots of a woman who looked kind of like Grandma except thicker, tougher-looking, like she was birthed in hardier times, holding two babies, twins. Nowhere, however, could I find a picture of Mom.

“Get a load of this place,” whispered Murphy.

The furniture was of the old chipped-paint kind. A cuckoo clock clicked its pendulum back and forth, and the light from the windows cast golden dusty beams across the floor. A piano sat in the corner, sheet music propped up on it. It looked recently polished, the bench a little crooked, like someone had played it not too long ago. I wondered if it was Grandma. But then I realized how dumb that was. I mean, of course it was Grandma.