She was surprised that the last message should be a mere comment on fortune-telling. She’d never at any time expected anything from those messages. Yet they did seem weirdly appropriate, not only because they could be adapted to her situation or lead her to create new situations, but because they manifested their own shadow. And that shadow reminded her of her own. It was like the photograph of a highway on the outskirts of the city, at night, in a storm. Her childhood fears were there. When she was a little girl she used to kneel on the seat of the car and look out the back window at the falling rain. When the wipers swept away the drops there would be an instant when the outlines of the vehicles behind were sharply defined, before they were blurred again by the rain. It was in that blur stretching back into darkness, bordered by lights, that her fear was precisely located, and she couldn’t take her eyes off it. Children didn’t have to wear seatbelts in those days and the distances always seemed greater because the roads had only two lanes and were full of potholes. But it could be said that the messages from the clairvoyant that appeared regularly on her cellphone were a manifestation of her own shadow. And the last message fit perfectly with something she’d been thinking through for months. Once she’d rid herself of any trace of faith and even the desire to go on playing the game, she miraculously received a message that was like the final promise of an unfaithful lover. I’ll never do it again. Miracles happen and clairvoyance exists.

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Rubén Bastida, María Lynch, Recaredo Veredas, and Alberto Olmos for their close readings and suggestions. Also the Residencia de Artistas Roquissar for its time.

The story “Rabbit Island” is dedicated to Sancho Arnal, a true inventor.

ELVIRA NAVARRO won the Community of Madrid’s Young Writers Award in 2004. Her first book, La ciudad en invierno (The city in winter), published in 2007, was well received by the critics, and her second, La ciudad feliz (The Happy City, Hispabooks, 2013), was given the twenty-fifth Jaén Fiction Award and the fourth Tormenta Award for best new author, as well as being selected as one of the books of the year by Culturas, the arts and culture supplement of the Spanish newspaper Público. Granta magazine also named her one of their top twenty-two Spanish writers under the age of thirty-five. She contributes to cultural magazines such as El Mundo newspaper’s El Cultural, to Ínsula, Letras Libres, Quimera, Turia, and Calle 20, and to the newspapers Público and El País. She writes literary reviews for Qué Leer and contributions for the blog La tormenta en un vaso. She also teaches creative writing.