“Not so different from your weekly séances,” I quipped. “You get up in all your customers’ business?”
“Only if I think they might be performing witchcraft.”
“Afraid you won’t be invited?”
“I’m talking about,” he lowered his voice, “the occult.”
I stared at him incredulously. “Have you seen yourself, man?”
He recoiled with offense. “I’m a goth, Ben, not a Wiccan.” He slid the book across the counter with a corpse-pale hand.
“I’ll remember that for next time,” I said, taking the book and tapping the side of my head.
* * *
The car rumbled into the gravel drive at the house where I rented an above-garage apartment. I opened the driver’s door to a thundering chorus of Neotibiden linnei10 booming away like nature’s own heavy metal string symphony. Although that’s a bad analogy, because while crickets utilize stridulation for their song – the rubbing of one body part against another, a crude version of pulling a bow across strings – cicadas are percussionists, vibrating a membrane in their exoskeleton called a tymbal.
Yeah, so anyway, it was noisy outside.
I tossed the new book, Harnessing Your Psychic Powers Part IV: Remote Viewing & Claircognizance, onto a larger pile of similarly themed texts beside my desk and quietly hated on myself for possessing any of them. Taking in the collection, I began to appreciate the merit of Ludlow’s witchcraft accusation. I even had a stack of religiously-themed candles on a nearby end table, though those had come with the apartment. Sure, I lit them from time to time, but for ambiance, not any ceremonial purposes.
On my way to the fridge, I paused at the giant LEGO sculpture that had risen from the surface of the coffee table in recent months. My parents had treated my moving out as their cue to begin a steady process of getting rid of anything I’d ever owned, including a massive tub of the plastic bricks. I’d planned to give them away, but started pressing them together one day, and soon, well. I found playing LEGOs to be a calming and cathartic exercise; and yes, I am almost thirty. What began as a mindless ad-libbing of pieces ballooned into a gargantuan living room monument that looked like one of those spiky naval mines set atop a golf tee. I reached down to the pile, grabbed a grey eight-by-two and a brown six-by-two, overlapped four of the studs, and pressed them together with a satisfying skritch, then added the component to the ponderous hulk.
There was leftover kale and chicken hash in the fridge, which I warmed, doused in barbeque sauce, and devoured with a spatula as I snapped more LEGOS onto the art. I subscribed to the canceling-out method of eating, where you eat as much junk as you want, so long as you cancel it out with something healthy. I figured the kale would counter tomorrow’s breakfast empanadas.
Holding the spatula between my teeth, I dragged my laptop over and tapped it to life.