Ch. 2 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask
…the present… (who heard the echo first?)
With a jacketed shoulder leaned against a tiled hallway wall, Deirdre reached out and knocked on Rehani’s door. Four teenagers, unmasked, joked their way upstairs from below. Deirdre, nee Imani Greene, reached out to repeat the knock when—
“’bout time,” Rehani greeted, flapping a hand that told Deirdre to enter.
Deirdre pulled down her own mask as she passed the threshold. A perimeter of Kosher salt lined Rehani’s apartment; the woman had nailed together a small step at the entrance so that guests wouldn’t break the seal on ingress. Deirdre stepped down. “None of the kids on the court had masks on.”
Rehani shrugged. “It’s an outdoors space.”
“COVID doesn’t care.”
Rehani wore bundled dreadlocks down to her waist, black sweatpants, and wraps of colorful sashes across her torso. In sandals, she flopped out of the foyer and into the main of the apartment. Despite having arrived from the Congo over twenty years earlier, she carried a slight accent. “You want something to drink?”
Passing under a dozen hanging devil’s traps and dream-catchers, Deirdre followed Rehani into the apartment’s kitchen. Deirdre also wore black sweat pants, with a camo tanktop and leather jacket above. A malignant growth of months-condensed and unmaintained hair snarled from her scalp where a clean-cut high-top once stood. It ached her scalp but she’d learned to live with it.
She’d learned to live with a lot of things.
Or without them.
“It’s noon,” she answered.
“So? You got anywhere to be?”
“I…no.”
“Well, not yet.” Rehani chortled. “Anyway, sanitizer’s next to the Tarot table. I’ll fix us up some, hmmmm…Cuba Libres?”
“You mean a ‘rum and coke?’”
“Sounds boring.”
Deirdre turned right, leaving the kitchen for Rehani’s living room—if ‘living room’ could adequately describe it. Rehani did relatively little living in the room, having converted it into an unofficial psychic business. While claiming not to use her actual psychic abilities with her clients—in fact, while claiming to have little control over them at all—Rehani felt confident enough in her theatrical skills to charge people for readings, advice, and fortune-telling. Deirdre found the industrial-sized jug of hand sanitizer and squirted some into her gardener’s palms. She rubbed her hands together and whuffed down on the over-cushioned couch that usually served as Rehani’s ‘waiting room.’
Rehani joined her shortly afterward, carrying a tray. Two coffee mug Cubra Libres and an enormous bowl of stew occupied most of the space. Next to the stew, twin plates carried pale balls of thick dough and twin bowls waited for filling. “Fufu.” Rehani set the tray down on the reading table proper. “And two Barista Communistas. Sit over here, come on.”
Deirdre sighed up from the couch and walked to the faux-velvet armchair opposite Rehani. She slumped down and sank into cushion. “You said you had something important to talk about.”
Rehani pointed a finger between the smaller bowls. “Serve yourself some stew. Or don’t and just drink.”
“I ate before I left,” Deirdre said. “I didn’t know you’d cook.”
“You didn’t?”
“I…no, I didn’t. Why would I know that?”
“Sometimes people just know things.”
“Sometimes psychics just know things,” Deirdre corrected.
“And I wish it was more useful than it was,” Rehani replied, half a joke.
“So, free drinks, hot food…do you need an advance or something?” Deirdre worked as an apothecary, trading in supernatural prescriptions and supernaturally-modified recreationals as her major form of income. “’cause you can just ask and I’ll give it to you.”
“Rude,” Rehani accused. “So rude.”
Deirdre opened her mouth.
“No,” Rehani pre-empted, “I don’t need some ‘advance.’ And it’s impolite not to talk to a friend after such a long absence.”
“Sorry.”
“Whatever,” Rehani flapped a hand, “we’re all learning how to be with people again.”
Which was truer for Deirdre than for most. For five years she’d taken care of a boy who went by ‘Razz.’ The summer before, he’d been murdered. The people who’d done it had all ‘gotten theirs’ to various extremes and the bloodfire from that had kept her moving for a few weeks afterward. But eventually…
The official COVID lockdown had only extended a solitude she’d already long held.
She cleared her throat. “But you did say you had something important.”
“Rude.”
“Sorry. So. What’s up, then?”
Rehani leaned back in her fortune-teller’s chair, high-backed and tapestry-draped. “You know that Vietnamese woman down the hall?”
“I don’t.”
“She’s the one who walked out naked in front of all those cops at downtown precinct.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
Deirdre nodded. “Wow.”
“Chh. Right?”
“You get her autograph?”
Rehani chortled. “Maybe when she gets out of jail.”
“They arrested her?”
“Oh, she’s out from behind bars, Oceanrest PD can’t fuck up those kinda optics after last summer’s shit show. But they charged her. She’s got a court date.”
Deirdre shook her head. “Goddamn.”
Rehani shrugged. “Dark days.”
“It doesn’t take a psychic to see that.”
Rehani pulled a piece of fufu away from the larger whole and dipped it into the stew. She put it in her mouth before the soup had all dripped off and used her index finger to stop a stray drop’s descent. She wiped it on her clothes. “I had a vision.”
Deirdre pried off a knot of fufu. “What kind?”
“What kind you think?”
“I meant what did you See?”
Rehani reached into a hidden pocket folded somewhere among her fabrics and procured a wrinkled sheet of notebook paper. Handing it across the table to Deirdre, she said, “I was off on dreamer and sixth sense stims. Was meditating, focusing my Sight, and this shit hit me out of nowhere. Wrote down everything I could remember, after.”
Deirdre hesitated. “Do I want to read this?”
Rehani scoffed. “Did I wanna write it?”
Deirdre read:
it moves unharassed peels souls over itself
it’s happening again
oh spirits what if it’s happening always
there: a knight, her armor rusted, hair a crumbling stormcloud
the key
a hanging man / blood pouring down / change
they scream in the streets
there: a seer who plucks out his eyes not to see,
pours poison in his ear not to hear
all the things wanting into this place
it’s pushing thr / who are you?
who are you? who are you?
take off your mmmmm
aaaaaa
sssssss
CALL HER NOW
“Goddammit,” Deirdre muttered.
“And that’s when I called you.”
“God-damn-it.”
“I thought: ‘who do I know who sounds like a knight in rusted armor with real fucked-up hair?’”
“You know what?”
“What?” Rehani asked, palm uplifted to indicate Deirdre’s head.
Deirdre didn’t really have a response.
Rehani waved an apology. “But, anyway, maybe it is time you took on another… ‘case.’”
destitute, the squatters and indigent of Oceanrest’s most scarified reaches. Once, people had conjured the unofficial burden of ‘Sheriff’ for her. They’d called her ‘the Sheriff of Squatter City.’ But she hadn’t taken a case since…well, as with so many things, Since.
She folded the page in her hands.
“It pretty much calls you by name,” Rehani added. “As close as it calls anyone, at least.”
“Yeah. I think it calls someone else out, too,” Deirdre grumbled.
“Where’s that boy live, anyway?”
Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents
