Untitled
an excerpt

Fuck me sideways and scrub me dishpot, I think, and sit down hard in my recliner, which butts up against my desk in the corner. I run a hand across the digital screen there, and pull down the keyboard. My home screen pops up, and a flurry of email messages, junk filters, and various pop ups assault my senses. Better than coffee, that. The modern day wakeup call. On the top, a window flashes. Daily bloody horoscope. I don’t think twice about reading it, I just do. Natural and all.

Your Daily Horoscope for Pisces
You can have fun almost anywhere, even in the most
inappropriate of situations. Maybe you should tone it down a little bit,
lest your significant other come home late at night to find a
stripper named Esmerelda passed out on the sofa.
Your future happiness depends on this.
And sober up, cocksucker.

My hand floats the mouse over the X for a moment and I feel the contempt tugging a frown across my face. A picture of Madame Zelda taunts me from the box’s layout, her large blue eyes magnified through the crystal ball she held up to cover part of her face, her wide lips stretched into a “mysterious” smile, though two years taught me that the mystery had a lot more to do with how one woman could have lived twenty seven years of her life without picking up a scrap of common sense along the way, then with the manner in which she channeled the mystic energies of the universe through those fake lashes and lacquered nails.
Yeah there had been something magical about the idea at first - an astrologist girlfriend who could entertain you with hokey ideas that you could laughingly dismiss with a wave of science. Someone who thought you were destined by the stars, planets, and sunbeams to be together, and who would attribute your annoying and less desirable idiosyncrasies to forces outside of your control. In other words, a free pass from guilt trips for eternity, and a chance to escape the heavy burden of responsibility for one’s own actions.
But then reality crashed in, as “Zelda” gave way to the reality that was Josephine, with its two am tantrums, its mad insistence on feng shuing the liquor cabinet, which included throwing out a few bottles of ‘liquid bad karma”, its invented phrases such as “liquid bad karma”, and the repetitive and varied ways of claiming that she “knew that today was going to be one of those days” whenever business or pleasure ended on a sour note at night. Which was, admittedly, most nights.
It’d been a slow and painful decline from reading those horoscopes daily with a superior smirk on my face to reading them just to decipher what hidden messages might be directed at me, masked as a message to all born under the sign of the compassionate fishes. After I decided it was over, and she learned as much the hard way, the messages became a lot less between the lines, and a lot more likely to get her fired from her job. Somehow, this amps this drama, and makes me more curious to check them every day, and see if she’s still getting away with ruthlessly slamming my every habit, while insulting billions of other innocent people around the city.
I wonder if anyone has shot themselves in the head after reading “You’ve been feeling directionless lately, and it’s probably not without grounds. Purpose has abandoned you, and you have no one to blame but yourself.” I would at least expect one or two overdoses. For all the horoscopes on all the websites and all the newspaper pages throughout the globe, there has to be enough kooks who place stock in them to keep them prevalent. I wonder if “Zelda” ever thinks about that.
Plus, as she so liked to point out, incessantly and repeatedly, we Pisceans exhibit a high susceptibility to alcohol and drugs in the first place. And as we are the emotionally volatile sort, torn between shifting emotional currents, conflicting desires, and extremes of temperament, I don’t know what she expects other than a little bit of blood on her hands. It must be some sort of psychosis, some desire to drive men mad, though it’s usually the kind of complex I see in serial killers.
I would know. I’m a detective.