Excerpt:

Funny thing about seeing the future, at least in Lindi’s case, was that it wasn’t as fabulous or as useful as one might think it would be. In the movies and on television, there’s always some epic disaster on the horizon that’s narrowly averted through the magical and mysterious mental powers of the heroine: a seat is abandoned on a plane before it splatters itself into the side of a mountain in a fiery ball of destruction, or a killer hiding in the attic is sensed before he has the chance to come bury a fireplace poker through his victim’s luscious and shirtless heaving bosom. These were of course the properly recognized uses of a precognitive power in the modern world.

Lindi could only dream of plane crashes and psycho killers, however. For her, the future could only be seen in bite-sized pieces, little pieces torn from the middle section of the newspaper—although who reads the newspaper anymore? Better to say that she got her flashes of the future from the little-read blogs of shut ins and Firefly fantatics. She couldn’t see plane crashes; she could see where she left her keys. She didn’t see murderers; she saw the garbage man looking through her trash for tossed panties and bras. There were no winning lottery numbers swirling up through the mist when she would buy a ticket, but she could see the random gibberish spelt out in her alphabet soup before she ever opened the can.

As far as amazing and useful talents went, hers fell pretty short of anything monumental. She knew what color gumball she would get out of the machine, but she couldn’t play the slots in the casino in Niagara Falls and win her way out of debt. And to make matters worse, what meager talent she had couldn’t even be called up whenever she wanted. It wasn’t like turning on the television and seeing what was coming next. No, when her power popped up its weak and unreliable head, it would happen while she was doing the dishes or painting her toenails a happily gaudy color, and then for no real reason and with very little interest on her part, she’d know what the next customer at the coffee shop was going to order before he did or that the first two rows of milk at the supermarket would be past their expiration dates and well on their way to the consistency of corn chowder.

It was on days like today that she wished she had a more cinematic power. The routine of her life was starting to wear on her. It was almost like a numbered grocery list:

1) Wake up.
2) Shower.
3) Have breakfast.
4-27) Wallow in boredom and monotony.
28) Go back to bed.

But if she could see something, really see it… now that would be worth all the endless repetition up until now, her 28th year of crushing normalcy. Why oh why couldn’t she stop a murder? Find a missing child? Pick a winning horse? Something… anything! Why else did she have her power than for that, even as lame at pitiful as it was?

Her “Amazing Psychic Power” was a relatively new occurrence in her life. Up until two years ago, she’d been just another average pretty girl who didn’t finish college and had no interest in dating within her friends pool. She’d already been working in the coffee shop for three years at that point, because really what were the options for a college dropout in Buffalo, New York? It beat working at the sandwich shop across the street at any rate, and she wasn’t above wearing low-cut shirts now and again in order to boost her tip-to-cleavage ratio. She could make a double frappa crappa Phi Beta Delta with foam and cinnamon faster and better than anyone in town, and while that wouldn’t necessarily win her any prizes from the Nobel Committee, she could wear that little fact with a mixture of pride and self-pity that was rather awe-inspiring in its own way.

One beautiful and sunny Buffalo morning (because, hard as it is to believe, Buffalo has a proportionately higher number of sunny days than any other large city in the northeast, which is a True Fact and of course impossible to believe for anyone that has never lived there), Lindi woke herself with a sneezing fit, a wet and icky series of blasts that left her hands gloved in nasty, thick globs of green snotty nastiness. She meant to rush to the bathroom to grab some tissue to wipe them with, but she only made it as far as climbing out of bed and collapsing in a moist heap on the carpet before she realized that she had woken from a perfectly wonderful dream of her, Johnny Depp, a pair of handcuffs and a bowl of chicken soup and into a nightmare of the horrendous Black Death. Well, perhaps not as dramatic as that, but it was certainly a bug strong enough to keep her tied to her bed for the rest of the day with a raging fever, aching body and unstoppable shivering. She slept as much as she could, alone in her apartment, and being one of those hardy souls that prefers to suffer in solitude, she phoned no one for nursing duties, especially not Richard, who had a Bills preseason party to host, and who in any case would have been useless in such a situation anyway. He didn’t have an unhealthy phobia of germs or sickness, but he did have a strong aversion to doing anything that would infringe upon his own plans, and an absolute adoration for carrying on and bemoaning his own existence when forced to alter his own life in even the most miniscule of ways. So she had huddled beneath her own blankets all day, sweaty and miserable, while her sickness raged on.

That night, somewhere between the fourth time she was praying to the porcelain goddess and wishing the railway spike being beaten into her skull would finally just pierce her third eye and put her out of her misery, she had her first Vision. Actually, in retrospect, she could hardly call it a *Vision* with a capital “V.” It was really more of a ~vision~, nothing major, nothing even that she would have paid much attention to other than in retrospect, in a sort of “huh, that was weird” kind of way. She suddenly realized that she had left her diaphragm at Richard’s house, and that one of his football buddies was just about to discover it while snooping through his bathroom medicine cabinet and looking for any stray pot that Richard might have had laying around. Odd the things we think about while we are in the midst of puking out our unborn twins, she thought to herself, and crawled like a WWI doughboy scrabbling under razor-sharp barbed wire back to her bed, where she managed just barely to weakly pull herself back up onto the mattress before passing out. She’d been asleep no more than five minutes before a distant yet insistent ringing pulled her to the outer edges of her sleep, awake enough to flail her arm wildly about on her night stand for her cell phone. She fumbled with it with eyes closed for thirty endless and aching seconds before managing to answer the call.

“Mrmph,” she said, more clearly and succinctly than she would have thought possible in her current state of health. Obviously her stamina was truly mind boggling, a virtual Rasputin.

“I thought I asked you not to leave any of that stuff over here.” For a moment, Lindi thought it was her mother and that it was ten years ago, when she had been sixteen and living with her father in Cheektowaga, a suburban satellite of Buffalo. She’d had a brief period of smoking cheap and nasty cigarettes that her older boyfriend would pick up for her from the Indian Reservation, and she generally left them in her room at her mother’s house, since her habit was completely half-hearted and she didn’t want to keep the foul things in her primary parental residence.

“Mom? Those aren’t mine. Bobby must have left them there.”

“What?” Her mother said, and then Lindi came out of her daze far enough to realize it wasn’t her mother on the line, but Richard. His tone, both accusatory and wounded at the same time, had merely touched a random synapse in her brain and brought forth the memories of her mother getting on her case. Ah, good times.

“What what?” she said.

“Your birth control,” he said, whispering down the line like he was a third-rate spy in a John le Carré ripoff, trading secrets to the KGB. “I thought you weren’t going to leave it here.”

“Jesus, Richard. Are you kidding me? I’m vomiting up my kidneys over here, and you’re calling me to bitch me out because Frankie found my diaphragm in your bathroom? And what grown man that isn’t molesting five year olds is named still named Frankie?”

“It jumped out of the medicine cabinet at him while he was looking for aspirin,” Richard said.

“It’s not spring loaded,” Lindi said. “Well, unless you’re trying to put it in, but if he was trying to do that, then he’s got another problem to deal with on top of being a pedophiliac pothead.”

“He’s not a pedophile. It was statutory rape, thank you very much, but only because the girl was seventeen. Hell, everyone thought she was eighteen. She said she was eighteen. I thought she was eighteen. It’s at a point where you can’t trust anyone without a fucking notary public coming along with you. And how the hell did you know it
was Frankie that found it anyway? I didn’t tell you who it was.”

“I dreamed it,” she said angrily, and then realized that she actually had in fact dreamed it, although not while she’d been asleep, but while hunched over the toilet and the remains of whatever had been in her stomach. “Huh,” she added, considering. “For serious.”

“For serious,” he repeated, “I don’t want to find anymore of that stuff laying around my apartment. I’ll put this one in a drawer, but you’re going to have to come and get it.”

“Throw it out,” Lindi said. “I don’t want to be using it after the pedophile had his paws all over it. I wouldn’t be able to screw without thinking about it.” She thought a moment, then said, “And who the hell cares if you have birth control in your apartment? You’re almost thirty years old! Your mother isn’t going to come snooping around your bathroom.”

“I just don’t want things leaping out at my guests,” he said.

Here we’ll freeze the film for a moment, to jump ahead a couple of years to the moment where Lindi has an “Ah hah!” moment while picking up a box of condoms. Of course Richard didn’t want her birth control in his apartment, because he was more than likely at that point banging every woman he could bring back to his place, and perhaps having to explain the presence of a mysterious diaphragm would have hindered his smooth Dashboard Confessional-on-the-stereo, wine cooler-lubricated seductions. She did a mental “I could have had a V-8” smack to her forehead, and went on with her life. Now, jump back in time and press the play button to continue.

“I’m going back to bed,” she said. “I’ll call you back once my eyeballs stop leaking blood. You make a mini-Frisbee out of the diaphragm or something, I don’t care. Just please let me fucking sleep, okay?”

“Aww, baby,” he said, suddenly turning tack and majestically transforming into Sensitive Boyfriend Man. “You just rest, and give me a call once you’re up and about, okay? That’s the best thing for you.” She noticed that he didn’t add that she should call if she needed anything, but then again, even his Sensitive Boyfriend Man uniform didn’t really hide his rather obvious and leisure suited sort of selfish side.

“I’ll do my best,” she said. “Talk to you later.” She hung up without waiting for his response, tossed the phone on the night stand and settled back into bed, pulling the comforter up over her head, burrowing. Odd indeed, knowing that Frankie had found her diaphragm.

Now, any normal person would have written that off to coincidence, and so Lindi would have as well, but over the next few days, more random bits of weirdness started raising their heads. She started noticing that when her cell phone would ring, it would already be in her hand. However, this would stop as soon as she noticed that it was happening. When she actively made an effort to predict when her phone would ring, it never would. As soon as her mind wandered off down other paths however, when the light in her phone booth was out so to speak, well that’s when the phone would trill at her, and again she would see that she’d already picked it up moments before. She found the whole thing vaguely unsettling for a day or so, and then moved on. Lindi wasn’t one to waste time lingering over things she couldn’t figure out.

As her first week post-plague went by, she started noticing little things, and keeping mental notes of them throughout the day: knowing a red car was going to stop at the corner outside her house; knowing what the next song on the radio was going to be before it played; knowing how much change she had in her pocket down to the last cent. Taken as separate events, none of these things added up to anything unusual. As a whole though, a pattern of precognition was obvious to her. A ring she’d lost months ago, discovered mysteriously under a bag of frozen waffles at the back of her freezer. Calling in sick on an October day that a freak snowstorm blew through town and shut the city down for a week. Getting into the line at the Peace Bridge border crossing into Canada that was the quickest moving, although the longest line when first approached.
Lindi knew something was up, although nobody else believed her.

“Are you still sick?” Sinead asked her when Lindi spilled her psychic beans, and felt her forehead with the back of her hand. “It’s coincidence, honey, coincidence.”

Lindi batted Sinead’s hand away from her head, and went back to wiping down the coffee shop’s marble counter. “I know it sounds stupid, but I swear to God it’s for real.”

“Yeah, but look. I’ll accept that there’s a possibility that some kind of psychic thing exists in the world,” Sinead said. “Something with a potentially scientific explanation, like pheromones or electricity or your fillings picking up radio waves or some shit like that. But I’m not prepared to accept that you catch a cold and then all of a sudden you can summon spirits to tell you if Elvis is really alive or not.”

“I didn’t say anything about calling up spirits. And everyone knows Elvis is still alive and living in an underground bunker with D.B. Cooper and the mummified remains of Amelia Earhart, so get with the program.”

The bell over the door rang as a customer came in. “Hey, it’s weird, I agree,” Sinead said. “But get back to me when you’re about to prevent a presidential assassination or something. Finding your car keys doesn’t really scream Mysteriously Awesome Power, you know?” She moved to the counter to take the order.

“Blueberry scone and Triple Frickle Rocky Mocha with whipped cream,” Lindi said, under her breath.

Sinead turned and looked back over her should. “What?”

“Hi,” the guy at the counter said. “Could I have a blueberry scone please?” He smiled at her. “Oh! And a Triple Frickle Rocky Mocha please.”

“Um,” Sinead said.

“Sure,” Lindi said, coming up and smiling back at the man. “Do you want whipped cream on that?”

“Yeah, okay,” he said.

“No problem. To go?”

“Please,” he said.

Lindi rang him up, then turned to make his order. She leaned in to Sinead on the way and whispered, “Must be our fillings are broadcasting on the same frequencies.”

Now, two years later and really nothing much had changed with what Sinead called her “Blaine-o-Matic” (named after the droopy-eyed street magician David Blaine, who in truth creeped out both Lindi and Sinead, with his card tricks, levitation and I’m-going-to-stab-you-in-the-face unflappability). Still finding her keys, still knowing her eggs had gone bad before she cracked a single one. Again, what could she do with it? Nothing. Like Sinead had said, come back when she could prevent a presidential assassination.

Lindi sighed. Well, at least it wasn’t a total waste. She wouldn’t ever be able to find Jimmy Hoffa’s body, but at least sometimes useful things came of it. She did, after all, get a flash that led her to leave work early and find Richard and his menage a trois with Patty and Paula—the Pee Pee twins, as Sinead referred to them—in her kitchen (apparently, he hadn’t wanted to mess up his kitchen with all the flour and chocolate sauce, although how he had expected to explain away the mess was more than her inner Nostradamus could manage). And while she would never be able to catch winning lottery numbers out of the air, it was handy to know where to sit in a movie theater to avoid being in front of the talkers. So perhaps it wasn’t all bad really.

That was when the Blaine-o-Matic dinged at her like a toaster and made her look up, just as the coffee shop’s door started to open.