June Flash Lit #3 - Consulting Fate

“Cash up front,” Posy said.  “No exceptions.”

It sounded like something you’d hear from a drug dealer or a pimp, not the kind of thing this grandma-looking lady with spectacles on a chain might say, and not in this kind of office with its therapist-neutral colors and soothing leafy art on the walls.  Manny made himself look up from the intentional crinkles of Posy’s off-white linen shirt and the collection of silver scissors charms that hung from her necklace into her eyes.  They were silver eyes, too, and he was pretty sure that the left one was glass.  Oddly enough, he felt like she could see just as clearly with the glass one.

He slid the envelope from the inside pocket of his sports coat and passed it across the desk.  “Now what?” he asked.

“The picture,” Posy said.

“Do I get it back?” Manny asked.

“Yes.”

His wallet hunched over his right buttock, right where it could give him sciatica when he drove or flew internationally for work.  He was away more than he was home these days, as Emma was quick to point out.  After the second vodka of the evening, he was likely to reply that with their neighbor Jim spending so much time over at the house fixing things, that was probably just as well.  And then Emma would take her glass of wine and her headphones and shut herself in the bathroom with the lavender bath salts.  Sometimes Manny thought he’d like to try that.  He was stalling.

“The photo is from a couple of years ago,” he said.

“Doesn’t matter.  I just need to see it.”

There they all were, Manny in his suit, Emma in a red dress seated in front of him, Ted with his not-quite-ready-to-growth-spurt ten-year-old pudginess and hair slicked down, and Ella, seven, hair pulled back in an Alice band, smiling.

“Which one do you want to know about?” Posy asked.  “I see four people here.”

“Ella,” he answered automatically.  It was Ella who was in the hospital, Ella who had lost her long hair, Ella who was fighting.  And then he wondered if Posy had said that because she saw something else, something worse.  He shook that feeling off.

“The doctors will say she is improving.  They’re wrong.  You’ll be there when she goes, you alone.”

Manny heard the words.  He felt like his entrails were sliding out through a slick hole in his belly.  He stood up, clutching it together.

Posy’s eyes rested on him, clear, silver.  There was a steadiness to them that might have been better than compassion.  They were real.

“No one will ever forgive you,” she said.