“Thirty days, or just over the cycle of the moon,” I said, looking at Nellie.\u00a0 I looked for signs on her face that it meant something, a flaring of the nostrils, a widening of the eyes.\u00a0 I am not trained at that sort of thing, but you do pick up a little here and there just by being a real person talking to other real people.<\/p>\n
“Three times ten,” she agreed.\u00a0 She shrugged.\u00a0 “It is a hard burden, carrying a piece of death in your heart.”<\/p>\n
I was about to say, “I can imagine,” but put the kibosh on it pretty quickly.\u00a0 Yes, I could imagine it, quite clearly, but I couldn’t really feel what she was feeling.\u00a0 Imagine kissing someone with a ticker of doom, knowing that you can’t quite reach the (wo)man you are loving because they are not whole in themselves.<\/p>\n
Of course, if I put it that way, maybe it’s easy – a lot of people aren’t “whole in themselves.”\u00a0 I let my body go a little more than I ought for my intellect, and I don’t give my emotional feedback a lot of say in how I do things.\u00a0 Too often I’m an observer in my own body, so I can’t even say I’m giving my all to a lot of projects.<\/p>\n
Funny, if you’d asked me I would say that passion drives a lot of the practice, and really, it does, but that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily in touch with your emotions.\u00a0 I mean, I’m the sensitive new-age nice guy your mother warned you about in spades, but most of the time I have just the same amount of trepidation and concern for what others might think of me that cripples most of us in the social arena.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, I know more than those outside the practitioners’ knitting circles and theory sessions that hesitation can equal death.\u00a0 It’s the only thing I might have in common with those in the armed forces.\u00a0 It’s just a lot harder for someone like me to focus that feeling into closing a door.\u00a0 That’s something the heavy hitters can do – they can make that tear for your departed father or that angst for the unreciprocated love and, well, make magic out of it.\u00a0 Me, I can get excited over doughnuts, but I don’t generally know how to hold that and put it into slamming a door to the outside shut.\u00a0 Maybe it’s something I can learn, but probably not from the exorcism teacher.<\/p>\n
I just looked at Nellie.\u00a0 “I will see what I can do.”\u00a0 It was all I could promise.<\/p>\n
She knew.\u00a0 She wasn’t going to get her hopes up. She took a small card out of the purse that was under her chair.\u00a0 She passed it to me, and then got up.\u00a0 “I must go.”<\/p>\n
It was the name of a restaurant, closer to downtown Denver.\u00a0 Viktor said something in what I presumed was Russian, and Nellie shook her head.\u00a0 She and her purse and her sorrow left the room.<\/p>\n
Doloise stood up.\u00a0 I looked at the Realm curiously.<\/p>\n
“They are done conducting their business with you, ” she said.<\/p>\n
I looked at Andrei.\u00a0 “The,” and then he used a phrase I didn’t understand, “is not a poet,” he said with a smile.<\/p>\n
“It translates to… lord’s house,” Artur said, unexpectedly.<\/p>\n
Doloise smiled at him.\u00a0 Artur seemed to shrink an inch in on himself.\u00a0 Good boy.\u00a0 Realized she wasn’t the hottie you thought she was, did you?\u00a0 I didn’t ruffle his hair, but the fact that I was tempted was channeled straight from my dad.<\/p>\n
Maybe I carried a bit of the dead inside me, too.<\/p>\n
“It’s been a pleasure meeting the lot of you,” I said.\u00a0 Adding the, “Insane sorcerors though you are,” would have almost been redundant.\u00a0 Of course, none of them had actually done any magic I had noticed, but that didn’t mean anything.<\/p>\n
I walked out with Doloise, nodding at and this time catching the name of the woman at the desk.\u00a0 I wanted to talk to someone about this, maybe do some research on if there was some clue as to the afterlife I could expect contact with, but Doloise wasn’t the right person.\u00a0\u00a0 I didn’t want to call Maggie.\u00a0 Ed would have been off work and hard to get on the cellphone.\u00a0 I thought of and discarded another handful of people in the business.<\/p>\n
I guess the internet was going to have to be my solace.\u00a0 Maybe I’d sign up on a dating site.\u00a0 Was there a witchy version of the ones on TV?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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