Crystal Ball

I'm one of those people who sees everything as an omen, an auger, a portent. If I could disect animals and read their entrails, I'd be tempted. This type of fortune telling is called hermispecution. (Some women do an emotional form of this type of reading, analyzing every toss-off comment from a man as if it came down from Moses on the tablets. I, myself, have never ever done this -- ha!) As nifty as this might be, it seems, well, messy, and unfair to the family pets and so I stick with runes and fortune cookies, horoscopes, the crazy babblings from strangers on the street. My last two fortunes read -- Be comfortable with being uncomfortable -- this will be very difficult. (Um, okay) and You must change your habits for some of them are bad. (No kidding) My favorite fortune of all time was received by my friend Priscilla and it read, "He loves you as much as he can, he just can't love you very much." At the time, it made perfect sense, and we couldn't stop laughing. I'm sure anyone who has been through the torments of semi-requited love would. Real love is like a spider-bite for which there is no cure -- you live with the poisonings of it until the day you die. Like the Bible says about following Jesus -- when you love, you love totally and you do not count the cost. You look back, you see the burning cities, you turn into the pillar of salt. You need no ghost to tell you this one.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"Do you believe in forebodings? Oh yes, yes, I do." Anton Chekhov

Crystal Ball
1 glass of pink lemonade
1 shot of vodka
1 shot of lime juice

To be served chilled in a bulbous glass.

Benedictions and Maledictions

First published in Spire Magazine:

Psychic Fair, 1981

When I was ten, a man I didn't know
told me that I had been Nietzsche's lover,
had known my mother before my birth,
that I had been her mother. He held my
hand and said, you will not always feel this
way, and I wondered how he'd known
I didn't want to. After it was over, he took
my five dollars and I walked toward my
mother and her friend. We drifted out of past
lives and into the future, toward women
would could look at the lines on anyone's palm,
believing destiny, however forbidding, could
come down to this, our own hands.