We are intrigued by the weather. Something in our human DNA requires us to have at least two weather apps on our phones at all times to have immediate access to all the local and national forecasts by the minute if necessary. And it’s absolutely wild how anxious we get when those app reports contradict each other? I have four apps myself: the app that came preinstalled on my smartphone, the Weather TV app, the Storm Tracker app, and the NOAA Weather Radar app.
After hearing that, you probably believe I have an unhealthy obsession with weather. Well, it’s not that or a sanity thing either. I assure you I’m in complete control of all my faculties.
I check all these apps around the clock because when it rains, two things happen. My powers work. Then they show up with that ghastly tapping on the circular window in my attic.
“Damn!” I see on my weather apps that there’s a hundred percent chance of thunderstorms, which means rain all night. That means I’m working tonight.
They’re coming because of my abilities. You see, I’m a psychic, but with limitations. My telepathic powers switch on only when it rains outside. On rainy nights, I work for a broker who facilitates what I can do for our customers in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area.
The storm started a few hours after nightfall. When that happens, I’m expected to be waiting in the attic for them to arrive to give me my work assignment.
My attic is quite bare because it’s partially finished. I set up a television area with an 18-inch TV set that requires an antenna and a camping hammock in the corner. Since the antenna picks up only two channels, my viewing options are Little House on the Prairie reruns or old Hanna-Barbera cartoons. I enjoy Thundarr the Barbarian, so I’m picking the cartoons.
I’m lying in the hammock, facing the TV, with my back to the attic window. I’m hyper-focused on the cartoon when the noise of glass pecking drowns out whatever Thundarr is saying. “They’re here.” About time! I’ve been waiting a while now—a long enough period to have watched five Thundarr episodes. I’ve become antsy.
There’s more pecking on the window. I turn my head toward the window and see them. A large, red-eyed blackbird is on the other side of the glass. My employer’s magical messenger raven has a tiny scroll (my work assignment) in its beak and is feverishly tapping on the glass to come inside to deliver it.
They see me almost flip the hammock over and spill onto the floor while getting out of it, but luckily, I catch myself.
The raven suddenly becomes restless. They tap away on the wet window and start to make deafening bird noises. That with the sound of the rain and thunder is overwhelming. It seems my almost-fall transferred my anxiety to them and amplified it.
“Calm down, I’m coming.”
I press the circular window to open it. The entire glass pane swings out, and the raven swoops in, lands on the top of my TV set, and shakes the rain off their feathers.
“Come on, show some respect! You’re getting everything wet,” I said, irate.
After giving my attic a bath, they drop the tiny scroll from their beak onto the table on which the TV set rests. “Someone’s mind needs attention,” they caw. Oh yeah, they can talk.
I look at the scroll and wonder what task they gave me. Our clients usually want their minds wiped or want me to read someone’s thoughts, which I admit is intrusive and deviant. But hey, my moral compass doesn’t rotate when the minds I’m intruding on belong to a cheating husband who’s been lying to their wife and family about late meetings with coworkers, who’s their mistress. “Screw that guy!”
“Someone’s mind needs attention,” they caw again.
I grab the scroll from the table, remove the tie, and unroll the paper. My assignment tonight is to wipe the mind of someone named Bailey.
“Bailey, why is that name familiar?”
The raven flaps their wings and flies out of the attic, back through the window, and into the storm. I’d better be going myself.
———————
The thunderstorm was tremendous. The thirty-minute drive to Bailey’s house was perilous, to say the least. I drove by one wreck, hydroplaned once, and almost got hit by a cool person driving too fast in this mighty downpour. Halfway to Bailey’s address, I remembered why he was familiar. “Damn.” My attitude suddenly turned to a dread of our momentary interaction.
I first discovered my powers as a kid. My cousin and I were waiting for his parents to pick us up at the movies. We just watched the second Mighty Ducks. We were under some shelter because the rain was coming down hard. My aunt and uncle pulled up, and we darted to their car. You could tell that they had been fighting. The tension was coming off them like steam.
We were at a stoplight. The wiper blades were going a mile a minute. My cousin said he wanted Taco Bell for dinner. My aunt told him that they were eating leftovers. Then I heard my uncle say something. “She can’t know about Denise and me. We’ve been so careful.” But no one responded. He didn’t speak. It was all in my mind. It was like I thought it up. I asked my uncle who Denise was. I was curious. I didn’t know that my aunt was suspicious of my uncle cheating on her. That’s what they had been fighting about.
He, of course, was. My hearing his thoughts proved that. I got dropped off afterward. My uncle ended up with a black eye. My aunt divorced him. Good riddance to that asshole. I love my aunt. She didn’t deserve that. I’ve hated cheaters ever since.
The area of Charlotte I’m driving through is very affluent. I’ve never actually been in this neighborhood before. Our customers aren’t broke because our services aren’t cheap, but Bailey has to be a millionaire several times over by how much a house here costs. “This is going to be terrible.”
I believe I’m here, but it’s hard to tell in the raining, so I drove by the house’s mailbox to confirm the house number. Yep. The house number is 1-3-5-2. The instructions said to park behind the Lexus SUV on the road, walk down the driveway, and enter through the gate beside the garage. Bailey will be waiting in the pool house.
I’m in my nonluxury car assessing the situation. I can wait for a break or dash to the pool house in the rain. There doesn’t seem to be a break soon, so it’s plan B.
I put on my rain jacket, grabbed my umbrella, opened the door, and got hit with a waterfall before I could even open the umbrella. My first step onto the street from my car is into a pool of rainwater that soaks my running shoes. “Damn, I forgot to change into my rain boots.”
Next, I’m moving down the driveway. Every one of my running steps splashes water onto me. It doesn’t matter. This storm is the type of severe storm that makes your clothes an oversaturated sponge. Luckily, the gate was easy to open and the path to the pool house was concrete, so I never had to walk through mud or a flooded yard.
Of course, the pool house is enormous. I’m waiting outside. There’s a blue door between me and something I don’t want to do. Bailey did something terrible. I’m sensing there are two people inside. “The message didn’t say anything about a second person being here.”
Someone shouts “coming” after knocking on the door. I count to five, and then a white-haired man with a goatee without a mustache opens it. “Come on in,” the man greets me, whom I recognize from the news.
I’m drenched. I walked by the man who stepped away from the doorway to let me in. “So this is Bailey, the girlfriend killer.” He offered me some bourbon and asked me to sit on a tan leather couch where a young man was seated, whom I assumed was the other mind I sensed outside. I declined the liquor.
“Welcome, this is my son Tristen Bailey,” Bailey says.
“Nice to meet you, Tristen,” I say with a handshake.
Bailey moves to a wooden bar cart in the corner to pour himself a drink, but Tristan could use one. He seems on edge about something. Bailey’s back is to us. I hear two ice cubes hit the bottom of a glass and him pouring liquid into the glass. Then he sits on a similar colored leather chair across Tristan and me, sipping his whisky, and lays it on a glass coffee table.
“So, I guess you know who I am and why you’re here,” Bailey asks me. “Yes, you do. I know you know who I am by the way you look at me.”
I thought I was doing an excellent job of containing my uneasiness about being in this poolhouse with him. I didn’t realize that my face was so easy to decipher. “Yep, I know who you are. I’m here to erase a memory from your mind.” I answered the monster.
“Well, that’s almost correct. You are here to erase a memory,” Bailey says cryptically. I look at Tristan. I don’t have to use my powers to know that he’s dead scared. It’s radiating off him. He hasn’t said a word since I shook his hand. What’s going on? I could quickly find out, but I didn’t think it was right to scan his mind, so I scanned his Dad’s mind instead. “Wow! So that’s why I’m here. Bailey’s mind is a dark place.”
“Tristan, my baby boy here, saw something he didn’t mean to. I need what he saw to disappear,” explains Bailey.
“Sure! I can manage that,” I tell Bailey. Then, I explain to the father and son how the memory erasing process works: Tristan needs to conjure up the memory, and then I use my abilities to make him forget whatever it is indefinitely.
Tristan permitted me to perform the memory erase. I told him to remain calm and remember what must be wiped out. Then Bailey watched me cover his son’s face with my hand with great attention and curiosity. The technique resembles a Vulcan mind-meld from Star Trek.
I grunt and shout like I’m in pain, which is purely theatrical. The whole thing is relatively harmless for both of us. I remove my hand from Tristan’s face and recoil on the couch.
“Is it done?” Bailey wonders. I shake my head, yes. He asks Tristan what he was doing the night of March 12th after nine o’clock to be convinced. Bailey’s girlfriend was murdered on that date.
“Dad, I don’t remember. There’s nothing but a black hole,” Tristan says for the first time.
“Impressive. Tristan doesn’t remember,” Bailey said convinced.
I tell Bailey that I need to get going. He thanked me with a devilish smile. “Damn you for making me do that to Tristan.”
The rain is still falling, but not as heavily as before. I dash for my car.
In my car, I think about Tristan and feel awful for him. His Dad is horrible. When I read
his mind, I learned two things about his Dad.
The first is that he did kill his girlfriend.
The second is that Tristan witnessed part of what happened and will testify in his Dad’s trial in two days. That’s the memory that I erased from Tristan’s head. How could Tristan tell the truth while on the stand if he didn’t remember the truth? Bailey needed that fixed.
I feel awful for what I just did to him. Not only did I violate him, but what’s going to happen to him in two days. I made it so that he’ll remember what he saw on the night of March 12th, right before he testifies. It will gut him and his family—the collateral damage.
“I’m sorry, Tristan. I couldn’t allow your Dad to get away.”
<THE END>
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