Destination: Oracle

More excerpts from what I am writing...

"The very first time I discovered my angels, it wasn’t some lah-dee-dah glittery castles in the clouds and rainbows in the heart sort of a revelation high on a Himalayan Mountain top. It wasn’t through intention that I drew psychic experience to me. Intention creates a method with which to control the communications. But with mediumship, you either have it (and hide from it) or you don’t.....

"....As a result, when you have ventured into that territory, meeting spirits half way on the bridge to the other side, your auric field becomes henceforth marked by passage openings like neon invitations. After enough journeys into what shamans call non-ordinary reality, dead people read these invitations like neon signs on the Vegas strip. “Bada Bing! Hot, Young and Willing.” “Live Seer.” “Gorgeous Oracle.” “World Class Psychic Girl.” Naturally, dead people start gravitating to you like you are a tourist destination, a refuge in a time of crisis, even a last stop on their road to nowhere.

"The afternoon my grandmother called me up from the hospital while recuperating from a hip surgery, wasn't the first time I'd been made aware of the fluidity between our world and the other side. I was thirteen and home alone. We always screened calls because of the constant barrage from bill collectors. Forced to leave a message my grandmother spoke as I listened to her in real time. “Pandora,” she gasped in a deep guttural tone, like a wolf with emphysema who had swallowed my grandmother up in one giant gulp. I reached for the receiver, but I didn’t pick it up. Like a coward I was scared shitless by the monstrousness of her voice. "Paaandooora?! I need you." she pleaded, like she was fighting for her life with Cerberus grasping at her neck. I knelt down and leaned in close to the answering machine. “Pandora, help me.” Yes, it really did sound like my grandmother's soul was being yanked out through her vagina and dragged in through a trapdoor into the Underworld.

"In chaotic confusion, her serpentine voice raised in simultaneous crescendo and throaty baritone. “Paannddoorraa……help me!" Clearly, the central heating was melting my grandmother from the inside out like a cheesy potato in a microwave. Hip surgery sucks. Maybe she needs better drugs. "They are taking me!," she yelled in a deep choppy exhale like machinery in a reverberating meat grinding factory. What the fuck are those occupational therapists doing to my grandma? I thought in paralyzed amazement. A few more Pandoras and my grandmother disconnected. I listened to the message over and over again. "Do I call her back"? I asked myself. Rewind. Stop. Play. Stop. Rewind.

"Does hell accept collect calls?" I nervously joked to myself before my dad turned the key in the front door. “Grandma called from the hospital, you should really call her back. Like soon”, I said, pale and standing hunched over gazing at the phone. “When was that?,” he said surprised, his voice soft and tired, his eyes red rimmed. “About twenty minutes ago. She sounded horrible. Like really bad.” “That’s impossible,” he said with alarm. “She did!” I insisted. “She couldn’t have because I got the call forty minutes ago that she died”, my dad informed me before bursting into tears. “I’m so sorry,” I hugged my dad and we cried together until I entertained the thought, Oh?! So, that’s why she didn’t sound so good. "How'd she die?" It was a sudden cardiac arrest. Her hip had been healing fine. She hadn’t had a heart condition. She’d been fine the day before, ready to return to the nursing home. He listened to his mother’s message into the evening, bewildered at its post-death time stamp. By morning my mom had erased it from the tape, but never from our minds.