Page 161 of Wayfarers
“It’s right off the highway?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Are you going to have a billboard?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” she says cautiously. “Usually you pick the business out first, before you start throwing up billboards.”
I laugh. It’s surprised and horrified and it bursts right out of me. The world hates us, and it loves us in equal measure.
“Sylvie? What’s so funny?”
“Have you ever,” I ask her, “thought about calling yourself Miss Lara? And giving out psychic advice? You could charge sixty bucks a half hour! You could have a crystal ball and tarot cards, but just for show, you’d actually be hearing out people’s problems and giving them real, sound advice, like you just did me. And then eventually, through your sheer empathy, wisdom, and know-how, you’d take over the midwestern psychic scene. Everyone else would have to close up shop. Including, say, a pair of feuding twin sister fortune tellers named Miss Tara and Miss Mara who, without their competing businesses, would be forced to reconcile their differences and be a family again!”
“Huh,” Lara says.
“Although I guess after they make up, they could join forces to hate on you instead.”
“I don’t know if I really want a pair of psychic enemies.”
“Yeah. I can see how that would be a problem.”
“Still, I’ll take it under advisement.”
When the cop comes back to give us the okay, she pulls me into a hug. “Go find some happiness,” she says into my ear before pushing me back toward my van, back out into the wild.
Knox
I drift, shell-shocked, around
the hive of the parking lot, the sounds echoing
off the walls of my body.
But then all of it and more overwhelms me
and I sit on the rough blacktop, not caring
particularly if someone runs me over
because I already feel like someone did that
(mental note, if you ever see Sylvie again,
and you probably won’t, don’t describe this
sensation to her that way).
Now I’m thinking about how I have
the most terrible sort
of freedom; the milkweed kind
where you’re at the wind’s mercy
and no one cares
which way you go
