Let’s Call It a Hunch?

           Bartok whined with his wet nose pressed against my forearm. I slowly opened my eyes, resigned to the fact that sleeping in was off the table. I stretched, letting out a loud groan that caused excited small barks and lots of claws tapping on the wooden floor.

           Rolling out of bed, I gave him a few pets before shuffling around for warm clothes so I could take him outside. He stayed under foot until his leash was on, and as soon as the front door was open, he bolted out, pulling me along behind him.

           Forever tightening and adjusting my grip on him, he took us all over the front and backyard. While he looked for the perfect spot to do his business, I thought about how I would spend my day off: looking up new ideas for fortune telling.

           I was burnt out on the same loop of fortunes I was giving, and I was feeling the disconnect from my customers. I wasn’t delivering with the same amount of heart or energy, and even though I mostly didn’t believe in any of it, I had a feeling some of my clients had more attunement to the actual art of premonition than I did.

           I’d found a message board online where real psychics talked about their own experiences with seeing into the future, and whatever else they babbled on about it. Today, I intended to mine it for ideas for how to better serve my own clientele.

           As soon as Bartok was done, he started barking at the neighbor’s house. I frowned. This was not part of his morning routine.

           “Shush. You’re going to wake everyone up.” I yanked on the leash, trying to pull him away. He wouldn’t budge. I grabbed his collar and pulled with all my might when suddenly there was a ringing in my ears and everything in my vision went white.

           Mud-caked boots at the foot of a bed, heavy breathing, blood stained the carpet near the bed. These flashed before my eyes like freeze frames from a video.

           I gasped. I was lying in the snow with Bartok sniffing at my ear. I opened my eyes at the exact moment he licked my face. I shivered and sat up. I grabbed his leash and slowly stood, ignoring my shaking legs. I swallowed and stared at my neighbor’s house. Eyes watering, nose burning; I knew something wasn’t right.  

           Something told me that whatever I’d just experienced was related to whatever Bartok had decided to bark about, and whatever he had barked about was related to that house. I examined the house, looking for some obvious sign of forced entry, without moving from where I was. I couldn’t see anything, but I stared anyway, hoping to will something into existence.

           I’d read enough about premonitions to know that what I’d just experienced was an honest-to-God vision. It had never happened to me before, and I’d constantly thought anyone online talking about it happening to them had always been full of shit…yet, here I was, snow dampening the backside of my clothes while I stared at my neighbor’s, convinced they were dead inside. And why? All because I had seen a flash of muddy boots, heard heavy breathing, and saw what looked like bloodied carpet? That was what I was basing this truly horrible thought on: a feeling?

           I rubbed the side of my head as a dull ache set in near my temple. I thought about my medical history, ransacking my memory for some logical reason, but I didn’t have a medical history. I was perfectly healthy. My shoulders fell when I made it to the understanding that there wasn’t any logical, medical reason for what had happened.

           Unless I had an undiagnosed issue. Maybe it was a brain tumor or the earliest stages of narcolepsy. Maybe it was explainable, and I just didn’t have an explanation for it yet. I shut my eyes; Bartok nuzzled into my hand.

           I exhaled deeply. “Bartok, was I really just hoping for brain cancer or narcolepsy to avoid checking on my neighbor?”

           He whined lightly. His tail had stopped wagging when he’d gotten upset about the neighbor’s house, and it still wasn’t moving happily.

           “Let’s go ring their bell, huh, bud?” I gripped his leash extra tightly and took several deep breaths. Then, trudging through the snow, I mumbled versions of what I could say when they inevitably answered the front door.

           I pressed their doorbell. With the bell ringing, terror slid down my spine. What would I do if they didn’t answer the door?  I shoved the thought away, certain that my dog and some weird images would be ridiculous and unrelated to the situation.

           I went to pet him, more to calm myself than to reassure him, but he was on high alert: his fur was bristling, and he emitted a low noise that sounded like a whine and a growl all at once. I braced myself for something horrible. But silence continued to greet us.

           The terror had slipped from the back of my neck into my stomach, mingling with the gut feeling that something was wrong. I pulled Bartok off the porch, and hurried to my own home, where I paced in the living room while he barked and whined and scratched at the front door.

           How could I explain this to anyone? I wasn’t about to break and enter to confirm my neighbor was okay, but how could I explain this was urgent to an emergency operator without sounding like a total nutcase?

           Grabbing my cell phone, I dialed the emergency line and took a deep breath.

Once they’d answered, I stumbled over my words at first, but eventually, I was able to get to the point: “I think my neighbor might be experiencing an emergency. My dog is acting very odd, and he has tried to get me to go check on my neighbor several times this morning. This is a completely new and unusual behavior. He stops freaking out as soon as I’m standing on the porch ringing the bell, but nobody is answering. When we leave, he instantly starts barking and trying to take me back over there. I was wondering if someone could do a welfare check to be sure they’re okay. I’m not particularly close with the neighbor, but I believe my dog’s insistence has me a bit concerned. I know they have some medical issues based on a few interactions we have had. Could someone please check on them?”

           After I’d hung up, I patted myself on the back for the quick lies I came up with. Fully exhausted, I dropped on to the couch, remembering the cold, wet backside of my clothing, which I went upstairs to change.

           By the time I came back downstairs, there were flashing lights over at the neighbor’s home, and a police officer was knocking on my door. Bartok, who was always at the door ready to be of service, stood by: still and silent, watching me.

           The images from earlier flickered through my mind, and I opened the door, with an uneasy smile on my face.

           “Good morning, ma’am, are you the one who called in the welfare check for your neighbor?”

           I nodded. “Yes.”

           “We wanted to let you know that we were able to enter into the property. What we found inside was…gruesome, so we wanted to make sure you were aware that someone has in fact harmed them. We’d like to recommend you keep all your doors and windows locked and please do not leave your house until we have cleared the area. We’ll be placing the entire neighborhood on lockdown until further notice.”

           My blood ran colder and colder with every sentence she added into the mix. I blinked several times; my hand mechanically came up cover my mouth. I nodded.

           “We might call on you if we have any more questions about what you saw that led you to check on your neighbor, so please be available until further notice.”

           The police officer walked away, adjusting her belt, and talking into the radio on her shoulder.

I shut the front door and stared at Bartok. “Okay, listen up, one of us woke up with psychic powers this morning. Was it you, or was it me?”

He stared at me, his tail weakly wagging at the sound of my voice.

I rubbed my eyes and stared out through the window on my front door. A black bag was rolled out of the house next to mine. I swallowed, but my sadness for the neighbor snagged on paranoia. Eyes wide, I stared at my own door. Had I locked it when I took Bartok outside? If someone was in here, he would be going nuts, right? I eyed all the possible hiding spots within range of the front door.

How did the first premonition happen? What was I doing or thinking or feeling right before it happened? Was it me or could it have been the dog? I chewed on my lower lip, working the skin of it off little by little. It had to be me, with the vision I had, that would make the most sense.

Sinking into the couch, I shut my eyes and tried to relax. How did it work? Could I make them come up? Could I use this for work? Shaking that train of thought from my head, I focused on the rise and fall of every breath, hoping it would come.

Nothing. I went back to pacing.

This had to be something I could do more with. I needed help with the fortune telling, and clearly, I could maybe try to solve murders. How could I explain I’d seen muddy boots and heard heavy breathing to the cops? My hand tangled in my hair; I fought to get it loose.

I hurriedly checked online for tips on how to make a premonition happen and how to explain it to a cop. No really good answers found me in the short time I was searching when it happened again. My vision fell away.

A beaten-up truck. Dirty, white buckets in the truck bed. A baseball player bobble head on the dashboard.

As the white faded away, I blinked and sat back up in the chair. I would need to figure out how to not collapse or fall on the ground when it happened, and I would have to figure out how this second one happened. Was it related to the neighbor’s situation? Was it something else entirely?

I closed my eyes. “It would be my luck that I got real psychic powers without a manual and powers that were so faulty they were useless.”

I buried my head in my hands and sighed. Was any of this useful information to do anything with? While all of these images were fresh in my head, I decided I could at least sketch it all out. Maybe they’d open an anonymous tip line for neighbor’s situation. If they did, I could call in and somehow tell them these things without explaining how or why, or at least, I hoped that would be the case. I hadn’t ever called a hotline like that before.

Scratching the tip of my nose, I stared at the page with all the items I’d drawn on it. For the first time, I was relieved I was decent at art instead of ashamed. I thought of the shop where I worked as a psychic, and of my coworkers. Some of them seemed to be certain they truly had “the gift” or whatever, and I wondered if they could help me.

Anything I said would need to be well thought out, because I couldn’t go to work and talk about how we were frauds. I tried to remember who else had today off.

“Hello?” A cigarette-fried voice full of sleep came through the phoneline.

“Hey, Ebby, I was wondering if you could maybe come to my house and have some coffee with me. I’ve had a weird morning.” I paused at the front door. “Wait, shit, you can’t come here. Actually, I don’t think I’m allowed to leave either. Okay. Could you talk to me on the phone for a moment?”

“JoJo, is that you?”

“Oh, right, yeah. It’s Joanna from work.” Police were still sitting outside of my house and my neighbor’s.

“What’s going on?”

“I had a vision.”

She laughed. “Yeah, we all do, honey.”

“No, no. Like for real. I..I was walking my dog and he got weird about the neighbor’s house. I stared at it for a while, and then…things went white and then I saw muddy boots, and heard heavy breathing, and saw blood. I woke up in the snow, like I fell down when it happened. I tried to check on my neighbor, and it didn’t…they weren’t answering. I called the police, and they’ve got our neighborhood on lockdown while they search the area for any sign of a suspect…”

“Oh, wow. Wow. Slow down. What now?” She sounded more awake and invested in what I was saying.

I tried more calmly to repeat everything that had happened since Bartok had woken me up. When I finished, she was quiet. I heard the flick of a lighter, and the sound of pulling smoke into lungs. I licked my lips and waited for her to say anything, while my headache began to throb a bit more consistently.

“I don’t know what to do.” I peeked out the front door window again and jumped. “Shit. Hey, Ebby, the cop is at my door again, hang on.”

The police officer who had spoken to me earlier gave a tight smile when I opened the door. “Hello again. I was wondering if you’d seen anything weird occurring around here in the last few days or weeks. Any unusual activity at your neighbor’s house or just in general on the cul-de-sac here?”

I shook my head slowly and then paused, debating whether or not to mention the truck or the muddy boots.

She took off her sunglasses and looked at me more closely. “What made you make the call this morning?”

I chewed on my lip and shrugged. “My dog was acting weird, and that was unusual in its own right.”

I envisioned becoming this woman’s psychic partner who helped her solve crimes, acquiring book deals for all the good we could do together.

“Had your dog acted weird in any other instance while going outside lately? Prior to this morning?”

I blinked and shook my head. “No, not that I remember.”

Was that vision of becoming a crime-solving duo a real vision or just me imagining something ridiculous because I found her attractive?

“All right. I might be back with more questions, so continue to be available.” She left without another word.

I brought the phone back up to my ear. “Ebby, are you still there?”

“Hey, yeah, kiddo, I’m still here. Wow. What a morning. Are you sure you aren’t sick?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Should I go to the doctor about this?”

“No. No. I wouldn’t. Or at least I wouldn’t frame it like you’re seeing things. You’ll wind up in a completely different doctor office for that.” She chuckled, but it turned into a deep cough.

“What do I tell the cop if she comes back?” I refrained from mentioning the fantasy I’d had about the police officer.

“I don’t know, JoJo. What do you think she’d be able to stomach? Can you get a read on her?”

I went to respond but paused. “Wait. Actually. Um. I imagined us teaming up solving crime together. Is that crazy?”

She chortled. “Yes. That is too crazy. But maybe that’s a sign you’d be able to tell her the truth to a certain extent.”

I sighed. “Okay. What if I go over and tell her to come have coffee here and I try to explain it?”

“Could be worth it.” I heard another flick of a lighter, another deep inhale of smoke. An exhale. “Let me know how it goes.”

“Okay.” I swallowed. “I’ll text you.”

Bartok lifted his head when I hung up the phone and saw me walking to the front door. He stayed where he was, and I walked outside and stood on my porch. I folded my arms and then unfolded them. Had she said her name?

She wasn’t anywhere in sight. Maybe that was a sign, too. I shook my head and grabbed the doorknob. I glanced back at my neighbor’s and the police officer was watching me. I raised my hand and motioned her over.

Once she stood at the edge of my porch, my mouth dried up. I stared at her.

“Did you need something?”

“I—I was hoping we could talk?” I gestured to the porch swing.

She held up her hand, waving away the offer. I continued to stand, too, unsure if sitting would be rude.

“This is going to sound ridiculous. But. There might have been something else that made me call this morning.”

I desperately wished she had put her sunglasses back on after we’d spoken last. Her eyes bore into me.

I nodded. “After my dog started acting weird about the neighbor’s house, I got a funny feeling…Some images flashed through my mind, and I—I don’t know if it’s connected to the neighbor, but I saw an image of some muddy boots and blood and heard heavy breathing. And then I saw a truck with dirty buckets and a baseball bobble head on the dashboard. I don’t know if that helps to know. But…it played into why I called.”

I inhaled and braced myself, ready to be carted away to a hospital or arrested for the crime I’d called in.