Unpredictable

I wasn’t especially happy to be there, and I knew it showed. It wasn’t that I was trying to be rude. I was simply frustrated because I shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

“Ms. Ayers?” The woman slid a paper across her desk. I instinctively assessed her nails as she did so. Unmanicured but tidy. The sign of a dedicated, yet not self-indulgent, worker.

“Yes?”

“I was asking about your skillset. You didn’t mark any skills on your resume. See? You’ve left the section blank.”

Oh, great.

My skillset.

For decades, I’d managed to avoid this conversation. And frankly, I hadn’t minded. My most significant (former) skill wasn’t one I could discuss in this—I peered around the room with its colorless walls, its industrial carpeting—traditional environment.

I avoided the conversation because my skillset had made me the target of the other students’ taunts in my childhood. They yelled Witch! Witch! back then, forming crucifixes with their fingers when I passed them in the hallway.

By the time I was an adult, I was well-versed in pretending I didn’t know the things I know. (Or knew, as the case is now.) As an adult, the only people who were aware of my ability were my loyal clients who paid me regular sums to inform them of their futures. But I no longer had that client base.

Because I didn’t even know my future anymore.

No, I don’t mean I was uncertain in that average, piddly, mid-life crisis way that 75% of my clients had seen me for. I intend to say, I didn’t know anyone’s future anymore.

Recently, I hadn’t been getting those enlightening flashes when I looked into someone’s eyes or studied the lines on their hands. I couldn’t see those hazy visions of future scenes in my crystal ball or in my shallow pan of divining water.

I’d lost the one skill I’d had.

I was no longer able to console desperate women, letting them know about those future children that would soon be in their arms. I wasn’t smelling the whiff of a future lover’s perfume, a sympathetic message passed to me via means I never understood. For the last six months, I’d been inexplicably left in the dark, cut off from my skillset. Worse, I was left without a means of employment.

“My skillset?” I repeated.

The job recruiter’s eyes met mine. She had a look that told me I wasn’t the first person who came to her, clueless about what to do next.

“Come on now,” she said, pointing to a poster on the wall. A striped cat wearing glasses sat under a speech bubble that read: CONFIDENCE IS A HABIT, NOT A TRAIT. “Everyone’s got something they’re good at, even if they’re not necessarily trained in it. Maybe you type? Or you’re good with numbers?” She nodded encouragingly. Although she was a good decade younger than I was, she had the patient motivation of a mother.

“Numbers… Absolutely not. But I suppose I’m a decent communicator,” I finally said after a moment of silence. “I communicated with my clients weekly. Well, most of them. Some of them needed to talk with me more often. Or less often.” For some reason, my cheeks warmed. It felt wrong to view myself in such high regard.

“Aha!” The recruiter’s pencil began scrawling furiously in her notebook. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” I wondered what she could possibly be writing in there. What did she see that I didn’t? What sorts of connections could she make in my life in the five minutes I’d sat in her office?

For the first time in my life, I realized how my clients must have felt when they sat opposite me, waiting for the big reveal. (Of course, my office was a cheery room in my home that I’d painted in shades of purple, while this employment agency’s gray office had all the personality of a chunk of gravel.)

“What sort of business did you run?” The recruiter paused in her notetaking.

“An entertainment business,” I said automatically. Although I wasn’t forthright in explaining it at this instance, my psychic business had been completely legitimate. After all, I wouldn’t be here in this employment agency if I was okay with pretending that I knew all sorts of things when I didn’t. No, the minute I realized my ability was extinguished, I put my business on an indefinite hiatus.

I like to run things by the book, you see. A lot of my clients are surprised to learn that I file taxes just like any other business. I keep track of each payment, logging all my earnings to a T. I even make it a point to charge below the industry standard.

(I wouldn’t charge at all except we live in a capitalist society, and I’ve got rent to pay and a son’s college tuition payments just like many of us. And I think it’s fair that I’m compensated for the time I spend devoted to other people’s lives. After all, that’s time away from my hobbies, which include reading cozy mysteries. Even when I could predict the future, I never once saw a cozy mystery’s ending coming, which was a nice change.)

The recruiter registered the phrase “entertainment business.”

“I see,” she said, making another note on her paper.

Answering “the entertainment business” kept people from asking too many questions. They tended to think my business related to dancing and tables and whatnot, and they were often too embarrassed to inquire further.

In reality, I chose to file taxes as part of the entertainment industry because it kept me from being sued if someone interpreted my predictions incorrectly. As long as I told people to consider me a purveyor of party tricks, I assumed zero liability for what they did with that information.

Besides, I’d never once in my 23 years in the business ever told someone what to do with the information that I gave them. I passed on what I saw in my visions, and my part was done. In other words, I read the cards. I didn’t play God.

“Lots of people come to me in your position,” the recruiter said reassuringly. I smiled politely, entirely sure this was not true. “And I, for one, believe you have a lot to offer. Now tell me, is there anything you’ve been interested in trying out? Maybe working as an electrician, childcare assistant, sales rep, anything like that?”

“I really haven’t thought about it,” I admitted. “I thought I was set in my career and didn’t expect to have to rethink my retirement plans.”

“That’s all right. I have a long history of helping people navigate the unexpected.”

“We have that in common,” I replied. The recruiter smiled.

“What sorts of things did you enjoy as a child? Think back to when you were young, before you had any real responsibilities. Was there something that brought you true joy?”

When had I ever been free of responsibility?

Before my visions. That was for sure. Once the first had appeared when I was eleven, I’d felt an obligation to pass on to my mother that maybe she shouldn’t date that blond-haired man (I knew he was involved with at least three women already). Then, another day, I’d told her maybe she should buy the Ford instead of the Honda because the Honda was going to have a lot of smoke under the hood on the drive home from the lot.

But before all those visions clouded my mind, what did I love to do at eleven years old? The memory of cruising down the neighborhood street came to me. I remembered gripping the handlebars of my six-speed bike, feeling like I was on top of the world. We lived at the top of a hill, and I could coast all the way down, weightless.

I hadn’t thought of that bike in decades.

“Do you have a job that involves bicycles?” I said, my heart suddenly pounding.

If the recruiter was surprised, she didn’t show it.

“Great! Let’s take a look.” She swiveled in her chair toward the computer and started typing. I leaned forward, ready to hear my future.