Nightmare Magazine, Issue 107 (August 2021) by Wendy N. Wagner

Author:Wendy N. Wagner [John Joseph Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Adamant Press
Published: 2021-07-24T15:34:04+00:00

Jill: 2018

Sometimes when she was painting—not often, and usually only after smoking some particularly good flower—the world lost its grip on Jill and she returned to the vision place, the place she used to enter so easily as a child, but that these days she had such a difficult time finding. As her hand swept red paint across the top of the canvas, she felt herself leave her body and float on the edge of a vast, dark plain, lit up with one tiny spotlight. For a moment she hovered above that bit of light and then she plunged into it, the sounds turning into colors, the colors traveling out of her astral body and into her hand.

She floated in the sounds for a long time, and when she came out of them, she stared at the painting she’d made. A seascape, definitely a seascape. A boy hung half-in and half-out of a sailboat, his arm seized in the maw of . . . a sea lion? A shark? Her draftsmanship, during these vision times, broke down into only the vaguest suggestion of shapes. But she didn’t need details to know the boy tumbling out of the boat was her nephew Zack. Her very brush strokes were infused with his personality.

Her legs wobbled, and Jill put down the paintbrush. The visions always left her exhausted. She wiped her hands on a cloth and sat down on the couch beside her big golden retriever. Merlin twitched in his sleep but didn’t move. Sometimes she thought he became more sleepy when she had her visions. Miguel claimed it was a sign of their spiritual connection.

Miguel was the only one who appreciated her visions. As kids, her brother had—but after all the shit with their parents and their fucking uncle, he’d turned his back on all the things that had made him special. He took his pills. He made his snarky posts on the internet, slamming “new agers” and “religitards” equally. Then he wrote his smug little books and acted like the things they’d seen in the past were just the work of overactive imaginations.

Jill rolled her neck and reminded herself she no longer lived with Gary, but she did live with Miguel. And he understood things like clairvoyance and auras and tarot cards. Hell, he was a fricking Reiki healer.

Still.

Gary was her brother, and they had been through some shit together. Some serious shit. She reached for the St. Christopher medallion she always wore and gave it a squeeze. And she more than understood why she would have visions about Gary’s family. It had been a long time since she had thought about Kingston, Oregon, but once Gary had mentioned Kim was looking at a job there, she hadn’t been able to stop. It wasn’t just her parents’ car accident. It was a lot of things.

Her fingers pressed against her throat, remembering the collar of her button-down shirt twisting into her flesh.

She forced her hand to her side. She hadn’t been able to wear a shirt with a collar ever since the godawful night she’d babysat for Vincent Vernor.

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