Tea Leaves by Jacob Budenz

Author:Jacob Budenz [Budenz, Jacob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bywater Books
Published: 2023-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

Every Saturday at 10:45 p.m., long after his wife has fallen asleep, Bartholomew creeps out of bed and heads downstairs to the kitchen. There, he fills the same royal blue ceramic bowl with croutons from the Secret Bag he keeps behind the cleaning supplies under the sink. His wife will never find them there. These croutons he smothers in Creamy Caesar dressing. Then, like a child watching Saturday morning cartoons with a bowl of sugary cereal, he takes his bowl into the den to watch the milky-eyed medium from Florida.

She sits in front of a live studio audience atop a crystal couch, blue calcite in giant geode chunks, smoothed over and carved into the shape of a loveseat and adorned with a sky-blue cushion for her to sit on—to aid, she says, with communication and clarity. Behind her: video feed of mist thickening over cliffs by the sea. Waves crash against the cliffs without a sound.

“In the morning,” she says, tonight, on This Saturday of All Nights. “I sit on my porch and stare closely at the dew in the grass. And I wish, I think if that dew could just . . .” here, as she hesitates, she pinches the air with her thumb as though to pluck the right word from the ether. “Melt! If that dew could just melt into the grass, well, that would be just fine.”

She smiles a warm, firm smile without showing teeth. Bartholomew loves her smile. Secretly, he does not trust women who smile with teeth. They remind him of sharks.

The mind reader with milky eyes reminds him, a touch, of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby after she gets her hair cut short: spritely, with a hollowed-out face and wide, bewildered eyes. But this woman wears cream-colored pantsuits and has lighter hair and carries herself in an altogether more still, self-possessed manner, and most importantly her eyes are foggier and grayer than Mia Farrow’s, with only a touch of blue. She sits upright, never slouching forward or slumping backward; her back never touches the back of the crystal couch. She calls herself The Semi-Psychic in half jest; she abhors the word “psychic,” finds the art of seeing into the mind or into the future to be much less precise than that label implies. Really, she says, her eyesight is especially powerful—she can sort of “zoom in,” as she puts it, close enough to see the molecules in dewdrops or the lighthouse miles away or, when she looks hard enough, the fuzzy shapes inside your head. Like peering at shapes through a fog. This is Her Gift to us. Her eyes glisten constantly, as though she might cry at any moment.

“And someone in here,” she says, pointing at someone in the audience, “is hoping two different kinds of matter might melt into one another as well.”

The camera pans to a pretty woman with long brown hair and a silky red dress in the audience. This woman covers her mouth with her left hand, laughing with what appears to be shock.

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