The X-Philes

Prologue

Phil.

Phil stirred, slowly blinking his eyes open, adjusting to the light streaming in from his second story bedroom window. He clenched his fists and pointed his feet, stretching out his limbs and arching his back. He pulled the blanket and bed sheet off him and sat up, twisting his body to the side so his feet rested lightly on the floor.

He glanced at the clock: 9:36 am.

Phil stretched instinctively again, yawning and scratching at the top of his head absentmindedly. He grabbed his phone off the nightstand and checked the time, then pocketed it before standing up and walking towards his door. He exited his bedroom and climbed down the stairs. At the bottom, he pushed open the curtains that separated his private living area upstairs from his business area downstairs.

Phil didn't start accepting clients until 5pm on weekdays. He felt that the later hours of the day lended to the mystic feeling of his work: being a psychic. He also ran a bakery from his apartment where he met with clients.

On the weekends Phil operated all day, often baking up a storm for his clients. Weekends were his time to have fun with what he baked, trying out new recipes instead of during the week, where he served daily special selections of tried and true recipes. Customers often picked the day of the week for their seance depending on what the daily special was; his baked goods were included in the price package.

It was Monday, and that meant chocolate chip and blueberry muffins.

Phil put a pot of water in the coffee machine and picked out a morning coffee blend.

While it brewed, Phil moved around his small kitchen gathering the ingredients for his home-made muffins. He didn't have a professional set-up by any means. For example, his oven could only fit one baking sheet of muffins at a time, and he was still using the hand mixer he'd bought when he first started his business venture instead of one of those all-inclusive stand mixers like you saw on display in the home goods stores. He dreamed that someday he might be able to move into an apartment located above a business space he could turn into a real bakery. For now, however, he hosted clients in his living room and baked in his kitchen.

Phil had just finished mixing together the dry ingredients for his first batch of chocolate chip muffins when he heard the coffee maker start to spit out some of that "dirty bean water", as he liked to call it, into his mug.

Despite having such a small kitchen Phil had an array of mugs, many of them gifts from loved ones. That morning he was using one of his oldest. It was a heat-induced color changing mug that showed a sky full of stars, and when hot water was added, as were the lines that connected them to form the constellations that he and his brother, the one who gave him the mug, used to watch every night from their bedroom windows.

Holding the warm mug in his hands brought back memories of him and Martyn back at the farmhouse they'd grown up in, holding mugs of hot chocolate their mom had made them on cold winter's mornings which they would stir with candy canes.

Phil.

There was that voice again. He realized now he had heard it earlier this morning, just before he woke up. In fact, thinking back, it was the voice that had woken him.

Phil set down the coffee mug and closed his eyes, reaching his mind out around him, searching for whoever had called his name, but there was no one. He waited a few more seconds to be sure, but eventually opened his eyes and went back to adding the wet ingredients to his muffins. If someone really needed him, they'd get ahold of him eventually.

When the first batch of muffins were in the oven he placed the mixing bowl of batter on the empty shelf in his fridge and went to sit down on his couch, pulling up a book from the coffee table in front of him.