Satan's Dollar Store & other stories

Cashier World

Outside of the office, Charlotte Ann Waddle avoided eye contact with other people as much as possible. Instead, she tried to focus her thoughts on the un-magic ring she wore from a bronze ball-bearing chain around her neck. The ring was a gift from her late husband, given to her on his last day on Earth. It had been a better gift than his unfortunate last name, which she still retained for sentimental reasons.

"It's nothing special," he'd told her. He'd just found it lying on the sidewalk, a piece of junk, a ten cent bubblegum dispenser prize, but it was special to her. She hadn't seen it coming, and anything unexpected was a genuine gift for Charlotte, a.k.a. Madame Carlotta, a professional psychic who operated out of a second floor office in an old Victorian above the U-Glo Beauty Salon on Florida Street near Gates. Like most psychics, hers was a family tradition, inherited from her mother, who'd been known as Madame Sheila and had run a successful business out of the same spot for nearly forty years. Eye contact was their trade secret. Charlie, as she preferred to be called, had the so-called gift of "pre-membering" other people's lives through the expression in their eyes.

"It's a lot like the way we remember our own past," she'd try to explain. "It's like a mesh, a net, wound tighter up close, and looser and looser the farther you get, like how you remember the past hour clearly, but the hour before, not so much, and the day before even less, and then a month, a year ago hardly at all. This is how I see their futures. The immediate future is right there in front of me, it's written all over their face but especially in their eyes. Further out on the timeline there are more and more holes in the picture, but that's okay. Most people don't want to know about all that anyway. No, mostly they want to know what's going to happen next, if it's good, and nothing at all if it's not."

It was not an easy job, and many times she'd thought of giving it up, doing something else instead, but her options were limited. Anything that involved contact with the public was out of the question. She could never work for a boss or supervisor. Direct engagement with anyone was problematic. It wasn't as if she could turn it on and off whenever she wanted. She looked and she saw, and her own face gave her away, or so she felt. It seemed to her that people could sense her accidental invasion of their privacy. They sensed her reading of their minds if not their destiny, or else she merely imagined their fear and hostility. David, her late husband, was always reassuring her that no one was actually noticing anything on her face.

"They're too busy with their own lives," he'd say, "to pay any attention to anyone else."

But how could David know? He was a special case. She could look him in the eye and ... and nothing. She saw nothing in his eyes except their own smiling light. Until she'd met him, she hadn't realized there were exceptions to the eye contact rule other than mirrors. She could look into anyone's eyes through a mirror and not see the future. This was true even for herself. She had no idea of her own fate, since the only way she could see herself was through a mirror and mirrors were exempt, for some reason. There was an immunity there, as there was in the case of David Henry Waddle as well. She had looked into his eyes by mistake. He'd been working in a bookstore where she'd stopped to buy a magazine. Normally she managed to get by in the world without looking at people. Most people considered her odd, if not rude, but that couldn't be helped, she couldn't let herself be too concerned about that. She had to protect her own self first. So she'd placed the magazine on the counter and kept her eyes lowered. She noticed his face in the reflection on the glass counter and noted that he seemed like a nice young man, tall and gangly with long dark hair, innocent-looking and kindly. She thought of herself as his physical opposite. She was short and compact, "thick" is how she would put it. Her short hair was naturally blonde to the point of white, her face-covering bangs died bright green by the ladies at U-Glo. She was dark-skinned with unusually dark and violet eyes, blood-red lips and a silver nose ring which secretly matched a tattoo she had above her navel. She'd been imagining David's voice to be as innocent sounding as his face seemed to appear, so it was a surprise when he came out with a deep bass sound asking if she'd found everything she was looking for. She'd glanced up and found herself looking directly into his eyes. She winced in anticipation of seeing and knowing things she had no desire to see or know, and it was a long moment before she realized his immunity from her gaze. Then she laughed involuntarily and he grinned right back at her and said,