Category: Stories

 “Harvey,” I said, “Don’t touch the curtains.” His hands were black and oil-stained – never clean, no matter how much he washed – the hallmark of being a mechanic.

“Hush, woman!” He whisper-yelled at me without moving.

I had just come out of the kitchen after washing dishes, wiping my hands on my apron. Harvey stood at the living room window, pulling aside lace curtains to see into our front yard. The bald spot at the back of his head shone with high-noon July heat sweat through thin strands of black hair. I could see the fat that had accumulated around his middle in our six years of marriage, bulges that stretched out his white undershirt and had necessitated poking more holes in his belt. I was surprised at how old he looked for being 24.

“The curtains are lace, for crying out loud,” I said, walking toward him. “You can see through without touching them.”

He ignored me, as usual, as if I wasn’t worth listening to. That was one of the first things to go after we got married. I hadn’t expected it because his listening to me was part of why I fell for him in the first place.

 My mother had told me to wait, that someone else would come along. But who could tell me anything at the age of fourteen? Besides, I wanted to leave home in the worst way. Ever since Dad had died, Mom had been sick – at least that’s what we called it – and I had to raise the younger children. I ran away with Harvey, because he was the first one who asked me.

“Elle, look at this!” Harvey turned to me with eyes that seemed to believe he had the charm of Marlon Brando, despite his missing front tooth and the rest of his appearance. He pulled the curtain aside, and I stepped toward the window. I saw our 5-year-old son, William, standing with his back to us, bent over the lowbush blueberries that grew near the sidewalk.

“So what,” I said. “He’s eating blueberries. That’s nothing new.”

While I spoke, I saw William’s little hand shoot up in a wave to a neighbor boy across the street. As William ran away to play with his friend, Harvey grabbed my hand and pulled me outside, the screen door slamming behind us.

Harvey put a finger to his mouth to quiet me as his gaze turned to the figure of William and his friend running behind a house. He bent down with a smile and bright eyes, then pointed to the bush and look at me triumphantly. “See?”

I was confused. I saw a blueberry bush, plain and simple. Grey brown sticks covered with dark green leaves and dappled with blueberry dots. “What?”

“It’s the blueberries! William has been standing here eating blueberries for half an hour. Look at how many are still left on the bush!”

 I was confounded. “Uh, so the bushes have been very productive this year?”

He stood up, grinning and shaking his head. “There shouldn’t be that many blueberries on that bush.” He pulled me over to the bush on the other side of our walkway. “Look at this one. Hardly any here.”

During my next in-breath I considered that Harvey was insane, but with my outbreath I recognized that this was how he always acted on the verge of a money-making scheme. It took me years to realize, from experience, that they were always bad ideas. But that was poor judgment, not insanity.

“Here’s the thing…” He got his face close to mine, and I could smell beer on his breath. Of course, while William and I had been at church, he had participated in his own form of worship. He whispered conspiratorially. “I’ve been watching him. He eats these blueberries, and they grow back almost as soon as he eats them.”

“How much beer did you drink this morning?”

I turned to walk away, but he turned me back around, his excitement-filled eyes tempered with the stirring of his temper.

“I’m telling you Elle, there is something going on here. I think maybe William got that thing from your Dad.” He tilted his head at me to bring me back in, a sign of forgiving or forgetting my belligerence. “This could be huge for us. Think of it, Elle!”

He said more after that, but I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of my Dad. And I didn’t stop thinking of him for the next week.

I loved my Dad. Everybody had loved my Dad. He had been a doctor. But not like Dr. Konrad Steiner on the TV show Medic, all serious and speaking in a monotone.  Never smiling. My Dad smiled all the time. And not just with us kids and with Mom. Sometimes he would take me with him on a call to the neighbor’s. We’d walk for miles, and make up jokes as we’d go along. Here’s one I remember. Why did the little boy have the sniffles? Nobody nose! I made up that one; I pointed to my nose when I said it. It made my dad laugh – he laughed at all my jokes. It was hard on the whole family when Dad died. Except for baby Joseph, of course. He was too young to miss him.

Harvey devised tests to see if William had the healing touch. But he didn’t even know what the healing touch was, for crying out loud. He had this idea that it was like some sort of miracle thing that could save people’s lives. But it was more than that. Dad didn’t just go up and touch a sick person and then suddenly they were healthy again. He listened to people. He cared about people. Harvey didn’t care about anyone but himself. If he cared about someone it was because they might make him some money.

Anyway, Harvey thought he was being so sneaky, not telling William what he was doing. He would go out to the flower bed by the side of the house – my flower bed, that I had planted and nurtured and was very proud of – and he’d go out and wreck the flowers one by one using different methods. He even tried to be scientific about it. He poured bleach on one dahlia, one zinnia, one lilly, then he’d ruin more flowers, one each of the different kinds, with some other method. He’d uproot them then set them back on the ground. He’d light some of the leaves on fire. He’d cut holes into the stems with his pocket knife. My God, I had never seen that man be so creative as when he was destroying my flower bed.

And he was thorough, too. He made a little chart, or maybe you’d say a map? –  of the flowers and what he had done to them. He didn’t go to the auto shop where he worked, either. I guess he figured he wouldn’t need to with the money he’d make from William’s talent. So after a couple of days, once the flowers got particularly droopy, he called out “Billy! Come help me out, will ya?”

William was only five, but even a little kid could tell something was up with a man whose idea of yardwork up to that point had been drinking beer until his wife or his neighbors finally nagged him into mowing the lawn. This Dad who never even played ball with his kid is all of a sudden spending all day with him?

Yeah, William knew something was going on. Harvey would make William touch a burned leaf or pick up a limp stem – had him touch all the flowers, one by one. At first he’d ask questions like, “What do you think happened to this flower? How would you fix it?” 

William was confused. And just a kid. At one point, he saw his friend, Tim across the street and he got up from the ground – filthy , by the way; nobody cared that I had to wash those clothes – and he started to go over to Tim. Harvey snapped. All of a sudden that smile was gone, and he yelled out, “William Harvey Dobson, you get your ass over here RIGHT NOW!”

I had been looking out the kitchen window, but I had to go away, do something else.

I wanted to stand up for William and say, “Leave him alone!” I wanted to tell Harvey that he was being stupid. But believe me, the only way Harvey was going to let this go was for me to let it run its course. Years of experience had taught me that. If I complained about something he did, he’d go at it twice as gung-ho, just to spite me. And when it came to William, if I defended him, same thing.  He’d get it twice as bad.

The worst part of the whole thing was seeing that William really did have the healing touch. The thing my dad had. Those flowers, all the ones he touched, started to get better, and Harvey got dollar signs in his eyes. I was so nervous, worried about what would happen.

One time Harvey had this idea to make money fighting dogs. I hated it so much. He brought four dogs to our house. I don’t know what breeds they were. But they were such precious puppies when he first brought them home, so energetic and bouncy. William was just a baby – he laughed so much then. He and the puppies played together those first few weeks, rolling around on a blanket on the floor. It was like I had five little babies.

But when the puppies got bigger, about the same size William was at the time, Harvey took them to the shed out back and told me to leave them alone. They whined all day while Harvey was at work – he put a lock on the door so I couldn’t get to them. Then when he came home, he beat them. Every night. So they’d turn mean. I tried to stop him, but when I did, he’d beat them even harder. I just had to stay away. He’d take them somewhere late at night, bring them back, lock them up. I’d see the trail of blood leading to the shed.

One day the dogs didn’t come back. Maybe Harvey sold them. Or they died.

It’s not like I thought Harvey was going to kill William with his money-making plan. But I knew it wouldn’t be good.  At night in bed, Harvey would tell me about how he would make this miracle scheme work. I didn’t really understand it. I said maybe our boy could become a doctor, like my dad did. Harvey laughed at me. Like I was an idiot.

I wanted to sabotage Harvey’s plan, try to make the flowers wilt again, maybe spray them with poison. But he watched the flowers very carefully. I couldn’t get near them, even at night. He set booby traps, too. He took my knitting yarn and made a kind of yarn web held up by sticks poked into the ground all around the flowers. Then he hung little bells from the yarn. And mouse traps all around that – hidden in the grass that he wouldn’t mow. Only he knew where they were. He also nailed the kitchen window shut, so I couldn’t do something to the flowers from above.

The worst part was thinking about what tests Harvey would conduct next. These were just plants, but I couldn’t imagine he would stop there. How much money would William make him bringing plants back to life? Somehow he would have to work his way up to healing people. How? Get more dogs? I didn’t even want to think about the possibilities. I was sick with worry.

And then, it just stopped. It felt like a miracle. Five days into the week, the flowers started dying. I couldn’t talk to William about it, so I don’t know for sure, but I think he just stopped healing them. I mean, he still did the same things as before, holding the wilted stems like his dad told him to, listening to his Dad tell him to make the plants healthy again. But nothing happened.

I felt a wave of relief when I saw those dying flowers. I thought Harvey would finally drop the idea and leave William alone. But he didn’t.

One day, when almost all of the flowers were dead, I was making breakfast in the kitchen, and I looked out the window to see Harvey standing with his hands on his hips and staring down through the yarn web at the dirt and decaying plants. His neck was red with sunburn, and he wore a white shirt with yellow sweat stains under the armpits. His face seemed peaceful, his breathing slow. Then all of a sudden, he started tearing at the yarn, pulling out sticks, throwing the mess of them around the yard while he yelled and screamed and bells banged around, clinking and ringing. His arms flailed around like the Tasmanian devil cartoon. I almost laughed. But when he bellowed, “William!”My heart stopped.

Harvey ran out of my view, and I turned and ran, too, following his pounding footsteps up the stairs to William’s room.

I got there just as Harvey was holding him up by his collar with one hand and hitting the side of his head with the other, yelling, “What kind of game do you think you’re playing, boy?” William and I were both crying as Harvey pushed past me, dragging our little boy down the stairs by his shirt. I ran behind them, to the flowers, where Harvey shoved William’s face into the dirt. “What is this?” He yelled. “Why are they dying? What did you do to them?”

Seeing William’s face smashed into the ground, I screamed “STOP!”

For a moment, there was silence except for William’s quiet whimpers. Harvey seemed to move in slow motion, and his face gradually changed from full-on anger into a dead-eyed smile which he directed at me. He reminded me of a cat stalking its prey – you know, the slow walk it does right before it crouches down to get ready to pounce?

He looked me in the eyes and said, real quiet, “What did you say?”

I didn’t plan it – I just blurted out, “He doesn’t have it.”

Harvey cocked his sweaty head, eyes still locked on me and said, as if I were a child to be humored, “Doesn’t have what, Elle?”

I looked at William, who was sobbing softly and looking up at me, still sprawled out amongst the ruins of my once beautiful flowers. I whispered, “He doesn’t have the healing touch.”

Harvey’s eyes widened in surprise, and he glanced at William as if sharing a joke with him. “Really? How do you know this, Elle?”

I looked at him and gathered my voice. “He didn’t heal the flowers. I just watered them, put fertilizer on them, did whatever I could.”

It wasn’t a good explanation. But I knew that, in that moment, Harvey just needed someone to blame. And I didn’t want it to be William.

Harvey put his hands on his hips, looking down. Then he looked up at me, nodding slightly as if he understood. “And you couldn’t get to the flowers after I put up the netting.” He called it netting, that mess of yarn. “So after that, the flowers started to die again.”

He pointed at his head, staring at me. “I knew it.” He tapped his head a few times, looking at William. “See Billy? Science. That’s why we use science. To figure out the truth.”

Well, things weren’t so good for awhile after that. I mean, they were worse. At least Harvey left William alone. Though after that he would tell William stories about how my Dad was stupid – how people thought he was so honorable, such a good person being a doctor and all, but that he left his family and died in the war, leaving his wife to raise four kids on his own. And how honorable was that? That wasn’t how it happened, but I kept quiet.

One time Harvey said, “Billy, your grandfather had such a big ego that he named all four of his children ‘Joe’ after himself. Even your mom.” He looked at me and smirked, like it was a joke on me.

William asked, “Is that true Mom?”

I couldn’t show how sad I was, how much I missed my family. I don’t know why Mom and Dad named us Joelle, Joline, Johanna and Joseph. I know it wasn’t dad’s ego. But I just made myself smile and say, “Yes, William. It’s true.”

Sylvia slowly sat up in the hospital bed, pillows tucked behind her back. She felt sore in a way she didn’t remember from her other three births. Her exhaustion mixed with a shimmer of energy – that was familiar. But something was wrong.

To her right, a window as tall as herself let in bright sunlight that made her eyes blink. Where was Joe? Where was anybody?

It had been a problematic birth. The baby’s heart had stopped beating, and Joe had been there to calm her, to help her sleep through the worst of the pain, through the worry.

She knew she was extremely lucky to have her husband with her during the birth. He had known something was wrong and had insisted on joining her in the birthing room. “I’m a doctor,” he had said calmly when told to go to the waiting room. “And she’s my wife. I’m not leaving.”

Their three previous children had been born without complication. In fact, they had gone quickly and smoothly. Joe had been with her through every one, holding her hand, stroking the dark, wet strands of hair from her forehead. She loved this man who cared more for her comfort and reassurance than for what other people thought was normal.

Her woman friends looked at her in disbelief when she first told them Joe had been there for the delivery. “Why?” They asked, so much judgment in that one word.

“He’s a doctor,” she replied, though she knew it was more than that. He was Joe. He was special.

Sylvia had met Joe walking to school. He had introduced himself as, “Joseph Aaron Spivey”. There was something about him that pulled her in. He had rich, caramel-colored eyes shiny, brown curly hair, thick brown lashes. She might have fallen in love with him for his looks alone. But his smile sealed it. It was more than a smile. It was a question and reassuring statement, together. It was kindness, caring, a strong gentleness that magnetized and warmed her.

One day Sylvia had tripped and scraped her knee badly. He had led her to the nearby stream to wash out the wound. As he cupped water in his hands and splashed it onto her knee, she felt so calmed, and barely felt any pain. She assumed it was because she was falling in love. But another factor had probably been what he eventually told her was “the healing touch”, something that ran in his family. She made him keep it a secret, though, for reasons she hadn’t understood until decades later. Only she and his parents knew about it.

 “I want to be a doctor someday,” he had confided in her. And it broke her heart to hear, given the extreme unlikelihood that it would happen. It was during the Depression. His family didn’t have money, and they needed him on the farm just to get by. Even if he could leave his folks, he would never be able to afford the cost of medical school.

They married five years later, and in that time, she saw what Joe meant by “the healing touch”. He had a way with living things – which was one reason why his parents wanted him on the farm. Crops grew better when he tilled the soil, the milk tasted noticeably better when he milked the cows, chickens produced more eggs, etc. But people were Joe’s specialty. And not being able to help them in an official capacity was like a punishment for him. He was happy on one level, but she saw something in the way he walked, a little more hunched over than usual, like he had just finished a deep sigh that kept getting a little deeper every day.

One day she felt it so acutely, this suffering, like a hangnail she feared would fester and spread, that she prayed while hanging up laundry on the line, three tiny children within sight, a breeze blowing through her long, dark hair. “Please God,” she whispered, eyes closing with concentrated emotion. “Help Joe to become a doctor.”

It would be ridiculous to think that her prayer had started the war, but it was the war that gave Joe his chance to study medicine. Pearl Harbor set many things in motion, one of which was a fast track medical degree program. If you could keep up with studies, you got your education free of charge. Joe graduated, along with a small percentage of his original class. And, of course, he was sent off to the war.

Those were tough years, with him gone. Her parents were not well, and Joe’s parents were slowing down, meaning she had to do more on the farm.

Again, how could she have been responsible for him coming home, just because she had cried one lonely evening, praying for Joe’s return? But one week after that prayer, he had returned, a bandage over one eye. As always, he comforted her, even though he was the one with one blind eye.

“Actually, I’m relieved,” he had told her. “You are way too pretty for me to look at with two eyes.”

Much changed that first year Joe was back. He established a practice that served country folk, making the rounds every day. Every morning, before he set out on his horse, Sylvia would make him a lunch of bread and cheese, an apple from one of their trees, or apricots or pears she had canned, maybe a pickled cucumber from her stock. She walked the kids to school, helped the teacher with tasks around the school building, came home, did housework, and made dinner. The kids walked themselves back home, and Joe came home by six o’clock every evening.

One day, when Sylvia was feeling particularly weighed down with her fourth pregnancy, Joe rode up with a passenger  – a young woman from one of the more isolated farms down the road.

“This is Lilly,” he said unceremoniously. As Sylvia came to the horse, he had just dismounted. He helped the frail-looking young woman down off the horse next, and Sylvia noticed her wince upon landing, despite Joe’s careful support. Their three girls came to greet their Papa, jumping up to hug him.”

“Kids, please show Lilly where to wash up for dinner. Sylvia, would you help me with Philly here?” He patted the horse’s neck and headed towards the barn as the three kids jumped and ran and chattered, leading Lilly to the house.

“I’m sorry for the last-minute guest,” he had told her, voice low, hand on her shoulder. There was both urgency and calm in his voice. “Ed’s on a bender, and she’s still recovering from the last time he came home drunk.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“He hits her, Sylvie. Fractured her leg. He might come here to find her.”

Joe didn’t make his rounds as usual for the next few days. It was lovely having him home, having lunch with him, watching him with the kids. She even appreciated having another woman in the house. Though she didn’t like the looks Lilly had for Joe. Sylvia wanted to say, “Stop looking at my husband.” But she bit her tongue.

A couple days later, Ed, came riding up on a horse. Joe told Sylvia to stay in the kitchen and keep Lilly from coming outside. Sylvia peeked out the window from behind the curtains just in time to see Ed dismount clumsily, then run to Joe, swinging his fist. Sylvia had never seen Joe fight, but there he was ducking expertly, jabbing and jumping, side to side. He landed a blow on Ed’s jaw, sprawling him into the grassy dirt.

Calmly, Joe came back in, “Can I have two cups of coffee, Please Sylvie?” She obediently poured two cups from the pot on the cook stove, handed them over. He kissed her on the cheek and went back outside.

Joe and Ed sat outside talking, and later Sylvia brought them bowls of stew. Several hours later, Ed and Lilly rode off on Ed’s horse. When Joe finally came in, he looked exhausted, with dark shadows under his eyes, which he could barely keep open.

“Lilly and Ed will be fine,” he said, seeing the question on her face.

“What about when Ed drinks again?”

“He won’t.” Joe walked to their bedroom, where she found him hours later, fast asleep, sprawled face-down on top of the covers, still wearing the same clothes. He didn’t wake up until after noon the next day.

That was the first time she had been worried for his safety since the war. Sylvia had always revered Joe’s healing talents, but now she feared them as well, how they drained him of energy, knocking him down.

“Hello?” A nurse in with a white rectangle hat had appeared at the foot of her bed, holding a tightly-blanketed bundle about the size of a loaf of bread. “Are you ready to see your baby, Mrs. Spivey? He’s been fed and is sleeping like a baby,” she said with a smile.

“He’s a boy,” whispered Sylvia. Joe had thought it would be a boy. Their first. “Where’s Joe?” Sylvia’s voice raised in concern.

The nurse kept her practiced smile on as she adjusted the lilac-filled vase on the bedside table, then put a glass of water next to it. “The doctor will be with you shortly,” said the nurse as she left, calmly but quickly.

Sylvia’s heart froze. The nurse was following the edict, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Her throat tightened, and words squeezed out of her mouth into urgent calls that eventually turned into screams when no one responded. “Where’s Joe! Where’s my husband? Damnit, somebody tell me where Joe is!”

A kerfuffle of nurse activity showed itself beyond the windowed wall at the end of her room. Soon a white-coated, gray-haired doctor walked through the door.

“Please, Mrs. Spivey! You’re alarming the other patients.”

“Dr. Pike! Tell me where my husband is!”

She could see the impatience and disdain in his eyes. If Joe were here, he would know how to calm her down. He did that with all his patients, and the contrast between the two doctor’s manners made her hate the doctor before her and resent the absent one.

“Please, I will tell you, but you must first calm down.”

Sylvia held her breath immediately.

“And calm your baby, for goodness sake.”

Sylvia’s breath came back in a whoosh, and she suddenly noticed the wailing little lump in her lap. Instinct led her to unwrap the head of the little bundle, to open her robe and offer the little boy her breast.

The boy latched onto her nipple and sucked vigorously and slurpily, gradually slowing with sleepiness. “Must you? the nurses just fed him.”

Sylvia’s stare became murderous, but she kept her heart beat still, the way Joe had taught her. She almost growled “I calmed my baby. Now tell me, where is my husband?”

Dr. Pike stuck his hands in his large white jacket pockets and looked away, his calm, in-charge demeanor now slightly cracked.

“You remember the birth?”

“Something was wrong with the baby,” Sylvia replied, looking down at her little boy’s head covered with dark peach fuzz hair.

“Yes. We couldn’t hear a heartbeat. At one point you passed out…”

Joe helped me fall asleep, she corrected him in her head, but said nothing, not wanting to delay his point.

He pushed his glasses up his nose, looking at the baby at her breast, then away.

“The umbilical cord was around the baby’s neck. We got him out as quickly as possible, but he was blue.”

Tell me where Joe is. She didn’t dare speak it, but her mind was screaming.

Dr. Pike cleared his throat in a fist-covered cough, then forced himself to look into her eyes.

“Joe insisted on helping with the birth, practically pushing me aside. As soon as the baby came out, he unwrapped the cord from around the baby’s neck, then – the nurses tried to take the baby…” Dr. Pike’s eyes wandered up, into a memory. “But he elbowed everyone away and held the baby. I – I would have held the baby by the feet, upside down, slapped its bottom. But he…” his hands recreated Joe’s unfathomable actions. “…he sat down on the floor, demanded a warm blanket. Nurse Sally brought it, and he had her put it under baby, on his lap. He just – sort of rubbed the little feet, massaged the back, rocked back and forth.”

Tears were welling and falling from her eyes, her lips fluttering.

“That baby was not alive, Sylvia,” he said conspiratorially . “And then, five minutes later…”

Sylvia knew what had happened. She hugged the now-sleeping baby a little closer.

She tried to hold the emotions in by squeezing her eyes shut, but the tears flowed, drops falling gently onto the face of little boy who would be named after his dead father.

In early August of 2005 I found myself in a Miami bar lazily drinking a beer and occasionally glancing at the TV above the bar. The man sitting on the stool next to me held a Vodka on the rocks in one hand, his eyes absorbing whatever was on television. He was well-built, muscular, but not overly so, with a handsome, square-shaped face and white-flecked, brown, wavy hair. His shirt looked expensive, button-up with a stylish striped design. At one point he repeated something from the TV. As the conversation was mostly one-sided, I have left out my negligible contribution.

“With great power comes great responsibility.” Ha! Screw that!

People are responsible for themselves alone. That’s it. People who try to take responsibility for others never come out ahead.

Take my grandfather. He was a doctor. My dad said he had a special gift for it. “The healing touch.” I never met my grandpa, since he died in the war. But he saved a lot of people, according to my grandmother. As if it was a good thing. He died, and she had to raise three kids, including my Mom, on her own. He could have been a family practice doctor, leave a lot of money to his kids, live a comfortable life with his wife. And what he chose to do instead was better? Fuck that.

My dad wanted me to be a doctor. Especially when he thought I had the healing touch. We had these blueberry bushes, and Dad noticed that after I picked blueberries, they would grow right back the next day. So he started testing me. He’d ask me to touch the leaf of a dying houseplant, and when I did, the plant would start growing again. Once he even asked me to touch a dead plant, hanging over the lip of its pot. I did, and the next day it was healthy as ever.

That’s when he told me about my grandpa’s “healing touch”. Mom never talked about it with me, and Dad thought they were just exaggerated stories, until he started watching me. Grandpa was known to touch a person and heal them. Thing was, I had no interest in being a doctor. It’s too much responsibility, you know? Even as a kid, I knew I didn’t want that. So I started shutting it down. Dad would bring me a sick plant, and I’d do everything he asked –touch it, water it, breathe on it, whatever, and nothing would happen. The plant would just end up the same or maybe a little worse, if I could manage it.

So my Dad sat me down to tell me I didn’t have the healing touch and that it was okay. I had it, but I figured out that it wasn’t so much about healing. It’s about finding the vulnerability in a system. What you do beyond that is where choice comes in.

I’ve always figured that my purpose in life is to be comfortable. I don’t need a lot of money. I just need food, shelter, sex. The basics. So I use my gifts to meet those needs.

My job? There are other ways to get money than with a job. Sure, I was a mechanic for awhile, and I did some work with computers, but I didn’t like or understand either one that much – I was just able to use “the touch” to move and adjust things by feeling them out. I could have been a weatherman, too. I can feel what weather is coming. I could have developed that skill, learned the meteorology vocabulary. But at this point I just use it to feel out when it’s going to rain, how hot the day is going to be, when I need to prepare for a hurricane. Sometimes I can tell weeks or a month in advance, depending on how strong a storm it’s going to be. That’s come in handy a couple of times here in Florida. I only get flood insurance in time to cover me before a flood, then I cancel as soon as I get my payout.

But I’m not really a “job” kind of person. The easiest way to get by in the world is to hook up with rich women.

Oh yeah. Sex is one of the easiest things to manipulate. See that woman at the end of the bar? Not the blonde. Her friend. If I wanted to screw her, I’d send her a drink to feel out how she reacts and get her to make eye contact with me. If that goes well, I’d go sit next to her and talk, and look only at her, not her friend. She’s probably used to people looking at her blonde friend, and not doing that makes her feel special. No, that’s not the touch. That’s just psychology.

I don’t always have to actually touch her for it to take effect, but it’s a lot more potent if I do.  It’s hard to describe, but I feel something in the warmth of someone’s body, something missing, like in her cells or something. Then something in my cells or whatever shift around and sort of flow into her, fill that empty place. I could be touching her anywhere – her hand, her shoulder, her knee. And then I take my hand away. It’s like holding a delicious meal under a hungry person’s nose but not letting them eat it. Then I’m in.

Age difference? Ha. I’ve been at this since I was a teenager, but I swear, the older I get, the younger the women are that want me. Now that I’m in my 50’s I can get any age pussy I want. Within legal limits, of course.

But I’ve converted to older women. They’re the ones with the money. Florida’s the place to be. Rich old men are dropping like flies, leaving rich old women lonely and ready to go.

Of course I don’t meet them in bars. Senior centers are the place. That’s where I met my current wife. Widow of a billionaire boatmaker. I know. Jackpot, right? She’s in her 70’s. In good shape. And seriously, with the touch, I don’t have to spend much time getting her off. It’s quick. Yeah, old and wrinkly isn’t really my type, but rich is, so there you go.

Plus, her husband left her a boat company, and I love sailing. Just me and the water and nobody I have to adjust myself to.

Do I have political aspirations? Funny you should ask. You remember the Bush/Gore race of 2000?

Let me tell you a story.

To set the stage, I’ll start with high school, where I figured out how to make people flunk tests. There was this one smart girl I desperately wanted to fuck, but she had no interest. So on SAT test day our senior year, I made sure I sat next to her, and I bumped her arm. Not physically, but with energy-like – I don’t know how to explain it – and I made her put down wrong answers. Multiple choice works best for this sort of thing.

We got our grades back weeks later. When I see her by the bus stop after school, I ask how she did. She literally falls apart in my arms, sobbing so I practically had to hold her up. Of course I fucked her after that.

Anyway, back to the 2000 presidential election. Bush and Gore are way too close for my comfort. I’m in Palm Beach volunteering in voting booths that year, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to affect the voting of old people. Touch lingers longer in their bodies – kind of like it takes them longer to get rid of a cold. Plus that antiquated voting system! Hanging chads galore. It was practically made to be tampered with.

I also had a hand in the scrub lists. You know, the ones where felons were removed from voting lists. But eventually they found listings to be inaccurate. In fact, some of the felonies listed happened at a future date. I’m not taking full credit of course. Ralph Nader helped, too.

I didn’t like Bush much, but Al Gore got on my nerves, with his global warming crap.

Oh, I believe in global warming. It’s definitely happening. I know because influencing things around me isn’t just a one way street. Opening up those channels to touch others lets things come over to my side, too. That’s how my grandfather could heal people I suppose. He gave them health, but he had to take in some of the sickness to know what was wrong. It’s the same when I’m influencing other people. In order to move around and adjust something inside them, I have to let a little bit inside me. With things, like voting cards, it’s nothing. With people, it’s a pain, but I’ve learned to keep most of it, whatever it is, out. I take only the little bit I need for my purposes and push the rest back.

But with the environment? Forget it. Try to escape from that. Global warming is everywhere, man. It’s in the air we all breathe. The ground we walk on.  It’s not just temperature. I can’t shut out global warming any more than I can make myself stop breathing. It’s something I feel every second of every day, surrounding me like a smell that just keeps getting worse, or an itch that’s slowly spreading all over my body.

So why get Bush elected? Listen, if you got cancer, a really nasty, incurable one, and you’re given a month to live, how do you want to spend those last days? Do you want to make yourself sick with chemotherapy or radiation, lose your hair and spend a fortune just to prolong your life a few more days? Not me. I say have a party, get yourself a DNR bracelet, and let loose.

But Gore just wanted to prolong the agony. All these environmentalists don’t get it. The world is sick of us. It’s trying to buck us off like a horse that can’t handle the weight. But it’s a horse that’s dying! I say let the world die, and put us all out of our misery. I figured Bush would stall things long enough to fast forward us into global death. But stupid tree-huggers are doing their best to drag it out. Drive a prius, go solar, eat vegetarian. Ridiculous. Bandaids.

Listen, I can feel hurricanes a month before they happen. Global warming is 10 times that feeling, but always there. And getting stronger.

At this point he took one last drink, set his glass on the bar, and stood up with a loud sigh. As he stood up, he put on his jacket and dug into his pocket. He pulled out a hundred-dollar bill and put it on the counter.

Before leaving, he took one more thing out of his pocket. “My card,” he said, setting it on the counter before me. “If you ever need a boat.”

About a week later, I called the number on the card, which said, “Benson’s Boat-Builders”. A woman’s voice answered, nasally and scratchy with age. When I asked for Mr. Benson, the woman hesitated, then said, “Mr. Benson died seven years ago.”

“I was given a card,” I said. “By a gentleman who didn’t give me his name…”

The pause lasted awhile, and I wondered if she was still there.

“Ma’am? Is this Mrs.Benson?”

“My name changed when I remarried,” she said. “I think my husband may have given you that card.”

“May I speak with him?”

“He passed away about a week ago. He was out sailing and got caught in Hurricane Katrina.”

I gave the woman my condolences and immediately wrote down whatever I could remember of my conversation with her husband.

I knew that my granddaughter had Potential when she was very young.

You may have heard it called the Golden Touch, the Changing Eye, the Cleansing Spirit, the Influence – even The Force. But my grandfather called it Potential. He had it, too.

Most people haven’t heard of it, but they see or experience it without knowing what it is. I’ve heard folks say, “He’s got the Spirit in him!” Mind you, sometimes he’s just a handsome kid with a bright smile, but once in a while, it’s Potential finding its way.

My Grandpa Joe sat me down when I was ten years old, with the pretense of sharing some ice cream, but with the intention of having a serious talk.

We sat out in the wicker chairs on the back porch, looking out over a Montana meadow, grassy and scattered with prickly pear and sage brush. I held my cone close to my mouth, turning it strategically so as to lick the melting ice cream before it dripped down into something my grandma would make me clean up.

“Joseph,” he said (I was named after him), “You’re ice cream’s melting.”

“I know Grandpa,” I said between licks. “It’s hot out.”

 He nodded and looked at his own cone. “Mine’s not melting.”

I looked at his cone, and it was true, but I didn’t think too much about it until Grandpa Joe said, “Here, let me see yours for a minute.” He reached out and took my cone, which immediately stopped dripping. “Huh,” he said.  “Look at that.”

I looked at it, barely interested, wanting my ice cream back.

“Well, let me clean this up for you,” he said, and as I greedily eyed my ice cream cone, I saw the lines of once-melting ice cream recede back to the scoop of vanilla above the lip of the cone. Grandpa handed it back to me, then gave his own cone a few licks as he viewed me from the corner of his eyes.

I reached out and took it, wondering if I had seen what I saw, rotating the cone to view its clean, dry surface. As I looked and wondered, the frozen treat began a slow slide of melting on the down-tipped side. I looked at Grandpa, and he reached out a finger that touched just below the newly-forming drip.

“Let me get that for you,” he said, and as soon as finger touched cone, I watched the melting ice cream retrace its downward track, leaving the cone clean and dry once again.

That was the beginning of many conversations about the Potential that he had, and his grandfather before him. It ran in the family, he said, and it came out in a lot of different ways.

His Grandpa had told him about it when he was around ten years old, and back then, Josephus (the first)  thought that it just ran in his family. But Josephus the third knew that one of the slaves on his family’s plantation, an old man named Kitch, had it. In his family, it was called the Influence, but he knew it was the same thing.

History was important, but how would I condense it all into an introduction for a ten-year old? By that time we lived in Seattle, and summers didn’t get nearly as hot as the ones in Montana, hardly the 90 degrees that melted my ice cream on a sunny back porch when I was ten.

So I decided to talk it over with her in the fall, when leaves were slowly turning colors – nothing as dramatic as east coast fall colors, but enough for my purposes.

I suggested we go to a park that didn’t get much patronage anymore since a mudslide made stairs to the beach inaccessible. Once in the park, I pointed to a leaf, just beginning to yellow, and I said, “Josephine,” (she was named after me), “Watch this.” I touched the tip of the leaf, and soon yellow was replaced with vibrant green, spreading as though it was sucking up green paint.

Josephine gave a little screech. “Grandpa! How’d you do that?” As I pulled my hand away, the yellow quickly seeped back in, the leaf drooping down.

“I thought about summer,” I said, “and how green the leaves get, how warm it is. Here,” I said moving her hand to the leaf. “You do it.”

Josephine touched the leaf and smiled. “Come on Grandpa. How’d you do that, really?” She was used to my magic tricks – a quarter pulled from her ear, a handkerchief changing color, a favorite stuffed animal appearing from within my jacket. I had explained some of these tricks to her, taught her how to do them. But this was not one of those tricks.

“Hold the leaf,” I said, gently enclosing my hand around hers, then letting go. “Now, remember last summer when it got so hot I turned on the sprinkler and you jumped through it?”

“Yeah. Wearing shorts.”

“Remember how you told me that the apple tree leaves were green on their tops but sort of soft and silvery underneath?”

“Like peach fuzz,” she said, looking down at the leaf she held. The yellow, almost crunchy leaf was slowly becoming soft and silvery green.

Josephine quickly let go of the leaf and looked up at me.

That was the beginning.

When Eulalie Sacks opened the door to her home, she had two thoughts.

The first thought was “accretion”. She had been studying vocabulary words for the SAT test she would be taking on Saturday, and she had lamented about how many of the words were abstract ideas, difficult to visualize. Accretion, however was a concept with a physical example in the form of stalactites and stalagmites, those someday-meet-in-the-middle icicle-like cave formations, the product of years and years of mineral deposits, so tiny as to be imperceptible, but impressive when added up over hundreds and thousands of years.

This thought came to Eulalie because a pile of miscellaneous items on the living room couch had become so tall as to form a precarious point that reminded her of a stalagmite, and she unconsciously looked up to the ceiling to look for the blob’s upside-down sibling.

Eulalie had gotten used to piles of stuff on the couches and chairs. Her mother had become a collector of things – books about gardening, pickling supplies, kitchen utensils – almost anything food or cooking related. She also had a myriad of hobbies and ideas for future hobbies which inspired piles and boxes full of piles on the floor. It had been awhile since Eulalie had seen a clear patch of the carpet. Most of the front living room window was also covered by boxes, many of which were piled on a cat condo for their non-existent (and never existed) cat to climb on.

It had been years since anyone had sat on the couch. And wasn’t there a chair in the corner? How had she not seen this happening? Her mother had always had a reason to put something here, something there, and she talked about plans to use those somethings or to give them more permanent homes elsewhere. But those reasons and plans never came to fruition, were never something Eulalie could see. They were all abstract ideas in her mind, but she assumed they were more visible in her mother’s mind. Were they?

The project ideas had begun when Eulalie entered middle school, the year her father had moved away. Little by little, interactions with her Mom moved into smaller locations. But Eulalie also spent more time away from home or alone in her room, so she hadn’t noticed. She stopped watching TV on the living room couch because she was busy with homework, or she watched shows on her laptop. She used to eat with her mom at the kitchen table, but now she ate all her meals in her room.

In fact, when Eulalie looked around at the living room, she was amazed at how much stuff had accumulated. The whole space was filled with formations that had slowly accreted there, piled by her mother after shopping trips and rummage sale stops and gathering from free piles in the neighborhood. When was the last time she had even looked in here? Usually when she came home, she was on her phone, texting or tweeting, then through her bedroom door four steps later.

It was like looking at a geological wonder, the cave of her home, slowly built up. Accretion.

It was then, looking on with mouth open in wonder, that Eulalie had her second thought.

“My mom’s a hoarder.” She let this phrase settle into her. Then she went into her room to Google it.