Day: March 7, 2025

853 words

When I first glanced at the prompt yesterday (yeah yeah I skipped a day), I thought it said, “Four of ten,” and I had a completely different story writing in my head. So when I looked at it again and had to start over, that was frustrating. That’s what I get for skipping a day and not refreshing my memory.

This was fun to write because of all the dialogue. The challenge here was to not name either of them or write from a particular point of view. That’s hard, especially when writing dialogue; I like to “cocoon” dialogue with analogies, feelings, and thoughts to help flesh out the characters. Without it, motivations and feelings aren’t clear, and we’re reliant on the actions of the characters to determine mood. Oh, and clearly I was thinking of the beginning of “Ghostbusters” (directed by Ivan Reitman).

“That’s not too bad,” he said, looking at the cards laid out between them. They were from a standard deck of 52 playing cards, the ubiquitous Bicycle brand, facing up. “Not great, but not too bad.”

“What does that mean?” she said, leaning forward, the tips of her blonde hair brushing the cards. Before he could answer, she said, “Can I try again?”

He scratched the back of his neck. “I mean, sure,” he said, “but that becomes less like a controlled experiment and more like a guessing game. We’re not trying to measure how well you can guess.”

She nodded, and her hair moved one of the cards out of place. It was a two of diamonds. “But I got four out of ten,” she said. “That seems high for guessing, especially considering there are 52 cards in deck.”

“I know how many cards are in a deck,” he said. “But someone who’s lucky will get three to four correct,” he said, straightening the cards until the tops of the cards were even and level with each other. “Five and above, that’s something to work with. With four, we could go either way. Nothing definitive here.”

“But I saw them,” she said, tapping her finger on the two of diamonds, sliding it out of place.  “I could actually see them in my brain. Almost like it was floating there in water or… or…” she looked up, trying to recapture her vision. “Like it was suspended in a clear gel.” She shook her head. “I can’t explain it. Am I making sense?”

“Not really,” he said. “But I’m one of those people who can’t ‘see’ things in their head. I don’t have a ‘mind’s eye’ or whatever you call it.”

She blinked at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, when someone asks you to close your eyes and picture something, that doesn’t happen for me. So no, what you’re saying doesn’t resonate.”

She gaped. “How weird! Is it like, nothing?”

“It’s not nothing, it’s just not something. More of a sense, or a concept of the thing.”

She slumped back in her chair, eyes wide, smiling. “That is fascinating. Do you dream?”

He shifted in his chair. “Some other time I’d be happy to tell you all about my supposed brain anomalies. I happen to think that humans are varied and complicated and the brain is a squishy meat antenna attuned to different frequencies, and some humans are on AM radio, and some are on FM.”

“What does that mean?”

He sighed. “Never mind. I just mean that I think our brains work differently from one another’s, and we just don’t know it. Which is why,” he said, straightening the two of diamonds, “we do experiments like this, to see how differently our brains work. 

“Oh, you mean like how I see red might not be the same color as what you see. You could be seeing blue or green.”

He shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “Now. When someone comes to me saying they have psychic abilities,” he gestured across the table, “that’s interesting to me. Not because I think ESP or telekinesis exists—well, not in the way people tend to think it exists, anyway—but because I think their brains are tuned into something we can’t normally perceive with our traditional senses.

“So you don’t think people can read other people’s minds?”

“Again, not in the way that people think they can.”

Her eyes widened. “What if someone tried to read your mind? Would it just be blank?” She sat up straight, her palms facing him as if she was defending herself. “Not because you’re stupid or anything. But because of what you said about not seeing things in your mind.”

He stifled a sigh. “I don’t know,” he said. “Like I mentioned, I don’t think that works that way.” He glanced at his watch. “Can we get back to it?”

“Sure,” she said, and it was her turn to look annoyed. “What’s next?”

“A hearing test,” he said. 

“What?”

“A hearing test,” he said, and she laughed. He didn’t attempt to stifle this sigh.

“A little joke,” she said. When he said nothing, she continued. “Why a hearing test? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Remember what I was saying about frequencies? I’m testing to see if you’re more sensitive to certain pitches.”

“I don’t get what that has to do with me being able to see cards,” she said, frowning. She was becoming bored.

“It may not,” he said, “but I’m curious. And that means I’ll look outside of what someone thinks is obvious to possibly create connections that can tell us more about what’s going on. You should try it.” He winced a bit, but she didn’t notice the slight. 

“Yeah, me too,” she said. “I like to learn about things. What does that do? She said, waving to the device as if to prove her point.

“It’s an audiometer,” he said. She reached for it, but he pulled it away. “Please don’t. It’s expensive.”