Popshot Magazine – August 2019

(nextflipdebug5) #1

FOR THE SPLENDOUR WITH


WHICH SHE SHINES


Short story by Jen Lua Allan
Illustration by Abi Stevens

They had told me that Aoife was having trouble finding a flatmate; no-one wants to live
with a prophet. The Gumtree ad was harmless enough: she didn’t mention anything
about cleanliness or noise, but had strong opinions about Hildegard of Bingen. My own
Venn diagram — a remnant from my Catholic school days — was probably the reason she
accepted my application. She held the interview in her front room, the blinds shuttered
despite the honeyed light outside. Crows rattled and scraped in the old townhouse eaves.
The scent of incense lingered. A roving map of stars was projected onto the wall behind
her, so that her face was constantly charted in constellations.
Her eyes were the first thing I noticed: a shade of brown so light they appeared amber.
She would later tell me this was one of the best things she inherited from her Nonna, the
other hand-me-downs an eclectic mix, ranging from the ability to make flawless ravioli
to a tendency to sing operatic arias when distracted. The most obvious and least socially
acceptable inheritance, of course, was her gift of prophecy.
“Would you like to ask me anything?” she said at the end.
I thought briefly of the writings which sprawled across the coffee table, the way the air
shivered and bent around her as if around a candle flame. Her voice was not what you’d
imagine when you think of oracles and mystics — it was distinctly ordinary, unmusical.
The slant of her left incisor was chipped. I thought of how this flat was just far enough
from my old life that I could pretend I’d moved to another city entirely.
I shook my head. “I’m in.”
Her sofa was at once voluptuous and sinking; it tipped her shoulder against mine as I
signed the contracts, balancing the sheets on a stack of books across my knee. She smelled
of cooking, and that faint curl of sandalwood. I had to keep my hand from shaking.
“I thought you might ask me to tell you your future,” she said offhand as I scrawled my
name across the last document. “All the others did.”
Looking at eyes like hers was like falling through an open window. I glanced back at the
papers instead; the ink mingling with blood from a recent cut on my finger.
“I’m not interested in knowing what to expect,” I said. It seemed less rude than telling
her I held no truck with miracles. It was only as I was leaving that she spoke, that ordinary
voice cutting straight through me.
“What if something was almost certainly going to be a disaster?” she said. “Would you
want to know then?”
I smiled. “Especially not then.”
It seemed so obvious to me that my previous life had puckered through me like a scar
— a thing no less visible than the port-wine stain above my eye, or the colour of my hair.

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