psychic abilities. “Hidden potentials that lay sleeping within the initiate are carefully nurtured at Puerto Nostradamus,” was written at the top of the brochure.
Their brochure was filled with sepia-toned photographs of well known psychics, including Shirley MacLaine and Nancy Reagan. There were quotes endorsing Gert’s and Charlie’s hospitality. Madonna said, “A miraculous experience,” and New Jersey Governor Crispy Crapp bragged about having lost one-hundred pounds, “I lost 100 pounds.” (The Governor regained every ounce and then some in less than two months.) There were pictures of natives rowing across Lake Titicaca, guests riding on several domesticated llamas and a visiting dignitary helping Charlie hold down an alpaca while Gert was busy sheering it. Another photo was of Gert all alone in the garden tending to her coffee plants while a rather dark and dirty-looking family rested beneath a cacao tree in the background to the left of Gert’s bonnet. All this was beguiling, yet V had serious doubts about that sort of thing which, consequently, kept her from visiting Aunt Gertrude. Although, she did recommend Puerto Nostradamus to a good many of her ex-friends. It sounded devilish even without having any idea where it was, what it was, or anything about it. The very name of Puerto Nostradamus conjured something other than a place for spiritual enlightenment.
Then there is Cousin Harriet, Maxfield’s younger sister, who found the word “Aunt” much too matronly for her taste and, therefore, insisted she be called “Cousin” Harriet. Cousin Harriet disappeared before the courts waived her privilege to enjoy the company of three husbands while two of them were still alive. As a result, the four of them took flight from Queen City International Airport for Gotham City from where they booked passage on a Norwegian freighter and haven’t been heard from since. Cousin Harriet, in her own small and special way, achieved a certain amount of local, however infamous, notoriety.
“Why shouldn’t I enjoy a bit of recognition?” V asked her dearest friend and companion Lily Nettles.
“What have you done for it?”
“You’re being provocative, dear heart.” V had already arrived at an acerbic edge by the time she got to “dear heart.” She hated questions that led to self-incrimination. “Sometimes you beg the question, Lily. No one gives a shit about me. I have nothing. I am nobody. Just a buttload of unfulfilled dreams.”
“Boo-hoo. Give me a break! You’re being silly and you don’t believe a single word of it. By this time tomorrow today’s anxiety will have morphed into your usual arrogance of genius.”
“I would not have used the words ‘arrogance’ and ‘usual’ in the same sentence,” V pouted.
“People love you, Sweetie. You host the Ladies’ Grecian Culture Study Group once a month, Friends of Erotic Artifacts bimonthly, and you’re a Capitol Hill fixture, a celebrity. You are the woman around whom the world revolves.”
“Really? Do you really think so?”
“There might be a few who wouldn’t agree with the revolving world stuff.”
“There’s always a few out to get me. It is always best to know who they are. Who are they?”
“How would I know, V?
“Exactly. Maybe I should forget about it.”
“Forget about what, V?”
“Posterity. Maybe I should forget about posterity and say fuck it!”
“That’s the spirit. Fuck it!” Lily had finally found something with which to agree as she offered up her empty teacup for refilling. By coincidental happenstance the cup and the subject were dropped.
Pudgy Penny and Piggy Peter came barging through the bird’s eye maple double doors that entered into the parlor. These custom-made doors were adorned with naked smiling cherubs bearing shields and swords, anchors intertwined with hexagons and rhombi, roses and ribbons of leaves, and most ornate is the three-foot tall dancing Dionysos that splits in two whenever the doors are slid open. Shady Sanctum was, after all, the residency of the late Reverend Kirby Victor Aires. The late reverend knew the worth——just short of pompous——of a pious atmosphere.
The twins Penny and Peter were a last minute gift to Uncle Max from Cousin Harriet the night she decided to fly the coop, as it were, with her three husbands——Jacques, Sean and Bonito. The twins were twelve years old when Cousin Harriet gave them to Max nearly ten years ago, and they haven’t grown a day since. No one is really sure from where they originally came. One day Harriet just showed up with them and said she had found them. “I found them. Here. They’re yours.” And, though the twins were not identical, they were similar. Pudgy was noticeably fatter than her brother Piggy whose pumpkin-red Buster Brown was cut not quite so butchly as Pudgy’s.
The twins returned early that morning from Haiti together with their Uncle Max who folded spacetime in order to spend five weeks with a mulatto family to study dark migratory short-horned locusts. The twins entered the parlor wearing an assortment of beads, trinkets, and oh my god are those human teeth?
“Auntie Vickie!”
“What now, Peter?”
"Is there any way of getting in the basement, if say Penny and me was locked out ‘cause somebody went and bolted the door from inside or something like that so there’s no way to get down there if say somebody wanted to so what would you say to that?”
“Yeah, what do you say, Auntie?” Pudgy Penny asked with unremarkable indifference.
“I would say don’t call me Auntie,” V twisted a venomous smile and added, “Coal slide, I imagine.”
“So did we,” grinned Pudgy Penny, looking like a jack-o-lantern stuck atop four and one half feet of coagulated gelatin. “What else,” continued the irritatingly impatient Pudgy Penny, “would you say?”
“I would say that’s it, kiddos,” answered V.
“We’re not kiddos!” Piggy Peter shouted.
“Of course not,” V snickered.
All the while, Lily sat and watched quietly. She would not look directly——as a blackbird flies——at the children. Lily made it a point to keep her glances as short as possible for fear of frightening the twins with her brutal thoughts; of which she was certain the twins could read.
“Can we have it?” Pudgy Penny asked while fingering her beads and human teeth. “It’s dark. It’s damp. It’s dirty. It’s moldy. It’s smelly.”
“It’s just perfect,” chimed Piggy Peter. “Will you give it to us?”
“Oh, my,” sighed Lily, sotto voce, from behind her hand covering her mouth and nose.
“Hello, Auntie Lily.”
“Hello, children…” then begrudgingly added, using five or six syllables to squeeze it out, “…welcome home.”
“We’re not children!” Piggy Peter corrected.
“Well, you’re home anyway. How wonderful.” If there were ever sarcasm in Lily’s tone, this was it; and that was as far as Lily’s interest could take her. She thought better of asking them how their trip had been; she didn’t want them in her head. Lily did not much care for anything about anything having a single thing to do with the children.
