Truly I LOVED writing Psychic in Suburbia! It has my brand of comedic flare, deep emotional wounding and healing, spooky shenanigans, and downright horror-lite scenes (or maybe not so lite) to raise goosebumps on your flesh and make you keep turning your head to make sure you are still truly alone while reading.

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If you haven't read it yet... What are you waiting for?

For those in the last category, here's a little something-something to whet your appetite...

“So, all that mumbo-jumbo warning stuff last night was bullshit? You’re not planning to hurt them.” My gaze goes from Wolfman to the backdoor.

“They won’t.” A gravelly voice whispers in my ear, followed by a burning sensation down my back. I pivot around so fast I stumble toward the precarious spiral staircase, slamming into the railing but catching myself before I plunge over. “But I will.” 

*********************

Wolfman and his band of misfit spirits immediately vanish.

“Thanks for the help!” I shriek to the empty air. My back burns as if someone has flogged me with a fiery whip. Before I have a chance to react, something strong and invisible picks me up like a sack of groceries and throws me over the railing.

I may have screamed. Not sure though. I’m too busy seeing my life pass before my eyes in vivid color: the day at the empty beach bar where I saw a handsome young man playing darts in the back and how his chocolate-eyed gaze had locked on me making me weak-kneed; the day those same sexy eyes peered up at me with the one question making my heart soar with joy; another day when we’d stood before a tiny crowd of family and friends with our hands clasped and some lady in a bright fuchsia dress proclaiming we were husband and wife; when the kids were born; the only time Tanner ever surprised me with a romantic getaway to Napa (without the children); and other happy times all flash through my mind at record speed.

Then…nothing.

***

If only the “nothing” had lasted. What follows is beyond the horrors my overactive imagination could’ve ever dreamed up.

Floating. That is all I can determine in the initial moments after recovering from the sheer terror of being seized by invisible hands and tossed over the railing…presumably to my death. Floating could be a good thing. Right? Before I dare pry my eyes open, I imagine I am floating up, through the clouds, past the stars with the magnificent rings of Saturn on my left, through a silky veil into the heavens with white, fluffy clouds and cherubs singing.

That’s not the sight to greet my eyes when I manage to open them.

Angels are not fluttering around on white, downy wings.

Saint Peter must have other plans because he is nowhere in sight either.

And there is no joyous reunion with deceased loved ones. Not even my Siamese kitty, Kasey, from my childhood is here to greet me.

My first thought is “What have I done to deserve hell?”

Wherever I am, it’s dark as if I’m submerged in a tar pit, except for in the distance a burnt orange glow outlines a jagged horizon. Not a moment earlier, my skin was cool except where the miscreant spirit raked red-hot coals down my back. Now, my whole body burns.

Maybe I am dipped into a tar pit. It certainly smells like it—a putrid, suffocating sulfuric odor usually present when the state has a crew laying down fresh asphalt to fill potholes right before an election.

Squinting, I focus on the horizon to see if I could make out any other shapes—people, buildings, Satan, anything. All I see is blackness and one shimmering line of what looks like fire far, far away. But wait! Are my eyes deceiving me or is the line closer than before; and am I moving toward it or is it moving toward me? Either way, I want nothing to do with it.

My arms and legs flail to no purpose. It doesn’t propel me backward, upward, or in any direction as far as I can tell anyway. There is no sense of time nor space, there is no ground and no sky. I am simply floating along in a big vast vat of nothing.

My vision blurs with an onslaught of tears, mixed with fear, sadness, and anger. I never asked to be eviscerated by a nasty entity. I had plans, you know. I was going to get into my size two jeans from high school before the next reunion (I was a plump little marshmallow at the last one after I’d given birth to the twins five months before the big event. Some jerk wad who had been the prom queen and the homecoming queen and was married to the captain of the football team made some confidence zapping comment about me turning into a Teletubby); I was going to travel more, see the pyramids, get lost in the library at Trinity College, hike to a dormant volcano in Hawaii or maybe Iceland; and I was going to write the next great American novel about guardian angels walking among us. But it seems my little psychic secret has doomed me to a life cut short and my soul to float around in what is either hell or purgatory or wherever the fuck I am! I’ll never renew my wedding vows overlooking the Cliffs of Dover, nor swaddle and rock to sleep my grandbabies, and I am gonna miss out on the Stevie Nicks concert with Alex next month!

The tiny hairs inside of my nose are scorched. The tears falling from my eyes sizzle then evaporate in the heat. I have no control over… Well, over anything at all. Simply suspended in a convection oven for all time, I suppose.

Hey, if I am dead, why am I not given the chance to go back and haunt everybody like all those ghosts in Krissy’s house? Why am I stuck here? I’d make an excellent ghost! If I get the chance, I’ll haunt Krissy for getting me into this mess. I’ll hide her corkscrew so she can’t open a bottle of her favorite wine. I’ll turn on the tiki bar fridge spigot so all Cal’s beer flows out. And, if Tanner remarries… Yeah, I’m totally poltergeisting him and the new trophy wife.

What the hell?

I hear something. A chuckle? My hands refuse to cooperate to wipe the tears from my eyes so I can see better. That sound did not come from me.

An icy sliver snakes down my back from the base of my skull to the small curvature of my lower back. Given my body is overheated from the atmosphere, the chill burns.

“Enjoying your preview?” A raspy voice—much like one would expect from a Horsemen of the Apocalypse—speaks into my ear. No, that isn’t right. It spoke into my mind.

I thrash around, trying to see if there is anyone or anything around or near, but my sight only takes in the same image from earlier no matter which way I turn.

“This is where those who disobey me go. There is no escape.” A stab of pain, much like an ice pick to my temple, provokes a shriek from my parched lips. “If you try to help them, you’ll join them. If you try to keep the young boy from me, every second of your afterlife will be worse than the most terrifying vision of hell you ever had.”

A tsking sound echoes in my head. “Don’t say I didn’t give you fair warning.”

Another sharp stab of pain, this time through my chest, then all falls silent. The fiery line in the distance extinguishes itself. There is nothing but darkness and the knowledge I’ve poked the wrong entity. But what he doesn’t understand is this Mama Bear isn’t about to back down. Because he, or it or whatever, cannot possibly comprehend precisely how stupid I can be when pissed off.

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