Cigarette Psychic

“The last cigarette I smoked was when my dad died,” the boy mutters, choking on tobacco, or maybe remorse.

They stand at the edge of their rented gravel lot, in the shade of a Bradford pear tree - a feeble attempt to escape the spring heat. Charleston is a lovely town, but so hot. It should not be so hot this early in the year. Esma has no patience for heat anymore; her hormones make enough of their own these days.

She inhales deeply, her lungs relishing the silent burn of the cigarette dangling between her fingers. She examines his face curiously, unmoved by his beauty. She’s never seen him before; he must be one of the new ones they picked up in Ohio last week. God, what a disaster Ohio was. The opposite of Charleston - too cold, and far from lovely. But they had so little business that maybe the ringmaster will decide against it next season. If there’s even a next season. People don’t go to carnivals the way they used to; theirs is a dying industry.

The boy is beautiful, in the way that all youth are with their bright eyes and light smiles. Years ago, when she was a calla among weeds, she would have devoured him with a mischievous wink and sultry crook of her finger. But now that the wind of life has whittled her body into a shadow of its former glory, his presence inspires something closer to resentment than lust.

The pungent smell of sex drifts in her direction. Maybe him, but more likely the damned tree. She’s always hated pear trees in spring.

She checks her watch—you’re late, the little face warns her with its slender hands. She allows herself one final drag before crushing the cigarette resolutely under her foot.

“That was my last. I am far too old for these poisons,” she says triumphantly, her accent bearing the lilt of travelers of old.

Really, she’s French, and her name is Emelie, and she came to the States hungry and heartbroken at nineteen. But she has been playing the part of Esma the Ethereal for so long that it’s no longer playing a part. Perhaps she has always been Esma, and it is the girl Emelie that is the dream.

Funny, too, how society shifts in the years. Her assumed identity is probably what the kids call cultural appropriation now. They’re right, but it is too late for her to change.

As she turns to walk away, something inside her pulls. This boy should not be smoking. And she should not care that he should not be smoking - she makes a point not to care about the other workers - but somehow she does. Interesting.

She gives him her best withering grandmother look. “And you, my boy, are far too young. Chin up.”

He blushes and drops his cigarette, but she strides away before he can say anything. She can’t hear about his dead father right now, and she knows she will if she stays. She has some degree of fame left to cling onto, and it is a fame that requires her to feel, and she has spent more feeling than she wants on this boy already.

As she walks to her tent, the heat glues the thick wool costume to her back. It is an awful thing, gaudy and sequined. Once, the costume she wore — similar to this one though it was — clung to her curves and exuded an air of intrigue.

Now. Now she is bone, and this a sack that swallows her whole.

Her watch scolds her once again. Late, late, late. But what does it even matter anymore? Time is just a thing to be lost.

She readjusts her headdress and rolls her shoulders back before bursting into her midnight-patterned tent. The lights flash, harsh and blinding, and she holds her hands proudly above her head for the thunderous applause.

Except the applause isn’t thunderous. It is hearty, sure—respectable, even—but not the standing-room-only, marvelous applause that Esma the Ethereal once came to expect. The rows have dwindled to a fraction of their former occupancy.

She feels the smile on her face spread across hollow cheeks. No, she tells herself sternly, there is no time for crying in the carnival. Her lips cooperate, starting to recite the tedious script.

“Welcome, one and all, to the World’s Greatest Showcase. I am Esma the Ethereal, fortune-teller extraordinaire!”

She bows with a giant flourish, the special effects technician flickering the lights a second out of sync.

Wonderful. It is going to be one of those nights.

She plops into the fading velvet armchair on stage and looks around. “Do I have any volunteers?”

The audience members cough and avert their eyes. They usually do; everybody wants to watch, but nobody wants to be the worm under the scalpel. For a moment, her stomach plummets at the thought of sitting across from an empty chair, trapped by the crowd’s hesitation. She has done it a thousand times before, and always, always, she has winked and drawn someone out. Easily, like it was nothing.

Tonight it does not feel like nothing. Tonight, her soul is tired.

Thank goodness Henri is not here to see my disgrace.

The thought dissipates as soon as it flashes across her mind, because of course it is no goodness that Henri is not here. She has wondered many, many times in the last years if he would even love her the way she is now, so far from the wild, beautiful girl she was then. Every time, she decides that of course he would. He is Henri. Was Henri. He would have loved her no matter what shape her life had shifted into.

Even if he didn’t, it would be a blessing to be rejected by him.

But then a single girl stands timidly in the back row. “I would—I would like my fortune told.”

Esma breathes a sigh of relief and lets the thoughts of Henri slip away. Daydreaming of the past would only serve to muddle her vision of the future.

The girl totters onto stage, reluctant and lovely. Heartbreak is written across her weary face; it is always the lovelorn who seem to find their way onto Esma’s stage, starving for the platter of hope they think she can serve.

This one is no different. She reeks of desperation. She's slight, with curling strawberry hair and doll-like eyes that glisten with unshed tears. Esma once had eyes like that.

Esma gestures for her to sit in the empty armchair, and then leans across the wooden table, resting her hands on either side of the glowing crystal ball. Palms up.

As the girl offers her own hands, she starts to say, “My name is—“

And Esma knows. Knows the second the girl’s clammy fingers brush her wrists.

“Amelia, yes,” Esma finishes, and the girl’s face is wide open now. Shock has a way of laying the people in these chairs bare before her.

Psychometry, the experts call it: the gift of touch. With the briefest of contact, Esma can see all that was and all that can be.

A window opens in Esma’s mind. A bloody fight—passionate fists against Amelia’s delicate cheekbones. A man she is leaving in her rearview mirror as her tires screech madly against the pavement. A blur of countryside, until Amelia sees a billboard on the side of the road, a woman holding a crystal ball at the forefront: “The World’s Greatest Showcase, featuring Esma the Ethereal.” And then she is stopping for the first time in hundreds of miles, and she doesn’t know why. She is walking towards the tent, wondering what a psychic could tell her, wondering if there is maybe, maybe . . .

And then the window jumps forward. Esma shifts from past to future like a driver shifting his clutch. Amelia bounces out of the tent, worry scrubbed clean from her face, and runs into a boy.

Esma startles. It is the cigarette boy, the too-young-chin-up boy. He smiles kindly at Amelia and offers to pay for her meal. They eat together on a park bench, side by side, and talk for much longer than his lunch break allows. Amelia glances at her car. She should go - the man she’s running from may show up soon. She doesn't know he is sleeping in a hotel room hours away. The boy follows her, and Amelia has an idea.

“Come with me.”

And he does.

A life flashes before Esma’s eyes: a sunset and a ring and a ceremony and a baby and million of beautiful, ordinary moments in between. This frightened girl in front of her has no idea of the love that awaits. All Esma has to do is say, “Walk outside, girl. Stand in the sun. Live happily ever after.”

But instead Esma thinks of another frightened girl from years long past, weeping over her fiancé’s hospital bed for the life they would never have. The life she knew they would never have, knew from the moment he tapped her shoulder in a French coffee shop and said, “Pardon, mademoiselle" --

and she felt the sickness growing inside him.

Which, of course, had also been the moment she knew she would fall completely, utterly in love with him.

An entire love story in one touch.

She pulls her hands back suddenly, breaking the connection. Amelia stares, enraptured.

“You—there is—you are—,” Esma stammers, the words catching in her mouth.

And then her lips move of their own volition. “You are in terrible danger. The man you fear has almost caught you. Leave this place, child. Run. And never look back.”

The girl’s eyes widen in terror, a deer in the headlights of an impending crash. Esma’s hands fly to her mouth. She could say something, should say something, there is still time—

Amelia almost falls off the stage in her haste as she bolts for the exit. The flap of the tent flutters behind her. Just like that, she is gone.

Esma swoons slightly in her chair, the horror of what she has done beginning to settle deep in her stomach.

The special effects technician coughs loudly, jarring her back to reality. There is still an audience in front of her. And not just any audience; it is a captivated audience, an audience that will hang on to every word.

She stands and smiles, the magic slowly flooding back to her cheeks. “Now, who is next?”

* * *

As the sun flees from the horizon, Esma steps out from the ringmaster’s tent. “You were absolutely magnetic,” he had sputtered, waving his bottle of whiskey like a parade flag. “People will flood when this gets out on social media, just you wait. Esma the Ethereal is back, baby.”

She turns toward her little stoop at the far end of the circus lot, under the pear tree. A cigarette finds its way into her fingers before she can stop it, and the light quickly follows.

Pieces of ash fall to the ground like melancholy snow.

The crunch of gravel alerts her to his presence. He has crept up beside her, a murky silhouette against the dusk.

“Can I have a light?” he asks.

She fumbles with her lighter, not daring to meet his eyes. Her shaking fingers collide with the hand reaching toward her. She sees him in twenty years: a farmhand covered in dust and mud, somewhere flat and endless, too hardened to retain any of his youthful beauty. Amelia is an empty space in his life, an ache he feels but doesn’t understand.

Henri, what have I done?

They stand shoulder to shoulder, staring into the same nothingness across the lot, and she has never felt more alone.

“This one will be my last,” he says when he is finished. “Promise.”

This time, they both know it is a lie.