My One Hundred Adventures by Polly Horvath

Madame Crenshaw.
    We go inside. Madame Crenshaw has to make way for Nellie’s bulk.
    â€œMy next-door neighbor, Mabel, tells me you can see the future. If you can prove you can do this, we’d like to hear about this girl’s future.”
    â€œHappy to. That will be twenty bucks,” says Madame Crenshaw.
    â€œI’d like to do an exchange. I do some energy work myself and I could give you a treatment and you could demonstrate your remarkable gift,” says Nellie.
    â€œWell, that would be a demonstration of
your
remarkable gift if you could make me give you a demonstration for free,” says Madame Crenshaw, and laughs. “I don’t do exchanges. Cash in advance.”
    â€œCash stops the flow of energy,” says Nellie.
    â€œBut it increases the flow of gin,” says Madame Crenshaw, sighing and getting a bottle out of the cupboard over the sink. “You want a drop?” she asks Nellie.
    Nellie looks uncertain.
    Madame Crenshaw turns to me. “You?”
    I shake my head.
    â€œWell, Christ, I do,” she says, and pours herself half a tumbler, then drinks about half of that all at once. She sits down and crosses her arms over her chest and says, “Well?”
    Nellie goes to her purse and opens it reluctantly. She gets out her wallet. It is stuffed with bills and heavy with coins. I gape. “It’s not all mine, some of it is from the collection plate, but, of course, I’m not using
that.
I have to make the deposit tomorrow. This twenty is
mine,
” she says, peeling it off and handing it to Madame Crenshaw.
    Immediately, as if the twenty has flicked the On switch of her telepathic mind, Madame Crenshaw stands up in a swirl of purple India cotton and begins incanting things we don’t understand.
    â€œIn English, please,” says Nellie.
    â€œI was getting to that,” says Madame Crenshaw irritably. She grabs one of Nellie’s hands, sits down, and holds it over her heart, staring into space, her pupils dilating.
    I can see that Nellie is about to snatch her hand back when Madame Crenshaw says, “I can feel in your hand you’ve got great preaching powers.” Then Madame Crenshaw takes Nellie’s hand off her heart and looks at the palm. Nellie relaxes her hand in Madame Crenshaw’s and stares at it as if trying to see what Madame Crenshaw does. “What you don’t realize is you’ve got great healing powers. You ever done any faith healing?”
    â€œYou mean like energy work? That’s another name for energy work! Isn’t it, Jane?” she asks me.
    I nod but I’m no expert.
    â€œYou are right to do it. You must do it. You’re
intended
to do it,” says Madame Crenshaw, dropping her hand and looking far far away. “You’ve got the gift.”
    The cadence of this reminds me of
Millions of Cats.
Hundreds of cats, thousands of cats, millions and billions and trillions of cats. This runs over and over in my mind and I try to remember the last time I read this story. Why can’t I stay focused? I don’t want to be skeptical but some tiny part of me is thinking that she isn’t telling Nellie anything Nellie hasn’t already told
her.
But I am afraid that if I am skeptical, the universe won’t reveal things to me. Nellie talks about being open to it all. If you aren’t open, maybe these mystical things don’t happen to you.
    â€œWhat gift?” asks Nellie, although it seems obvious to me. I think she just wants to hear it again. Everyone wants to think they’re extra-talented.
    â€œ
The
gift,” says Madame Crenshaw, looking sideways.
    â€œ
The
gift?”
    â€œ
That’s
the one,” says Madame Crenshaw, starting to stand up.
    â€œThe
healing
gift,” breathes Nellie in hushed, awed tones.
    â€œYeah, it’s the holy grail of gifts, all right. Anyone mind if I smoke?”
    â€œMy mother always did say I was good with my