That Dark Thing on my Head

(Excerpt from my memoir, "Falling Through the Cracks: The Misadventures of No One Famous")

Terra has recently discovered the power of her own gift of intuition. She's a baby-psychic, really. She also has an uncanny sense of smell.

Once when we were getting in my van, she sniffed the air like a bloodhound and said, "Someone just lit a cigarette-" and then frowned over at me, since I'm a smoker and she's not, and we always go round and round about it. It wasn't me, and I accused her of being so sensitive, that she imagines things.

Well, we pulled away from the curb, and around the corner. And there stood a young man puffing away. She looked over at me victoriously, and I could only shake my head. Scary, really, these visions of things and people and objects that prove accurate.

At night while she's falling asleep, she has graphic images of snakes and big rocks falling on her head. This sounds like the sort of images I should be having, but I digress...

About a year ago, during one of our prolonged phone conversations in the wee hours of the morning, she announced that she could see "a dark thing on my head."

I said, "You mean a freckle?"

"Well, no...it's big...and like, attached...sort of like a spider--"

"You mean, like that thing in Alien?"

"Well, yeah, except it's dark, like that goopy stuff you find in old plumbing...Its legs wrap around your head and hold the sides of your face...one of them goes into the corner of your eye..."

The pregnant silence that followed was enough to make her try to wiggle out of the subject, but I pressed. She believed it was somehow symbolic of this negative energy that follows me around like the proverbial black cloud. Only this was a dark growth of some sort. Like Cancer. Not exactly what I wanted to hear before going sleep.

That Dark Thing on my Head