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THE LAST TIME MILO ALLOWED himself to be on the receiving end of a psychic reading, Arthur Piers had still been breathing.
This is the way Milo's brain works, dividing his life into two parts. Life before, and life after the accident; his memories categorising themselves into a dysfunctional Venn diagram constructed of circles that never overlap.
Set on the coffee table before him are two dark ceramic bowls filled with water—his past and his future. Like the two halves of his brain, they remain apart; two separate entities that will never meet.
Though Milo and his father had little in common, the one thing they had always shared was their lack of psychic intuition. While his mother and Valerie would spend hours interpreting tea leaves in hushed tones, Milo would sit cross-legged on the workbench in the garage with his head in a Greek mythology book while his father tinkered away at the same car for hours on end. In a way, their family had been a lot like the disjointed Venn diagram in Milo's head; the two halves of the household operating on two vastly different planes, with one of them being mostly astral and the other being everything inbetween.
"Milo," Lenore says, her lilted voice softer than usual, pulling him straight from his thoughts. She pushes a small stone across the table towards him. "You know the drill."
After a moment's hesitation, Milo takes the stone. It's smooth and barely the size of his palm. He looks to Valerie who's standing arms crossed in the archway between the kitchen and the lounge room with questions in his eyes but she answers him with an indifferent shrug. Beside him, Anais taps her foot with what could either be impatience or anticipation. The clock on the opposite wall—a slightly misshapen moon with wobbly numbers painted by an eight-year-old Milo's unsteady hand—marks each passing second with a rattlingtick tick tick.
The room holds its breath as they wait for Milo to place his stone in a bowl. Pick one. It's not that hard.
He drops the stone in a bowl on the left, feeling his stomach drop with it.
Lenore leans back in her chair, the cheap wood creaking with the motion. "I think it's best we start with the past, don't you?"
Though her words form themselves as a question, Milo knows he really doesn't have a choice in the matter, so he nods.
"Same thing as always, hon. You're going to take my hand for clarity and Anais's to keep you grounded, okay?"
Milo nods again, his brain filled with so many thoughts that he can't find the right ones to put into words.
"Whenever you're ready."
Milo takes Anais's hand first, before stirring the bowl he had chosen anti-clockwise, dragging his free hand lightly across the glass-like surface of the water. He can't tell whether his hand is sweating or Anais's, but he grips tighter when he finishes stirring. This is the easy part, hethinks. You know what you're going to see, so stop freaking out.
