Half an Hour Glass
by Audrey Greathouse
part 1
I kept waiting for Sandra to ask if I was really sure I wanted to do this. She never did ask, though, so we sat silently in the only two chairs that fit in the small entryway.
The shop, or office, or whatever this dingy place was, shouldn’t have existed where it did. Nothing should have been crammed so tightly between a dance club and convenience store, except for the kind of alley that people go down to get mugged. Repetitive electronic rifts pounded through the wall, retaining their power and energy. From the opposite wall, I could barely hear the rhythm of the convenience store clerk arguing with a drunk customer.
“Are you sure you believe in this?” Sandra asked, fiddling with the ring on her left hand. I had ordered the ring half a size too large. It fit her finger fine in the mornings, or when she went out for runs, or whenever her finger was a little swollen or warm. When she was cold and nervous, however, she had enough wiggle room to toy with the trinket, spinning it around and making the diamond orbit her finger.
“Yeah,” I answered. What I had seen of magic had convinced me that every life deserved a dabble in the inexplicable, a little pursuit of the otherworldly. “Do you think I’d spend all this money on it if I didn’t?”
I didn’t actually care about the money. Compared to the ring, this cost nothing. Even if it only bought us a few moments to marvel over smoke and mirrors, we’d have an amusing story, one more memory of excitement, unique to us, that concretized our promises for the future. The techno music next door abruptly switched beats as the DJ inelegantly transitioned songs.
“I know you’re spending some money on this, Alec,” Sandra acknowledged, “but you believe too, right? I can’t think of anything worse than convincing you to do this just because you didn’t think it mattered, that it wasn’t real.”
Our knees and thighs were already pressed together in our compact seats. I reached out for her hand, steadying her ring-fidgeting. “No, I know it’s real,” I assured her. “I know I want to spend every day of the rest of my life with you. I don’t want to lose you a moment before. I know that’s real, too.”
She smiled, but a nervousness still haunted her face. She started telling me, again, about all the old couples she’d met or known or heard of who had done it. How they had passed together in their sleep, or had their hearts give out at same time in different parts of the house. She detailed it all again, but the apprehension in her voice suggested she still wanted to convince herself.
“One couple died in a car crash, right before they turned, like seventy. But I feel like even that wouldn’t be so bad, if it happened quickly, together.”
I agreed and patted her hand. I didn’t want to live afraid of grief any more than she did. If a little money spent in an alleyway of an office could ensure that neither of us would ever know the pain of losing each other, that seemed more important than a ring on either of our hands or a superfluous ceremony next summer.
I checked my watch: almost four in the morning. The proprietor’s poorly-formatted website had specified that she booked appointments only between the hours of three and five in the morning. Our appointment was now running ten minutes behind its already absurd schedule. “How long do you think this will take?”
Sandra shook her head, unknowing, but somehow confident. “Not more than half an hour, I figure.”
“I can’t imagine magic takes long.”
The convenience store door outside slammed so hard it sounded like a gunshot. Sandra yelped and shot up in her seat, no longer slouching. Another moment of techno-infused silence passed.
“Are you sure you believe in this?”
We talked only a few minutes more before an aging woman creaked open the office door. Her short, curling hair was dyed a muted red, and dark layers of lose clothes wrapped her compressed frame. I expected her to address us, but her watering eyes didn’t even look at us.
A small, bald girl ambled out behind her, and the old woman took her by the hand. With her free hand, the girl rubbed her tired eyes and sad, sleepy head. They squeezed past us and out the door without a word.
Sandra and I watched them slip into the darkness before another presence drifted to the doorway beside us.
“Are you three-thirty?” she asked.
“What?”
“Are you my three-thirty appointment?”
Her hair had an absurd and carefully cultivated volume. Her thick eyebrows, as dark a brunette as her hair, looked almost as painted-on as her vibrant blue eyeshadow and overdone blush. Her lips carried such a heavy coat of gloss, it seemed her wet, pouting mouth might slip off her face at any moment. She had the aesthetic of a middle-aged discount psychic, clad in a colorful, loose shirt and leg warmers that neither clashed nor matched the ostentatious patterns of her shirt and headband... as if the only thing she had abandoned in the eighties was her youth.
“Yeah, we’re the three-thirty,” I replied.
She nodded and beckoned us in with an exceedingly small and tired gesture.
Her cramped office must have been larger than the entryway, because she had managed to cram a rickety, oblong table and three matching chairs into the small room. Everything looked like thrift-shop rejectamenta, from the nicked-up wooden furniture to the stained tapestries hanging above like a second, more claustrophobic ceiling. Broken toys, disregarded dolls, and gaudy kitchenware filled shelves like mystical objects imbued with the disappointed essence of generation X.
Disorganized milk crates full of plastic cassette tapes on the floor left little room to navigate. Sandra and I sat down while our hostess wound to the chair on the opposite side of her table. However, she did not sit down.
“I’m sorry I kept you waiting.” Her speech seemed slightly slurred, but nothing about her demeanor suggested drunkenness. I wondered if it mattered, if alcohol could or would impact the effectiveness of magic. “My last appointment was very strange. There was great difference in ages, some very progressed medical conditions in the girl... a lot of variables.”
“That’s all right,” Sandra told her, unsure what else to say.
“I’m Sybil.” The psychic extended a hand covered in garish rings, but only to make a sweeping, majestic gesture as she introduced herself.
I’d heard cornier fake names than ‘Sybil’ for psychics and took everything in stride.
“You’re looking to even your lives?” Sibyl asked.
“Yes,” we answered together.
“Do you have the money? Cash only, no change.”
I handed over the wad of twenties wrapped up in my pocket. Sybil flicked the rubber-band off and shuffled through money, counting it with the manic efficiency of a coke dealer.
Sibyl finally took a seat opposite us. “All right,” she began. “Do you understand what’s involved? I take a look at your lives, I figure out who has the longer, and I split the difference. I transfer half of it to the other, and kazaam, the both of you live to the exact same moment and not a minute more.”
She seemed bored by the miracle she promised to perform, like an aging airline attendant who had given the same flight safety lecture too many times before. Sandra and I nodded along.
“You don’t get to ask how long you live, you don’t get to ask who has longer, you don’t get to reverse it. I don’t do that stuff. I even lives, that’s all. Any questions? No? Let’s get started then.”
Sybil pulled an engorged handbag off the floor and onto her lap, grabbing the leather-bound notebook inside. She asked us for our birthdays and transcribed them with some other notes on a blank page, constantly referencing star charts inked in earlier pages.
When Sybil set it aside, she reached out her hands and waved us forward. We leaned in.
“Give me your hands.” The words dripped out of her liquescent lips.
Expecting some kind of séance, I reached my hand out to hold hers. She grabbed it and flipped it, palm up. I noticed her lime-green nails only as they began tracing lines on my palm. She did the same with Sandra’s, looking between our hands in studious silence.
She made more notes but grew confused and pulled my hand closer to her eyes. I didn’t know how she could see anything as subtle as palm lines in the low light of her studio. The electronic music pulsing through the walls had faded into just another element of eerie eighties nostalgia plaguing this place.
Sybil put my hand down, slowly, and picked up Sandra’s with a slower, now interested motion.
I looked at my own hand and its enigmatic lines. I had the uncomfortable sensation that Sybil had just gleaned information about me so intimate that even I didn’t know it.
Looking at neither of us, she stared at her notes and asked, “Are you both sure you want to do this?”
Sandra’s confidence was weak, but not wavering. “Yes, I want to spend my entire life with him.”
I heard her nervousness and knew the promise of security lured her to this bizarre transaction. Maybe her nervousness compelled her even more than her love for me, but I could not judge her anymore accurately than I could judge the amalgamation of fear and love driving me.
Sybil nodded, still looking at her book, and waited for my answer.
“Yes,” I announced, “I want to do this.”
She lifted her eyes to mine with an ominous look that she immediately turned to Sandra. “All right.”
Copyright © 2022 by Audrey Greathouse
