Can you astral project? I can.

Totally fighting to stay alert today. I have some goals, dammit. Trying to pad the red-haired cheerleader’s parts in my novel. Not her physical parts, her talking parts. Come on, people, let’s not get sidetracked.  I also want to take a shower and apply tanning lotion, in preparation for sitting in the audience at graduation tonight, crying as some of my favorite kids in the world cross the stage.

But all of that seems impossible. I’m so f-ing tired. My face is puffy, my limbs feel like Hephaestus opened up his forge and pored some molten lead into my body. I can’t even drag myself downstairs to retrieve some overly-warmed Folgers. I can smell it from here. It has that boiled stink. God, I want some. 

While I can’t seem to focus on re-building a character, I do have a story rolling around in my head, something Andre and I were talking about last night. Wanna hear it?

Premise: I, Holly Lorincz, have a weird relationship with animals. Freaky shit happens, frequently. I’m going to share three major incidents that will make you call me a liar. That’s okay. I can’t hear you.

Incident 1:

On March 15^th, 20--, I went into labor at 11:30 at night. I took a shower, woke up Andre. On the way to the hospital, the contractions didn’t seem so bad, though my back was starting to hurt. By the time we were checked in, my back hurt a lot. Baths, walking, nothing helped. I was in back labor. My robotic, Grinch-hearted doctor wouldn’t come in until I was dilated more, nor would she okay an epidural. At one point, the contractions became a blessing, pulling the baby up off the nerves in my spine, until he crashed back down on the nerve endings, over and over again.


 I took that for twelve hours. At noon, the horrible doctor finally agrees to stop watching re-runs of Grey's Anatomy and come in, approving a shot of phenobarbital over the phone, to tide me over until she could get there.

The needle slid under my skin. Within a minute, I found myself going under. But before I was out, I shut my eyes and found:  I am standing in my driveway. The sky is a crisp, bright blue, the trees a sharp green in contrast. On the ground in front of me, one of my sweet little brown and white springer spaniels is seizing. McGee is arcing back and forth, foam slathering her muzzle, her body wet with sweat, the gravel cleared out from underneath her body. The seizure has gone on for awhile. Her eyes are on me, then they roll. My heart wrenches.

I think to myself, “Oh my god, McGee has been hit by a car, I have to tell Andre.”

Then I fell unconscious. I did not dream. But exactly one hour later, I awoke. Groggily, I called out to my husband. He was right there. “Andre, call the neighbors, something has happened to McGee. I think she was hit by a car.”  He told me he’d already talked to the neighbors, they’d checked on the dogs this morning, they were safe in our yard. To humor his laboring crazy wife, he called again.

The neighbors called back a few minutes later. They found McGee seizing in the yard, the ground swept bare beneath her.  They wrapped her in a blanket, holding her seizing body all the way to the vet; she’d been poisoned, how we still do not know. She barely survived. She had the stench of death on her for days, crawling like a worm to sit at my feet. She sits at my feet today, healthy, my beautiful little pup.

I’ve had these kind of “aware” moments before, but they’re hard to believe, even for me.  I don’t know if McGee was reaching out for me, or if I astral projected, or … I don’t know. I’m not in tune with the supernatural. I’m not versed in the lingo of other-worldly stuff. I generally try to ignore that side of the world, pissed off when I feel the hair on the back of my neck rise, pulling the quilt over my head in defense of ghosts and vampires.  But I didn’t just see McGee that day, I was there with her, and that moment is burned deeper into my brain then most others, every color and smell vivid still.  Whatever happened, no matter how weird or outside the box, I’m grateful McGee is alive.

Okay. Incidents #2 and 3 will have to wait for another day. Stay tuned.