Free The Clairvoyant of Calle Ocho by Anjanette Delgado

women’s slips, lacy affairs she tie-dyed all shades of happy.
    â€œNice try, Iris. As far as you’re concerned, I’m still and always will be in my thirties, okay,” I said, motioning her and Henry inside.
    â€œOh, honey, I used to hide my age. But nobody cares if I’m sixty-eight or one hundred and eight. It’s all still old as hell to most.” She laughed, following me in. It was sad, but true, like most of the things Iris said.
    â€œAll right. It’s forty, and it’s the day after tomorrow,” I said.
    â€œSo Saturday, September the twenty-fourth, a Libra, but barely. Well, then I’ll say it again: You look great for any age.”
    â€œThanks, Iris,” I said, Ellie’s key now in hand.
    I was about to ask Iris to go upstairs with me when I heard Henry in the kitchen.
    â€œHe . . . He . . . Hec—”
    â€œHey, what are you doing there, my friend?” I said, scooping him up and planting a big sloppy one on his cheek as I brought him back into my living room/office with me.
    â€œIs that my name in the pancake syrup? I can’t read it if you cover it up with syrup!”
    â€œIt’s not syrup. It’s honey, and, it’s, uh, for the plants,” I said.
    â€œPlants eat honey?”
    â€œI’ve got a bit of a situation upstairs. Will you go up with me?” I said to Iris, trying to change the subject.
    â€œEllie?” asked Iris, knowing the answer.
    I nodded.
    â€œHey, plants can’t read!” said Henry, making a big deal of smoothing his polo shirt now that I’d set him free and he was standing on his own two feet again.
    â€œWell, the ink is good for them,” I retorted, heading for the stairs and ignoring Iris’s baffled look.
    â€œI can read very good, Mariela, but the syrup made the words blurry,” said Henry.
    â€œIt’s not important, Henry,” said Iris. “Come on. We have a scamp to catch. Oh, my Lord, what in hell’s name is that smell?”
    â€œWhat’s a scamp?” asked Henry, hurrying to catch up with us despite his heavy shoes.
    But the word scamp was a gross understatement. Inside, it was as if a suicide bomber had failed on his first attempt and had had to try several times to get it done, and either those were his remains all over the apartment or Ellie had never cleaned a single thing since the day she moved in. In addition to the filth, she’d made deep scratches in the original wooden plank floors in at least a dozen places, burned the kitchen countertop in several areas, and allowed water from a clogged pipe to filter down onto the kitchen cabinets, rotting the woodlike material at the corners. There was a broken windowpane, the intense smell of a cockroach colony all settled in, a broken ceiling fan, about a half-dozen full-to-the-brim ashtrays, and the toilet tank’s porcelain top had a deep crack on one of its corners. There were relatively dirt-free sections of flooring where furniture appeared to be missing, and the only clothes I could see were either in piles or strewn on the floor.
    There was also some marijuana inside a filthy rice cooker and some sinister-looking black-brown pieces of rock in little plastic Ziploc bags.
    Okay, so I cried. I cried remembering the girl who’d first moved in. I remembered telling her she should write stand-up comedy after listening to her tales of working the drive-through window at the McDonald’s on Fifteenth, purposely mixing up the orders for rude customers or leaving the thing they’d asked for a dozen times out of their bag. They were immature pranks from a girl playing at being an adult, something I felt I’d never had a chance to do, since I had to grow up the moment my mother got sick. (If you’ve ever wondered why is it that they can never get the damn order straight, I’ve got one word for you: Ellie.)
    I saw the curtains I’d given her as a moving-in gift still folded