Free Modern Rituals by J.S. Leonard

generations, sometimes more than one—a gift of sight, of seeing beyond reality’s veil. Her mother didn’t subscribe to such tosh, but there she was, divulging like a drunken sailor.  
    “Listen Olive,” Susan, her mother, had said. “If you’d have met your nan, you two would have been the best of friends.” Susan touched her throat and fought a hiccup. “It’s a shame she went a bit nutter toward the end—with those dreams and all.”
    “Dreams?” They sat on the floor near the fireplace’s warmth. Olivia scooted closer to her mother and her skin grew toasty and stung.
    “Ah yea, the dreams!” Susan slapped the air. “All my life she complained about them—got worse as she aged. I just think it was dementia later on—but I can’t explain her gift, telling when people were sick.”
    Olivia discovered she shared the gift a few years later.
    “What’s this gift?” Olivia rubbed her arm to cool the burn.
    “Oh yea…the gift . The strangest thing, your nan could, like, tell when people were ill. Seen it myself, I did. She’d diagnose random folks in our neighborhood, ‘Jim, go get yourself checked out for Crohn’s,’ and ‘Nancy, you’ve got a good bit of inflammation in your shoulder—take this.’” Susan said. “Your nan never studied medicine, but she was always right with these prognoses—always helping anyone and everyone.”
    “Sounds amazing.” Olivia picked up her glass of wine and took a sip, holding her gaze on her Mother over the glass’ crystal rim.
    “It was,” Susan said. “I remember I had a friend when I was a young lass: a boy named Anthony. He’d drop by to play and would get into these fits, grabbing his tummy like it was on fire. Your nan took one look at him and rushed him to the hospital. Turns out it wasn’t a belly ache, it was the start of a deadly heart condition. He received treatment soon enough and got better…I wonder whatever happened to him.”
    “How come you’ve never told me of these stories before?” Olivia said. “These are great.”
    “Oh you know me…barely any time to shower, let alone talk about the past,” Susan said. “And as great as these stories are, your nan had a certain darkness in her that frightened me.”
    Olivia shifted her weight to her right and shook alive her left leg.
    “What do you mean?”  
    Susan watched the fire as its flames curled around three chunked logs and filed high into the chimney.
    “In the hospice, toward the end, your nan would often wake up screaming her head off about fighting valiant battles, about being a champion, about old gods, and about creatures , terrifying creatures…all kinds of nonsense, y’ know?” Susan said, still staring into the fire. “She’d get this look in her eyes—that kind of look a soldier gets on the battlefield: of having seen death and reckoned with it. Seen that look all through my life—and at the oddest time, like full moons and certain holidays. Me and auntie Claire knew to stay away during those times—hell, that’s one of the reasons why I left home so early. Never looked back, really, until your nan got sick.”
    Olivia realized that the hairs on her arms were upright despite the fire’s heat.
    “I mean, she wasn’t a bad person—the opposite, actually—I had my own issues too,” Susan said and looked at Olivia, then touched Olivia’s arm. “You remind me of her sometimes—the good parts, that is.”
    The tips of her mother’s fingers brushed against Olivia’s skin, causing a slight tingle that snowballed into an arm-crawling chill. It tickled. And comforted her.
    Olivia smiled. The chill calmed and her cheeks felt puffy and hot. She was drawn to this story and dared to inquire more before one of her mother’s million other duties took precedence over the lovely evening.
    “So…this gift , it skipped generations?”
    Susan drained the last half of her wine and turned the glass in her hand, inspecting the viscous, purple residue that coated