Free Magnificent Vibration by Rick Springfield Page B

you a push on your way, and pay for both of our coffees.” She relaxes slightly. Just slightly.
    I launch into the whole, extremely anomalous tale and for some reason start at the point where we met at the bar and tell the story backwards. I figure it wouldn’t seem any more plausible going in the right direction, so what the hell—and that last disturbing phone conversation is still fresh in my memory. I don’t mention my divorce again, or my desire to get myself iced by the Holy Spirit, and I end with the beginning of the first cell call I made from my bachelor digs. She has relaxed her guard a little more, enough to ask a question.
    “How do you know it isn’t just someone you’re familiar with or who’s familiar with your life messing with you?”
    “Because this . . . voice knows stuff about me that no one else knows. I mean, someone could, if they dug deep enough I guess, but who would bother, for a joke or whatever,” I answer, then continue the thought. “And I swear to God, okay, bad use of a phrase considering, but the men’s room sink really did catch fire. It was the most bizarre thing. It burst into flames and he laughed like a maniac in my ear. It scared me.”
    I still don’t know how far from believing me she is when she asks, “So where did you find this phone number?”
    “In some book I bought at a bookstore a couple of days ago.” And no, I am not going to tell her I stole it. “It was written in pencil on the inside cover. That in itself is pretty eerie. I haven’t read the book yet; I only got as far as the phone number. I think it’s called Magnificent Vibration. It’s a book on personal growth. I was in the store and the bookjust seemed to kind of jump out . . .” I stop talking. Alice is reaching for her purse slung over the back of the chair. She’s leaving.
    “Wait,” I say.
    But she doesn’t halt her movement, and her movement, I realize, is not to leave but to retrieve something from her purse, which she does and then drops it in front of me on the dark, fissured wooden table. Comprehension takes me a second but I do recognize the object. It’s the same book I’ve just finished telling her about. Magnificent Vibration is the title. “ Discover Your True Purpose, ” says the caption underneath.
    “Motherfucker,” says I.
    “I bought it at a bookstore a couple of days ago,” says Alice.
    I look at her in complete confusion. She’s wearing a similar expression, which doesn’t help.
    After a few beats she adds, “Unlike yours, mine came without a phone number.”

Ronan
    T he blood-drained winter sun is an impotent, diffused ball hanging low and idle in the haze of a dawn sky. A light drizzle further filters out her anemic warmth and color. Silence hangs inside the low, settling lake mist. High above the bleakness, morning birds call and wheel as they prepare for yet another uncompromising day of gathering nourishment for themselves and their nurslings. The damp Loch Ness fog offers small counsel and limited guidance for the shadow that is slowly finding its way through the aurorean blur. The dark shape looms. Its movement is steady, like a living thing, and it leaves a gentle wake as it cleaves the fascia of the water. Concentric circles form on the still lake as fish break the surface to breathe in the oxygen-rich air-water layer, sending ripples ever outward until they resemble diminutive black sand dunes stretching to infinity. Lakeside trees drip dew back into the great starless Loch.
    A half a world away, as two people sit over a table in a late-night coffeehouse and struggle to comprehend the incomprehensible, people here are waking, rising and greeting the coming assault of a new day with hope, fear, apathy, and all the colors in between.
    Rubbing eyes, stretching limbs, and heaving sighs, some heavy, some joyous as the day breaks in through their bedroom windows. Life awakens, coffee boils, eggs fry, engines rev, and the repetitive path of the