Medium Mayhem

The semi asphyxiated cockroaches writhing around in Boris Blinkhorn’s kitchen sink wished they’d never exposed themselves to the mouldy atmosphere in his apartment for the sake of a few vegetable scraps. After yet another seventy-hour week as a sanitary engineer, Boris felt only slightly healthier than those half dead vermin.

The bottle of bourbon he’d finished the night before hadn’t helped. He was so stiff, sore and woozy he considered following his GP’s advice and resorting to mocktails, salad, yoga, acupuncture and tai chi. He wasn’t quite ready to try what he termed “that girly and eastern shit” yet though. Boris’ bath was his cure all. He filled it to the brim. By the time he’d loosened up a week’s worth of stale sweat and grime he felt almost ready to face the day. As he luxuriated in the effervescent bacterial broth he dozed off and began to dream.

The dream began much like a typical Sunday morning. Boris was browsing the pornography section of Purgatory Heights News Agency. Hugh Kramer, the elderly news agent, was sick and tired of him tearing holes in the plastic packaging of Taboo Detonator, Kink Mayhem and Atomic Scandal magazines. Boris usually dumped them in the cooking and home decorating sections once he was done with them. They weren’t exactly coffee table book material and by the time Boris was finished with them it could well be time to call the hazmat squad.

Boris’ dream began like a typical Sunday morning, but it didn’t end that way. Katrina, the sales assistant at Purgatory Heights news agency, looked uncannily like Chloe Klein, the five times centrefold in Kink Mayhem. The birthday card section of the news agency inexplicably transformed into a jelly wrestling pit. Now Boris knew he was dreaming. He used this newfound knowledge to conjure up a double of the Chloe Klein lookalike and then a triple. It wasn’t long before he was refereeing a jelly wrestling match between his creations. The original Chloe Klein lookalike sold copies of National Geographic and Women’s Weekly to elderly customers who didn’t appear to notice anything unusual going on where the birthday cards used to be.

A terribly disappointed Boris awoke when the jelly wrestling match was about to escalate into the wildest lesbian lovemaking ever witnessed at Purgatory Heights News Agency. He coughed and spluttered as his head dipped under the heavily polluted water of his bath. A mouthful of that sickening soup wasn’t enough to quell his appetite for breakfast.

A growing fear of diabetes and heart disease was yet to eclipse Boris love affair with fat and sugar. He devoured a plate of bacon and eggs like a half-starved golden retriever and washed the remnants down with a cocoa pop/thick shake combo. Brushing his teeth wasn’t high on his agenda. Boris put on his thermals, a brand-new Adidas tracksuit and an expensive pair of running shoes designed for athletes who can run marathons faster than Boris could dash to the bus stop around the corner.

After feeling the subzero chill, Boris grabbed his Adidas beanie from the glove box of his lovingly restored 1972 lime green Torana. He was intensely afraid of falling victim to brain freeze. He didn’t know that brain freeze was just the brief pain caused by the rush of blood to the roof of his mouth when he slurped down frozen cola too fast. Jack Jones, one of the regulars at Purgatory Heights Hotel, told him that the brain is often the first part of the body to be affected by hypothermia, otherwise known as brain freeze. Since then, Boris often wondered how many times he’d almost died from exposing his bald head to the elements.

Jack Jones was a doctor, everybody at Purgatory Heights Hotel said so. They weren’t lying, Jack had been a doctor of creative writing since 2017. In his thesis he’d argued that gullibility is a genre. Jack demonstrated his point by making Boris Blinkhorn the protagonist in “The Whole Warren,” a one hundred and fifty-thousand-word trilogy based on Boris’ sprawling descents into conspiracy theory rabbit holes.

Boris was sceptical of anything supernatural, but he had no doubt that chemtrails were controlling the minds of less independent thinkers than himself and that the moon landing was nothing more than a flower power era sci fi movie. Boris had been a flat Earther until the significance of always spotting the masts of sailing ships coming over the horizon first dawned on him. He was still a hollow Earther. He also told anyone polite enough to listen that the moon was an alien spacecraft in disguise, a spacecraft that would have been identical to the death star of Star Wars fame if it weren’t for its rocky, crater pocked facade.

Lately, Boris had spent most of his non-working, waking hours getting up to date on the reptilians’ efforts to secure world domination. Boris was sure that the royal family and various heads of state had been replaced by reptilians, but he wasn’t sold on the shapeshifting theory. He he had no doubt the reality was more like V, a nineteen eighties sci fi television series featuring lizard people in human suits.

On the morning of his lesbian jelly wrestling news agency dream, Boris didn’t have time to sit in front of his computer and read conspiracy theory updates. He was a man on a mission. He filled his backpack and dumped it on the back seat of his lovingly restored 1972 lime green Torana. In a hidden compartment, at the bottom of his bag, were four boxes, two of which were x-ray proof. Boris was the only living person who knew what was in them. He wasn’t expecting that to change. As he turned the key in the ignition and sped from his driveway The Trolls latest single “Miss Bucket List” blared from the speakers of his ancient car radio.

Miss Jet setter’s busy cultivating a worldly façade,
by hopping from one famous landmark to another
taking in no more than a paragraph on a postcard.

It’s first class for a first class bitch.
Give me a bucket Miss Bucket List.

Should I inform the tragic attention whore it’s unhealthy
to hang from the side of the Eiffel Tower, during winter,
in an absurdly tiny bikini, in search of the perfect selfie?

It’s first class for a first class bitch.
Give me a bucket Miss Bucket List.

Her blingtastic new travel partner Bartholomew Dench
proves she has a preference for greeting card addicts
who make puddles look as deep as the Mariana Trench.

It’s first class for a first class bitch.
Give me a bucket Miss Bucket List?

Bart is sure God’s an economist urging all to go forth
and turn every Garden of Eden into an open cut mine
but that’s just fine because the man drives a Porsche.

It’s first class for a first class bitch.
Where’s my bucket Miss Bucket List?

As the Trolls latest single faded into silence Boris ruminated on what he’d just heard “I don’t understand what’s not to like about this “Miss Bucket List.” She goes to all sorts of cool places, she’s tough enough to wear a tiny bikini during wintertime in Paris, she’s got a boyfriend who likes to piss off greenies by wiping forests off the face of the Earth by turning them into open cut mines, yet the dudes singing about her hate her guts, what’s up with them? I know I won’t be buyin their album.”

To onlookers Boris’s critique of the Trolls latest single “Miss Bucket List” appeared to be addressed to the dead rat he hadn’t gotten around to scraping from his windshield. He loved his car but lately he’d been too depressed to clean it. He’d been feeling down ever since the day he’d bet fifty dollars on the outcome of a Bankok cockroache race. Just centimetres away from victory his favourite thoroughbred decided it was time to run in the opposite direction. He’d won several hundred dollars from the next race but the parking fine he received while placing the bet wiped out his winnings.

Miss Bucket List, the dreadful song Boris had just endured, was number eight on the I-Tunes charts and just as popular on Spotify and YouTube. Other people’s success enraged Boris, especially when he couldn’t comprehend it. Speaking of Bucket Lists, Boris had one of his own. It focussed almost exclusively on who he yearned to harass before he died. The thought of expiring before he’d clipped the left wing from certain women’s rights activists, gay rights activists and climate change activists among others was too much for him to bear. He also had his sights set on those he labelled new age nutters.

As far as Boris was concerned, Celeste James, the psychic medium he was on his way to see now, was nuttier than a peanut tree and more fraudulent than Uri Geller. She was the CEO of an organization called White Crow. Boris thought it was an odd name for a business in such a fraudulent industry. Surely everyone knows there’s no such thing as White Crows? The name was of course symbolic of the exception to the rule.

Symbolism was usually lost on Boris. Among other things, he couldn’t work out why an Australian not for profit organisation that had been established to help people cope with depression called itself the Black Dog Institute. Were black dogs more likely to be miserable than white ones? What did that have to do with people? Obviously its founders should have gotten a smart person like Boris to do their marketing for them.

Out of all the psychic mediums Boris could have chosen to target that day he chose Celeste James because his ex-girlfriend Tiffany had spent the profits from his part time dope dealing on weekly sessions with her. Boris referred to Tiffany as his ex-girlfriend, but it would be more accurate to say that she was one of the few sex workers who had ever wanted his business. The eight hundred dollars that he referred to as the money Tiffany had stolen from him was the value of the gifts, he’d asked her to return. Boris only knew Tiffany had been to see Celeste James because he followed her between her home and her workplace on on a daily basis.

Boris was so fixated on his desire to humiliate Celeste James that he almost forgot to stop at the newsagent for a lottery ticket. He considered picking up a spare copy of Taboo Detonator and Kink Mayhem while he was there. Boris parked out the front of Purgatory Heights Shopping Centre. He was so eager to get to the newsagents that he almost left his ancient car unlocked with the keys in the ignition. Two strides from the automatic doors, Boris noticed something was wrong. He was unperturbed by the nearby police tape, the chalked outline of a body and the bloodstains on the footpath but the closed sign on the news agency was too much.

Upon closer inspection, Boris realized the shop was completely empty of anything someone might associate with a news agency. Shopfitters had been busy partitioning the interior into smaller rooms. Boris finally noticed the sign advertising the Thai massage parlour that was coming soon. He chuckled at the words “coming soon.”  Kramer’s News Agency had been a part of his life for as long as he could remember. He’d stolen his first copy of Kink Mayhem from there when he was twelve.

Light snow was beginning to fall by the time Boris turned the corner into Premonition Street. He scraped the gutter as he parked his pride and joy, a lime green 1972 Holden Torana, in front of White Crow Psychic Mediums. Apart from the scuff mark on the front left tyre and the dead rat still attached to the windscreen wipers that lime green Torana looked as immaculate as it had on the showroom floor.

“White Crow Psychic Mediums, here I come.” Boris boomed. He opened the icy wrought iron front gate as recklessly as he slammed it shut and took great delight in snapping branches off Grevilleas in the bird attractant garden. Throwing pebbles at the tadpoles and eels in the pond broadened his idiotic grin. White Crow was inked on the solid oak front door in gold. Boris knocked as impatiently as a man battling to exit a burning building.

“Who is it” Celeste’s muffled voice sounded from somewhere within. Who is it” Celeste repeated.

“Not very good at ya job are ya, ya can’t even use ya sixth sense to know whose at the fucken door.”

“If I relied on my sixth sense for everything that doesn’t require a sixth sense it would be my one and only sense, wouldn’t it. Perhaps you’re curious enough to further investigate my claims of psychic and psychic mediumship ability. A little respect could mean a more fruitful experience for both of us” Celeste reasoned with her uncouth customer, as she swung the door wide open to reveal a largely empty house. She was tempted to slam it shut again but with her few valuable possessions safely deadlocked in her bedroom she was far less concerned by the diminutive, smirking troll before her than most women would have been.

“A more fruitful experience ya said? Whaddya mean fruitful? What is this, a fucken orchard? Ya couln even guess who’s at the door. What good are ya?” Boris mindlessly repeated. His clumsy fingers botched a forgettable pop song on Celeste’s battered old upright piano.

Somehow Boris’ playing became even more arrhythmic and chaotic as he studied Celeste out of the corner of his eye. On that chilly central western New South Wales morning, she was dressed as conservatively as a nineteenth century nun, but that didn’t stop Boris from ogling her as though she were the star of his favourite porno ‘Smorgasbord of Smut Queens.’ With her gap tooth, short blonde hair and bold, intelligent green eyes she reminded Boris of that feminist he loathed like a roller coaster ride after a dodgy kebab, the one who had an instant comeback for all of his insults on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. No matter how many fake accounts he used she always knew it was him. If that evil feminist wasn’t as short as a jockey and Celeste wasn’t as tall as a basketballer they could have passed for identical twins.

As Celeste led Boris down the hallway, he switched his focus from her figure to the tributes to Vincent van Gogh, Judy Chicago and Kara Walker lining the walls. “So not only arya a pretend psychic you’re an art faker too, no surprises there. I’ve caught you out already I have. Ya, can’t fool me, I’ve seen that portrait of that painter dude with part of his ear missing before.”

“Those most familiar with the work of van Gogh, Chicago and Walker would never mistake my amateurish tributes for attempts at art forgery.” Boris who had only been half listening looked utterly bamboozled.

“What’s this talk of vans going to Chicago? Whadtha fuck does that havta do with art forgery?” Celeste couldn’t help but look stunned by the combination of Boris’ patchy listening and breathtaking stupidity. The couple who had come for an appointment earlier that morning spoke German, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian better than English, yet communicating with them had been easier. As Celeste guided Boris into the kitchen and dining area he resumed rubbishing her alleged psychic abilities.

With a mercurial man baby like Boris in the house, Celeste was glad it was only prints of her paintings on the wall. Boris was as aggressive as he was clumsy. This made him potentially destructive to inanimate objects, but easy for a lifelong martial arts practitioner like Celeste to subdue if need be. Her father was a Brazilian ju-jitsu instructor, her mother specialized in Japanese Judo and her Uncle Donovan had spent more than a decade teaching Muay Thai to tourists in Bangkok. Celeste tried waiting for Boris to stop babbling abuse but ultimately, she had to cut him short.

“Boris, are you here to utilize the services of a psychic medium or not? The clock is ticking. I have a money back guarantee for anyone who says they’re a dissatisfied customer so there’s no chance of you being out of pocket. If an allegedly disappointed customer comes looking for another appointment, they might find that I’m booked out for months though” Celeste warned.

“Ha, ha, ha, I bet you’ve never been booked out for the resta the day. You couldn’t get booked out for the resta the day if you were a hooker in an asylum for the blind.”

Celeste resisted the temptation to drag Boris from the premises and shove his face into the front pond long enough to instil some manners into him. Her spirit guide Juan urged her to be patient. For over an hour before Boris arrived, Juan had been insisting that, from a performance point of view, this was going to be her best reading ever.

“The clock is ticking Boris. How about you sit down and stop making this more difficult than it needs to be.”

“Where did you get my name from?”

“You gave me your name when you made an appointment. I’ll give you the gist of what to expect. I am merely a conduit, a proverbial telephone line between this world and the realm of the so-called dead.

“A condu what, a proverbi what? Speak English will ya.”

“In other words, all I can do is pass on whatever messages I’m given. Occasionally there aren’t any.”

“How convenient.”

“No, not really” Celeste replied as she ushered the vile vulture into a comfortable chair. She poured herself a glass of ice water and offered Boris the same. The unending onslaught of insults was as natural for him as pillaging is for a viking. Had Boris chosen to pay her for the pleasure of insulting her? If so, it was his loss not hers. As his barbs continued to bounce off her, like windblown grains of sand from a bullet proof windshield, she opened her mystical pores for the spirits who wished to communicate with Boris.

“I can see a distinguished looking, heavily built, red haired gentleman with a handlebar moustache. He’s wearing a Victorian era suit, complete with a top hat and a fancy walking cane. The cane has an octopus tip. He’s wearing modern basketball boots with his old-fashioned suit, those fancy ones with air pockets in the soles. Now he’s showing me an image of horse races out in the country, with carnival rides nearby. He says he died when he fell from an antique Ferris wheel. I’m suddenly feeling woozy. He’s communicating his inebriated state at the time. It looks like he was too drunk to realize what was happening. He hit the ground before he had time to be scared. Now he’s showing me a pack of cards and says he’s looking forward to a game of poker with you when you join him in the afterlife. He’s finally giving me his name, it’s either Darren or Derryn. I’m having a bit of trouble making it out. It’s Darren or Derryn Rowland or Rollins, one of the two.”

“When I find out who you’ve been interviewing to get that info, I’m gonna sue your ass”

“Darren says you just reminded him how you always used to stare at his wife Sue’s ass, that you thought you were doing it discretely, but your staring stood out like Uluru in the desert.”

“How the hell did you find out how Derryn talks? That stuff about me staring at Sue’s ass, it’s not true, it’s just that sometimes that perfect butt of hers happened to be right in front of my eyes, in those skintight jeans and those painted on yoga pants she wore.”

“Derryn is laughing at you. He says he found your sketch book, the one where you drew explicit nudes of Sue. He’s laughing hysterically at the way you claimed it was just a coincidence that you joined the live drawing classes on the same day Sue started modelling for them. According to Derryn it was surprisingly clever the way you stapled your most depraved drawings of her into the cover of an old fishing magazine.”

“How do you know that? Ah, that’s it, you must have been in that live drawing class too. I don’t remember all the students. Or maybe you were the teacher on one of the days when I wasn’t there and you broke into my locker and took a peek at some of my secret drawins then.”

Celeste giggled at Boris preposterous attempt at an explanation. She composed herself and continued “Derryn is rolling around laughing now. Sue is with him. She’s shaking her head.”

“Whatever, Sue is still alive darlin.”

“How long since you’ve spoken to her?”

“I’m sure that if she died that I’m one of the first people her family would’ve called about the funeral.”

“How long since you’ve spoken to Sue? Perhaps you should look into that.”

“There’s no need to check your claims, I already know you’re wrong. Where are these ghosts ya reckon you can see anyway? I can’t see a thing. And why do they look like people if it’s just their spirit?”

“It’s hard to say where Derryn and Sue are, I can’t see any signage but they’re in a place that appears to be made entirely of shimmering crystal. There are dancing lights in their sky that make the Aurora borealis and Australis look as dull as a 25 watt globe at midday.

“The aroara what? Oh, I see, they’re some kinda lights are they.”

“Yes, they’re otherwise known as the northern and southern lights. Sue is telling me how she died now. She says she was killed by a drunk driver who had forgotten to turn his headlights on. She remembers glimpsing a lime green Torana, a split second before the impact.

“How do I know you’re not making this shit up?”

“It’s unlikely that I’ll ever give a reading where I receive information to verify one hundred per cent of my observations.”

“That’s so convenient.”

“No, not at all.”

“If you’re so fucken smart get Derryn to ask God whose gunna win tha football this week.”

“As far as I’m aware God is not some all-knowing, all seeing, all powerful individual. All the spirits I’ve communicated with tell me that God is the qualities that could develop in us or the ones that already exist in us, such as love, courage, wisdom and creativity. I’m not aware of any reason to take the personification of a supreme individual literally.”

“Why would I care what the fuck God is or whether there’s a God or not?  I just wanna know who tha fuck’s gonna win tha football.”

“Personally, I haven’t encountered anyone in the afterlife who is still obsessed with who is going to win football games, horse races or anything like that.”

“What about boxing? Whose gonna win the fight of the century between Supersonic Sid Salisbury and Larry the Lethal Clown Lincoln? Whose gunna win, will it go the distance or will it end in a knockout? In which round will it end?”

“Derryn says that Supersonic Sid Salisbury should win, that the swarm of hornets like pressure Salisbury creates should take the sting out Larry the Lethal Clown Lincoln’s punches by the eighth round. He says that in the end Salisbury’s peppering left jab will obscure Lincoln’s vision and encourage him to bring his guard to the centre. Then Salisbury will surprise him with a right hook to the eardrum. It sounds as clinical as brutal doesn’t it.

That’s just guessin based on stuff boxing commentators and journos say.”

“Maybe, I could have gotten it from them, but I didn’t. I have no interest in martial arts competitions of any persuasion, including western boxing” Celeste chose her words carefully. She spent up to three hours a day on martial arts training for fitness and self-defence purposes, but had no interest in formal martial arts competitions. On the one hand she didn’t want to lie and on the other she wanted to be underestimated by her possibly dangerous customer.

“None of this shit you’re coming out with is makin any sense. If there’s a heaven or a hell, or anything like that, how tha fuck could there be nobody in those places that cares about important things like who’s gunna win world title fights and football matches?

If Boris had more than the grey matter equivalent of an Apple 2E, Celeste might have told him that the afterlife can’t be summed up with simplistic bronze age concepts of heaven and hell, that it isn’t confined to a geographical location, that it is wherever and whatever the spirits it consists of perceive it to be, with some realms being largely collective realities and others bending to the whims of the individual.

If Boris was reasonably intelligent and receptive to what Celeste had to say she might have suggested to him that in the afterlife a thousand people could be at the same party despite being in a thousand different houses. Whether an aquarium or a window lined the back wall of the ballroom would likely depend on who was looking. Whether the dancers were in tuxedos, evening gowns, their birthday suits or manifesting as swirling patterns of light could be equally dependent on the observer. Celeste’s near-death experiences and the words of Juan, her spirit guide, were consistent with that view.

While Celeste briefly contemplated the mystical journey, she could have taken Boris on if he didn’t already know virtually everything, he continued to rant about how sports results went a long way towards explaining the collective purpose of humanity. Possibly, you’ve guessed that Boris wasn’t well versed in science or philosophy etc. If he’d heard of Isaac Newton, he might’ve insisted that his laws of gravity didn’t mean anything before the emergence of test match cricket. If he knew who Socrates was, he probably would have assumed he was hopeless at sports betting? What other conclusion could he have reached about a philosopher who claims to know nothing? Would Socrates even realize the T.A.B is more than a discontinued soft drink?

Celeste attempted to draw Boris’s attention back to the reading “Derryn says that if you had been paying more attention to the finer details of recent sports history than you have been to myths about lizard people and the moon being an extraterrestrial spacecraft etc that your sports results predictions would probably be as good as his.”

“Celeste, if you knew the first fucken thing about science you’d know that if the moon was just a hunk of rock it wouldn’t have the power to meddle with the tides on Earth.”

“I’m not here to discuss how the laws of gravity relate to celestial bodies.”

“I didn’t say nuthin about your body, we’re talkin about the tide.”

Celeste somehow managed to keep a straight face as she steered the conversation back to the reading. “Derryn tells me you’ve brought a number of objects with you, that you picked some of them based on their sentimental value and that you chose the rest based solely on their uniqueness. He says that you’ve stashed these objects below the false bottom in your backpack, that you’ve put them in boxes and some of those boxes are made from an alloy of tungsten and stainless steel, in an effort to make the contents invisible to x-rays. There’s no furniture in here beside this table and the chairs we’re sitting on, so where would I hide an x-ray machine?”

“How did you even know I brought a bag with me, I left it in the car. You musta guessed all that, I bet clever people like me always hide x-ray proof boxes inside their back packs. If you’re so fucken psychic how come you don’t know what’s in it? Got ya now don’t I. Wait here while I go and get those boxes.”

“Whether you leave your concealed boxes in your car or not makes no difference to me. There is no X-ray machines within cooee and I don’t have x-ray vision, I’m not Superman, so the x-ray proofness of your boxes is irrelevant. I’m basing my conclusions on what Derryn tells me, which would be easier if you stopped interrupting.

“I’m gonna go and get them boxes.”

“If Derryn knows whats in them it doesn’t matter whether you bring them inside or not Boris.”

“If I don’t bring them inside to show ya how can I prove that you can’t see into the x-ray proof ones.”

“Seriously Boris, it doesn’t matter, I’m happy to take your word for it about what’s in the boxes.”

“Hang on while I got those boxes so I can prove to you just how ridiculous your ridiculous guesses are.”

“Boris wouldn’t my “guesses,” as you call them, be more impressive if the boxes weren’t in the room? You can always grab the boxes and show me what’s in them afterwards Derryn just mentioned a Chicago Bulls jacket signed by Michael Jordan back in 1993. He says that’s in one of the x-ray proof boxes. I think it’s safe to say, I haven’t had time to break into your car and install a computerized x-ray machine with a Bluetooth connection to my phone while you weren’t looking? Not that I would even know where to order one from. Whose Michael Jordan by the way?”

“You reckon you’re psychic and ya can’t even figure out who Michael Jordan is? What a fucken loser of a fraud you are. Winner frauds are more convincin than that.”

“I’m not omniscient, I’m merely a conduit for messages from the spirit world. I have no control over what kind of information spirits choose to share with me or whether they choose to communicate with me at all. Sometimes I misinterpret what they’re trying to tell me. Like any process, it’s not perfect.”

“There’s other things in them boxes and I bet you don’t have a fucken clue what they are.”

“Didn’t you say you wanted to go and get those boxes so you can open them later to show me how wrong my predictions are? If that’s what you want to do, get on with it.”

Boris ran to his car and wheeled the boxes in on a trolley. “Derryn says that you’ve got a Donald Bradman biography in one of them, one that was signed by Donald Bradman in 1984. He says it’s in one of the x-ray proof boxes, but he can’t remember which one exactly.”

“Tolja you don’t have a fucken clue. That biography was signed by Donald Bradman when he was 84, not in 1984”

“Derryn gave me the number eighty-four and I assumed he was talking about a year.”

“Excuses, excuses, excuses. If Derryn was really telling you stuff from beyond the grave you wouldn’t make any mistakes. Where are you hiding that x-ray machine?”

“There is no x-ray machine Boris. In addition to the Chicago Bulls jacket and the Bradman biography, I’m seeing images of a disco dancing dingo. I’m also seeing a Prince Charles and Princess Diana royal wedding commemorative cutlery set. That’s not the sort of thing I’d expect you to have in your possession.

“The royal cutlery usedta be mi grandmother’s” Boris explained.

“Now, I can see a one-eyed peach face parrot. It is trapped inside a golden cage the shape of a buxom woman’s chest. This information I’m receiving now is not coming from Derryn or anyone else in the spirit world, it’s coming from your subconscious mind Boris. I have no idea what this image might mean beyond having the feeling it’s something that you should think very carefully about when the meaning becomes apparent. I’m also seeing a cyclops floating in the background. I don’t know what that signifies either. It’s all very puzzling.

“Fucked if I know where that parrot’s from, you’re the psychic, you tell me.” Boris eventually said.

“Nothing wrong with testing me to the enth degree but perhaps I should remind you that I’m not some sort of God, that all I can do is share the information I receive, that I don’t need to be omniscient in order to prove that my ability is genuine.”

“Omni what?”

“If someone is omniscient it means they know everything.”

“Why use such fancy words ya fucken university snob? Ya still haven’t told me which item is in which box, they’re numbered you know and there’s a few items ya haven’t even mentioned at all.”

“Derryn is with us again. He’s waving goodbye now. As he’s walking away, he’s saying something about an Andre the Giant figurine that is dressed as Wonder Woman and sitting in an igloo. Clearly you were extremely careful not to put common objects in your x-ray proof boxes, to make sure it’s as guess proof as x-ray proof.”

“Derryn must’ve faked his death. I wasn’t there when he allegedly fell from the old Ferris wheel and broke his neck, I eard about that later. He could still be alive somewhere and conspiring with you to pull off his greatest ever practical joke. Either he’s not really dead and this is a conspiracy between you and him or he wrote down everything I told him I would put in them boxes and somehow you got hold of that list after his death. You’d have me believe he’s spying on me from beyond the grave though wouldn’t you.”

“Boris, Derryn is dead, and I never met or communicated with him when he was alive. I’d never even heard of him before this morning. If he left a written record of anything you’ve told him I haven’t seen it. I don’t know where he lived, where he worked or anything like that. Even if I did, I wouldn’t snoop around and rifle through his possessions. You really shouldn’t jump to conclusions without evidence, it can be extremely offensive.”

“Well bad luck for you that I’m not as guliverable as the silly old ladies that probly usually come seeya.

Celeste wanted to tell Boris that the word he was looking for didn’t originate in Jonathon Swift’s tale about a shipwrecked sailor stranded in Lilliput but was reluctant to further inflame the situation.

Boris seemed to have given up on his quest to humiliate Celeste. He was uncharacteristically silent for the remainder of the appointment. He looked like he was in a daze as Celeste relayed tidbits of information from the surprising number of spirits who could be bothered communicating with him.

Boris’ only lasting memory of the final fifteen minutes of the session, besides Celeste’s rare interpretative errors, was a mysterious image of three apples in a row on the keypad of an automatic teller machine.

He drove away from White Crow Psychic Mediums at an uncharacteristically sedate pace. As he halted at an intersection, he noticed for the first time that “how about them apples” was graffitied on a service station wall.

In the early hours of the evening, while he was walking home from the local bottle shop, Boris noticed three giant apples had been spray painted on the wall of a pedestrian underpass. Worms that looked capable of sucking a clan of tarantulas through a straw glared at him through the windows they’d fashioned in their fruity homes. Boris shook his head in bewilderment. He couldn’t remember seeing that graffiti before. Surely nobody could have created an artwork like that in the time between him exiting and re-entering the tunnel?

A week later, three women dressed as apples and a man clutching an I-pad approached Boris in a shopping centre hoping to survey him on his fruit consumption habits. Boris’ eyes were filled with paranoid terror. Before the man with the I-pad could say a word, he was sprinting towards the haven of the local pub.

Eventually, Boris was too focused on work, conspiracy theories, sports results, Martian BDSM and petty theft to remain fixated on the significance of three apples or revisit the audio recording of his psychic medium reading in his quest for clues. Naturally, he’d made that recording without Celeste’s consent. Irrespective of the topic, consent had never been a high priority for Boris.

Boris’ interest in apples was eventually rekindled. He was formulating a plan to travel to Sweden to harass a teenage climate change activist when three apples in a row, on a scratch lottery ticket, revealed that he had won a hundred thousand dollars. He’d bought it at his beloved Purgatory Heights News Agency, which had reopened in the smaller, cheaper rental space next door to the new Thai massage parlour. They still sold printed copies of Taboo Detonator, Kink Mayhem and Atomic Scandal. Boris decided to head back there to brag before contacting the Lottery office to claim his winnings.

Katrina, the nineteen year old sales assistant at Purgatory Heights News Agency, looked more like five times Kink Mayhem centrefold Chloe Klein than ever. She was wearing a t-shirt with a one-eyed peach face parrot printed on it. The parrot was trapped inside a golden cage the shape of a buxom woman. The cage reminded Boris of those wire mannequins used to display bras in lingerie boutiques. Even if he’d had a girlfriend, Boris would have been too paranoid about being labelled a crossdresser to be caught dead in one of those places, but he’d seen them in passing. That strange t-shirt seemed familiar somehow. Had he seen it before? Had someone mentioned it to him before? Boris was too distracted by the outline of the Chloe Klein lookalike’s colossal nipples to dwell on the details of her t-shirt for long. If he’d looked closely, he would’ve realized her left eye lacked the vitality of the right one. It never moved. He was too focussed on her magnificent breasts to notice.

“Chloe, if them nipples were any bigger, they’d be as famous as the Leaning Tower of Pisa” Boris quipped. Katrina, the sales assistant, smiled nervously. While she was wondering who Chloe was, Boris grabbed her enormous breasts.

“What are you doing?” she cried out in rage and disgust.

“I bet ya love that. Playin hard ta get arya.” Katrina tried desperately to stop his greasy hands from sliding beneath her bra, but to no avail.

Boris’ timing wasn’t that of a criminal mastermind. Two female police officers wandered into the news agency. It only took one of them to wrestle the clumsy, diminutive menace to the ground and handcuff him. Thanks to his refusal to plead guilty and his insistence on his legal team challenging the severity of his sentence, Boris’s legal expenses during the ensuing criminal trial amounted to approximately one hundred thousand dollars.


© Rodney Hunter, 2023

Donate