ADELE OLIVEIRA
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OUIJA After a minute Cole said, “I don’t feel anything.” “Shhh!” Aurora hissed. “It takes longer. You’re not going to feel anything if you expect not to. Give it a chance.” Cole swallowed and closed his eyes, adjusting his fingertips on the planchette. His hands were cramping and twenty seemed too old for séances, but anything for Aurora. “Come at me, Randall Davey,” he said. “Tell us about the beyond. Or the here, I guess, if you’re still in this dimension. Are there paints in the afterlife? Do you even care about painting, when you’re dead?” “You’re not taking this seriously,” Aurora shoved the game board and the planchette away from her, hugged her knees in close to her body. “It won’t work if you think it’s a huge fucking joke. I knew I shouldn’t have asked you.” They sat facing each other on warped wood floorboards of a very old house that had been an old sawmill before that. The house was a museum now, run by the Audubon Society, but in the 1920s, when Santa Fe was still remote, the painter Randall Davey lived on the property with his family, nestled into the foothills below Picacho Peak. In those days, the reservoir brimmed high just across Upper Canyon Road, and Davey held champagnesoaked parties under the stars, swinging croquet mallets by torchlight. He was buried, with his second wife and stillborn daughter, in a small plot bordered by lilacs that lay just beyond the orchard. “Hey,” Cole reached across the air between them and brushed the back of her wrist. “I’m sorry, Ror. Just messing around, getting in the spirit.” He paused, but she didn’t acknowledge his pun. “Try again?” Aurora looked at him over her knees, eyes green and flashing, hair dyed a lurid dark red, reminding him of a dragon. Since they left for college two years ago, she’d gone bonier: her face suspended between precise collarbones, sharp as paper airplane wings, and her hipbones made steep mountains, mirror images of each other, when she lay flat on her back. “One more chance. But if you pull any more shit like that, I’m going to actually be mad,” Aurora said. “I’ll make you sleep outside if you do.”
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Volume 16 • 2021
