Adele Oliveira, "Ouija" (fiction) (Pushcart Prize Nominee 2021)

ADELE OLIVEIRA | 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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Sleeping outside didn’t sound too terrible to Cole, but they repositioned the board and the planchette, and, as they had before, sleepily lowered their eyelids, squinting through their lashes at the blocky black letters, making them go blurry. Cole heard Aurora taking deep breaths through her nostrils; it reminded him of the way she snored when she slept, a low, throaty rattle.

“Randall Davey,” Aurora started. “Or anyone really, but especially Randall Davey. We are artists, we are here, and we are listening… ” She trailed off. “Oh! If you’re here, please give us a sign.”

Cole waited, knowing better than to snort. He wasn’t an artist, but he was keenly aware of the soft, barely-there feeling of his cotton t-shirt against his chest, his toes going to pins and needles under crossed legs.

Aurora had feigned an interest in birds and trail maintenance in order to spend the summer living on Davey’s property, to be as close as possible to his paintings—which lined the walls of the house’s upstairs salon—to be alone with them. The paintings (all portraits in oil) unnerved Cole: there was the little girl, dressed for her First Communion, looking like both a child bride and a ghost, and another of Davey’s second wife, Isabel, nude and staring at the viewer from a green velvet settee, her round rosy breasts as frank and as fixed as a second set of eyes.

Cole’s arms started to prick with the strain of holding his fingertips daintily aloft when the planchette began to drift. Surprised, his eyes shot open and searched Aurora’s. Hers were also wide and red-rimmed like she’d been crying, though she hadn’t. She looked back at Cole and shook her head.

“I’m not doing anything. I swear.”

Rationally, Cole knew how this worked, he’d read about it. Something about your hands falling partway asleep and moving the planchette unconsciously—he knew this, and yet he felt the planchette floating beneath his fingers without his effort, soft and easy as a kiss.

The planchette wandered over to the Yes corner of the board, danced near the image of the sun with a smile, knowing and almost cruel. It was making a path for the letter C when they heard a muffled thud somewhere beneath them, on the first floor or in the cellar, cut into the eroding hillside.

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“Fuck this,” Aurora said, kicking the board and planchette under a credenza as she rose to her feet. “Let’s go.”

“You want to go?” Cole said. “Now? But it’s like, working?”

“Yes,” Aurora said. She grabbed his hand and took quick strides across the salon, her flip-flops loudly smacking the soles of her feet. The no-longer-functioning kitchen was upstairs too, all paned windows and white tile. They exited the way they’d come in, through a back door. Aurora’s hands were shaking as she produced a large ring of keys and slid the deadbolt into place.

Without waiting for Cole, Aurora ran, first down a flight of stone steps and then a grassy hill flanked by twin cottonwoods to her seasonal quarters, a low-ceilinged adobe structure that had served as a chicken coop in Davey’s time. No sooner had Cole closed the door behind him that Aurora pinned him to it, came at him with her mouth open. Cole hadn’t been frightened, but her adrenaline and arousal were contagious. He kissed her back, thrilled, and opened his eyes to look at her, but she dropped to her knees.

“Wait,” he said, as she undid his jeans.

“What?”

“You don’t have to,” he nodded, embarrassed, toward the ground. “We could just kiss. Or not even. You don’t have to,” he said again.

Aurora tilted her neck back so she could look him in the face and rolled her eyes. “Stupid. I know I don’t have to.” Then she took him in her mouth. The bedroom was small, and they only had to shift to the left to collapse on Aurora’s single bed, shoved up against a window which faced the main house. Cole knew he was going to come very quickly and worried that Aurora wasn’t interested in fucking him as a person, that her attraction to his body lay primarily in its availability as a safe place to practice. In six weeks they’d both be back at school, Aurora regaling him late at night on instant messenger with the details of her latest conquest.

He came, and out of habit, he closed his eyes. Had they been open, he might’ve seen a light in the house, no bigger than a candle flame, faint and indistinct through the second-floor curtains.

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Cole pushed Aurora to the bed and raked her shorts over the jagged peaks of her hips. He didn’t see the light because he did not believe in its possibility, yet on it flickered through the small hours, disappearing briefly sometimes but always reigniting, until sunrise streaked the sky.

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