Erin was lost. A little emotionally, a lot professionally, and completely lost physically. She got turned around on a backroad with no GPS signal and this tiny town is her hope. The only things open, a coffee shop or laundromat. Erin could go for a coffee.
She walks in and the space seems to darken and hush around her, reducing everything to dim, fuzzy shapes and churchyard quiet. A woman sitting at the table next to the window glows like a beacon in the dark and silent room.
In reflex, Erin’s hand goes to her chest, rubbing across her collarbone a few times. The motion soothes her, has done since she was a child, and reminds her to breathe. As Erin inhales, the room grows brighter and the volume returns with hisses of steam, clinks of ceramic, and grinding beans like they have always been there. Only a few tables have people sitting there. A group of teenage girls, a single older man, a woman with a baby in a buggy, and the woman in the window.
A plain black coffee from the teenage boy behind the counter. He doesn’t meet Erin’s eyes, looking only at the cash register in front of him, making sure to avoid any contact with her hand as he gives her change. His whole vibe says please don’t talk to me. He isn’t going to give Erin directions.
She looks back towards where she saw the older man sitting, he’s gone. Everyone is gone except the glowing woman, who is waving her over.
Erin’s palms are sweaty as she walks over to the table. Nerves like she’s about to jump out of a plane flood her body and the chair is there at the precise moment her legs start to wobble and shake.
“I’ve been lost before. I know the look. Sit down, drink your coffee, and relax for a bit.” The woman’s voice wraps Erin in a weighted blanket, hands her a plate of warm cookies, and also tells her to get her head out of her ass and kick in doors.
“What’s your name?” All of Erin’s manners are forgotten in her fog of nerves. She can’t look at the woman. Erin puts down her mug, shifts between leaning back, crossing her legs, to leaning forward, hunched over the table, feet on tiptoe vibrating, to ramrod straight with both legs on the floor. She must look like a twitchy fidgety child, Erin thinks.
The woman leans forward, rests her hand on Erin’s forearm. Her palm is warm, real and Erin feels a beat or two of the woman’s heartbeat, “You can call me Anna.” Erin looks up from the hand on her arm, sees bright glowing eyes, are those grey, green, yellow, purple, why can’t she tell?, red gold hair reflecting light in some prism like way, her dress shimmering and seeming to shift around her, even her ears glowed.
“I’m Erin. I’m on my way home from doing interviews with people who have, well,” Erin waves her hands in a ‘how do I explain way’, “it’s men actually, who have lost their eyes.” Why couldn’t I have lied?
“I’m familiar with the story,” Anna picks up her mug and Erin rubs her eyes, trying to remove the blur that made it look like the mug nestled into Anna’s palm.
“Honestly, I wanted to feel sorry for them. But I walked away thinking they are all just assholes who got what they deserved.” Erin’s hand covers her mouth, her eyes go big, shocked at what she let come out. “I’m not a monster! It wasn’t just me who got ick feeling from them. I did my research and spoke to a lot of people who know the men.”
Erin watches Anna, no one sits that still. Maybe it’s because the air around Anna seems to always be moving. Shimmering, glowing, shifting like she’s caught in competing light sources. Anna tilts her head, “I wouldn’t call you a monster.”
Erin’s quick relief smile breaks a bit of the tension, “I heard stories of bullying, lecherous comments, mistreatment, acting holier-than-thou, unwelcome touches, of being an all around asshole. The hand brusher, the boob talker, the stand close and breath down the neck-er. All of them treated people horribly. Do you want to know the other pattern I saw?”
“Of course. You’re good at seeing patterns.”
How could she know that after only a few minutes? Erin says, “No family or friends were in their rooms, they were all alone. When I broke my arm on vacation, a crew of my friends met me at the airport and took care of me for days.”
Anna runs her finger over the table, tracing a line of sunlight, “People come together when someone in their circle is hurt.’
“Exactly. It’s like the universe came after these men to teach them a lesson.”
“In ancient history, people had stories of gods of vengeance, retribution, karma. For millions of years, even thousands of recent years, people believe beings of energy took action against people to keep things in balance. Do you believe?” Anna asks.
Erin freezes, feels that her answer will decide a path she didn’t know she was on. Belief is a familiar question, argument?, for Erin. Her grandma liked to shove religious piety down her throat and ask her if she believes in a punishing God. Anna’s question feels different and the same, the same words but a whole different meaning.
Anna smiles, “I asked too much too quickly. May I tell you a story instead?”
Erin swallows, clasps her hands in her lap, “Yes, please.”
“Stories get passed down the generations but I find it’s like playing telephone. Some parts get left out, misheard, misremembered. Knowledge we need to remember embeds itself though, in our senses and our bodies, bypassing the clumsiness of language. I know this story like I know how to breathe, how to flick my finger.” Anna flicks her finger and a sparkle flashes bright for a hairbreadth of a second. Erin sneaks a look at Anna’s nails, she must be wearing clear glitter nail polish.
“My part in the story is a small part of the whole. I’m not the only one and we can trace our past only so far. Others have described it as a compulsion, a curse, a divine gift…I call it answering cries for help.”
Erin looks around for a weapon, something she can use to defend herself because the air feels harder to breathe and Anna’s glow looks sinister now.
“I drove two hours in random directions the first time I heard a call. I was 16 years old, had borrowed the car to get donuts,” Erin thinks, this woman eats donuts?! “Then found myself parking in a field of a county fair. It was the first time I smelled animals, the odor drowned out the smell of food, the people around me. I followed both the scent and the pull even as I put the sleeve of my flannel over my nose.” Anna’s arm lifts to demonstrate, Erin imagines the sleeve of her black dress looking like a well loved flannel. She blinks and Anna’s arm is back on the table, no flannel.
“In between two barns, a man had a boy by the shirt. The boy, his eyes had that hollow look of shutting down, he was hiding in himself and wasn’t around.” Anna’s voice drops lower, “The man, it took him a few seconds to realize I was walking towards him. He froze, his brain trying to map what I was and it scrambled him enough that he let go of the boy. I walked in between them, took the boy’s limp hand in mine and led him off.”
Anna’s voice suddenly so full of violence, the air around her distorting like Erin was watching her through a fire, “I could feel the man slowly coming to his senses and staring at my back. Preparing himself to make his move. That’s when he screamed. I took the boy to a security guard and then found my way back home.”
“If someone was screaming behind me, I would have looked.” Erin says, rubbing her collarbone.
Anna breathes for a moment, closes her eyes. When she opens them and speaks, her voice is back to the warmth of before. “That’s because you wouldn’t know what was happening. I did. I felt it the moment he went blind.”
Erin twists in her chair, angling towards the door, screw her shaking legs, “You attacked him.”
“No. I didn’t touch the man; I was there for the boy. The man, he went blind because of himself.”
Erin shakes her head no, “You answered a cry for help and a man went blind. You played a part.”
“Yes. I went where the energy guided me, gave a young man a chance at life without violence, and the violence-causer…the energy interacted with him and balance was restored.”
“Energy doesn’t have a mind of its own. It’s energy.” Erin smacks her hand on the table. Great, now she’s acting like a kid having a tantrum.
Later, she’d tell her friends that it was this moment when she felt it. Someone, something else at the table with her and Anna. Erin would say, “You know how people talk about feeling hot or cold, a tingling, a heaviness when they talk about ghosts and things? It wasn’t like that. It was like realizing a strange dog was siting at your feet the whole time and you only just noticed it. I didn’t know if it was friendly or if it was going to go for the eyes.”
“Having a mind isn’t necessary to cause a reaction. The wind may not operate with an awareness that we can minimize down to “mind”,” Anna uses air quotes and that human, sarcastic gesture makes Erin smile. “Yet, when it interacts with things it can guide, destroy, grow, change. Musical sound waves deliver the emotions of the musicians, without the benefit of a mind. Those energy waves can make us feel what the musicians do. How is the energy I’m describing any different?”
“Wind and music don’t remove eyeballs for one thing.”
“Maybe not in the dramatic way that is happening now. But they can do it. The wind blows a piece of grit into the air. The grit gets in the eye of someone who is causing you harm. That grit infects and results in the eventual loss of their eye. You don’t think of the wind causing that, you don’t think of the person who walked over the dirt that flung grit into the air. You do, in the dark and uncomfortable part of you, think of whatever you believe in and thank it for restoring the balance.”
“That’s just all coincidence. No one could plan that.”
“Plans and intents are very similar. Decisions have outcomes and ripple effects. Your decision to take the assignment, to drive, to take backroads, to drive past the sketchy gas station,” Erin thinks, how does she know that?, “and so on, all led you here, to this moment. You didn’t plan for it but your intentions…With each decision you made, you were weighing the balance and listening to a sense you have. Your plan wasn’t to take this assignment. Am I right?”
Erin thinks back, being given the choice of two assignments. Travel with a CEO and interview her over the course of a week or interview men who lost their eyes. Legacy making piece or clickbait. And Erin took the clickbait.
Anna is silent. Erin rubs her finger against her lower lip, pinches. It’s silent around them, the teenage boy no longer behind the counter, the street and sidewalk outside empty. The sun should have moved, should have been setting but it stays in the same place, the same shaft of light Anna traced on the table.
Erin’s fingertips come together, “It felt right. I was typing back that I’d take the CEO interview but I…changed my mind and said I’d take this one. I think I wanted to know who, or what, was behind it. I didn’t have that piece until I met you.”
“Am I behind it? No. Was I there? Yes.”
“Don’t you feel any guilt about the part you play?”
“I didn’t make the choices for the people impacted,” Anna says. “I wasn’t in their ear telling them to do the things they did. I didn’t know them and I didn’t seek them out specifically. I followed the energy, the feeling. My choice was to follow the energy. I don’t feel guilty for that.”
“Removing their eyes is so permanent. These powerful men are now vulnerable and weak - they are literally left in the dark.”
“With no one around to care for them.”
“Yes! That punishment is so extreme.”
“I read a book by Tori Amos. She tells a story of a Native American woman asking her if she’d trust the people in power with her mother’s care. And if not, why would we put them in charge of our world’s care. Is the punishment extreme or is the energy giving the men the same care they’ve given others?”
Erin feels like she’s at the path again. One direction is she lets her mind accept this question and that she will no longer be able to deny her belief, the other is she turns away.
“It’s the same care. They did it to themselves”
“Things were out of balance. The energy is getting it back in a better place. You, Erin, are a part of that balance. ”
“What? Why? How?” All the questions, good. Glad my skills are so honed and am sounding so smart right now.
Anna spreads her arms, her fingers fluttering, “Stories spread and stories pass down knowledge, even if we don’t think or aren’t aware of them leaving their knowledge behind. The story of the men, the story of the energy, even the small part I play, all of that would be known by in a tiny number of people, unless someone told the story.”
“You brought me here.”
Anna shakes her head no, “I arrived here a week ago. I’ve come to this coffee shop every day. I’ve walked the sidewalks, the parks, eaten at the restaurants, shopped for groceries. And I couldn’t tell you why. Today, the tingles started, telling me this is the day, prepare and listen. I knew who you were the moment you opened the door.”
Erin sees the week play out as Anna described it. Anna sitting at the table in the window observing everything in the coffee shop, walking the town, senses alert to anything and everyone she passed. Erin watches as Anna flops back on the bed of a motel room, the bathroom door open and dark mold spotting the white tile.
“You are important, Erin. You don’t have to believe, you don’t have to tell our story, you decide where or if this goes any further than two strangers in an unfamiliar town sharing a coffee.”
Erin looks down at her forgotten mug, “I haven’t even taken a sip.” She jumps when the teenage boy is at her shoulder, “I just tasted the pot of coffee I gave you and it’s gross. I brought you another cup and a muffin to apologize.” He sets a warm mug in front of her along with a banana nut muffin.
Erin looks at Anna who is smiling and sipping from her mug. The coffee shop door opens for a group of women with books in their hands, the sun is lower in the sky, the air around Anna moving in lazy waves.
“It’s time for me to leave,” Anna says and puts her hand over Erin’s on the table. “I trust you and whatever you decide.”
Erin watches her walk to the door, other people in the coffee shop oblivious to what they were present to. Just before Anna is out of sight, Erin sees her run her hand down her waist, like she was smoothing a wrinkle. Erin swears she sees the dress swirl in at the waist, tightening like it was giving Anna a hug.
—A month later—
The article opens, “They got what they deserved. We’ve all said this at one point in our lives. Who, or what, we believe delivered this payback ranges from big-g god to karma to the all encompassing ‘universe.’ What if I told you in the course of investigating the cause of men going blind, and more recently literally losing their eyes, I met someone who was a catalyst for this payback? I’ve been trying to remember what she looked like, I swear. So I could tell you it was this or that that made her catch my eye. I don’t even remember enough to tell you how old she was. She could have been 20, she could have been 80. I honestly don’t know. All I remember is her glow and the energy around her. She told me a fable and asked me if I believe…”