Rise of the Wadjet Witch - By Juliet C. Obodo Page 0,19

front of her former workspace. She heard footsteps coming down the hall.

“Hello, Memphis.”

She looked up and was nearly blinded by the bright gold locks of Troy. “Would you mind moving? I need to get into my office.”

She quickly got up, afraid that he would kick her out of the way with his pointy, handmade shoes if she didn’t.

“Your office?” she repeated.

“Yes. It seems a spot on Dr. Roth’s team has opened up.”

“Yup, it’s wide open; he fired me. It was my position.”

“Oh, did he? Well, that’s a shame. I hate that I received this job under such circumstances.” His expression didn’t match his sympathetic words.

Who was this guy? Memphis felt as if she were starring in an even more twisted version of Single White Female. A version titled, Single-Recently-Found-Out –That-She-Was-Black Female-Whose-Boyfriend-and–Job-Were-Stolen-by-a–Single-White-Male. Okay, a much longer title, but this felt personal. Troy’s bright blue eyes were cold and his bee-stung lips formed a sneer. That was her cue to leave.

“Yes, I’m sure you feel badly about it all,” she said. She slowly backed away from Troy and ended up walking backwards down the entire hallway. She definitely didn’t want to leave with her back exposed.

On her way to the subway, she checked the rest of her e-mails. She saw the unopened horoscope from astrogirl88. She opened it and what she read stopped her dead in her tracks.

Today you shall reach one of your major goals, only to then realize that it is no longer your dream. This will lead to the end of a toxic situation and the beginning of something greater.

This was ridiculous. She had to find out who was sending these prophetic messages. She exited from her e-mail screen and called Jill. She asked her if she knew anyone who could trace the chain of e-mails. She explained everything that happened the past few days and how the horoscope predicted Jill’s engagement and her job loss. After Jill got over the shock of hearing the news of her termination, she recommended a guy in her newspaper’s IT department. She instructed Memphis to forward her all the correspondence. They would get to the bottom of this.

Memphis arrived home and headed straight for the bathroom. She needed a nice long bath. She soaked for an hour and got out when her extremities began to prune. After putting on her old and worn robe and Little Dipper pajamas, she grabbed some snacks from the kitchen and settled on the sofa for another night of television.

The Universe Now was on again. It seemed to be on no matter the time. Maybe it was a marathon. She decided to watch it; it was quickly becoming her favorite show. The focus of today’s episode wasn’t on the stars, but on a faraway region nonetheless: the country of Egypt. It was well known among astronomers that Egyptians were very advanced and their myths and religions were based on astronomical and astrological facts.

During her own research on the elliptical, she came across an actual historical figure who was tied to the constellation Ophiuchus; his name was Imhotep. She didn’t know why, but she felt a spark of recognition. She’d been a bit sidetracked from her actual research, but wanted to find out more about this man. Imhotep was the world’s first named physician and the architect who built Egypt’s first pyramid. He was undisputedly the world’s first doctor as well as priest, scribe, sage, poet, and astrologer. Imhotep was also the first known medical professor and a prestigious writer of medical books. As the first medical professor, Imhotep was believed to have been the author of the Edwin Smith Papyrus in which more than ninety anatomical terms and forty-eight injuries were described. He also founded a school of medicine in Memphis, possibly known as “Asklepion,” which remained famous for two thousand years. All of this occurred some 2,200 years before Hippocrates—the western father of medicine—was born.

Virgil was going back further than that in history, to the time of the Gods—the Neteru—who adopted planets to share messages with humans on Earth so they would continue to evolve. He began to tell their story, with which Memphis was familiar.

“At first there was only Nun. Nun was the dark waters of chaos. One day, a mound rose up out of the waters. This mass was called Ben-Ben. On this mass stood Ra, the first God. A self-centered deity, he was the first being to emerge from the darkness and endless watery abyss that surrounded the world before creation. A product