risk of being haunted by visions of dead wizards—but the anonymity of public transport gave me space to think.
I was sliding fast into one of those too-much-to-do-not-enough-to-do spaces where there was a whole lot going on but not a great many ways I could affect any of it. At some point I needed to repeat my so far 100% successful call-every-estate-agent strategy in Maidenhead. Which would be a faff, and probably wouldn’t end anything like as well as it had this time, but would at least help me help Galatea find what had happened to her husband, although my experience of missing spouses was that the client never liked the answer, since it was almost always “dead”, “cheating” or in particularly depressing cases “dead and cheating”. Then there was operation fix Elise, which basically involved sitting around and waiting for Dr Bright to text back. And we capped it all off with my seemingly never-ending problem of being sent mystical visions by magical women who wanted me to do vague but symbolically important things that they could never quite be bothered to explain the details of.
About halfway through Chiswick, my phone buzzed.
I had a dream. You died.
Then.
:sad emoji::sad emoji::sad emoji:
I hadn’t heard from Sofia in a while. Last I’d heard she’d done a lot better in her A-Levels than I did under similar circumstances—I guess she was just smarter than me—and was now well into a five-year medical degree at Imperial. Of course she was also still technically the reincarnation of the Delphic Oracle and so I tended to take it seriously when she dreamed about things.
Dead how? Then in an effort to seem down with the kids I searched for a suitable pictorial representative of my emotional state and settled on a slightly befuddled-looking blue elephant.
Stabbed. Or drowned. A bit unclear. Why did you send me an elephant? :confused emoji:
Oh joy. How can it be unclear?! Stabbing and drowning are very different. What’s wrong with the elephant? :penguin emoji:
A woman in a black dress held you under a lake. Then you were dead on the shore and stuck full of swords. It was weird. :worried emoji:
Then a moment later. And I know I’m nearly twenty now, but you should probably be careful about sending me random emojis because half of them mean sex stuff.
Shit. Wait, which ones mean sex stuff?
Lots of them. Use your imagination.
I have a really dirty imagination. That won’t help.
If it looks like a penis or a pair of breasts, it’s probably sex stuff.
I was kind of pleased that Sofia had grown up enough that she could type the word penis into a text message perfectly comfortably. Then again she was a medic now, she’d probably been slicing them off cadavers since fresher’s week. You are no help.
You realise you’ve spent more time asking me about sex emojis than about how I foretold your death.
She had a point. Although, to be honest, she’d known me long enough I couldn’t imagine she was terribly surprised. People try to kill me all the time. I don’t often accidentally sext teenagers.
Enough time passed without a reply that I panicked slightly. It was the penguin, wasn’t it. Do penguins mean cunnilingus?
:confused face::confused face::confused face:
Then
I suppose they do now?
Here lies Kate Kane. Was in a hole. Didn’t stop digging. Beloved daughter, sorely missed.
Tell you what. Let’s go back to talking about me dying. I’ll feel way better.
Good idea.
I waited for a moment, but nothing else was forthcoming. So—anything else?
Just what I’ve told you. Black dress. Water. Swords. I made a note in my dream journal.
You have a dream journal?
My dreams are messages about the future from the God of the Sun. Of course I have a dream journal.
She had a point. Again. It still sounded a bit teenagery to me but then she was still technically a teenager, so she had me coming and going.
Am I the only one who’s in danger? I tried.
I don’t know.
That was vague. Vague was seldom good when it came to prophecies. Of course it was also usually all you got. It seemed that consulting the oracle had taken me about as far as it was going to.
Or maybe not. A thought struck me.
Sofia, have you ever tried doing the prophecy thing deliberately?
:scared emoji: What do you mean?
I mean someone asks you a question and you talk to the gods or destiny or whatever
Out of habit, I split it into two texts. And then you say something cryptic and ironic that they can look back at