• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“I’m a telepath.”

“You are! No shit! Well, woooo woooo,” Luna said, imitating the traditional ghost sound.

“No more woo woo than you are,” I said, feeling I could be pardoned for sounding a bit testy.

“Sorry,” she said, not meaning it. “Okay, here’s the plan—”

But I didn’t get to hear what the plan was, because at that moment we were hit from the rear.

THE NEXT THING I knew, I was hanging upside down in my seat belt. A hand was reaching in to pull me out. I recognized the fingernails; it was Sarah. I bit her.

With a shriek, the hand withdrew. “She’s obviously out of it,” I heard Sarah’s sweet voice gabbling to someone else, someone unconnected with the church, I realized, and knew I had to act.

“Don’t you listen to her. It was her car that hit us,” I called. “Don’t you let her touch me.”

I looked over at Luna, whose hair now touched the ceiling. She was awake but not talking. She was wriggling around, and I figured she was trying to undo her seat belt.

There was lots of conversation outside the window, most of it contentious.

“I tell you, I am her sister, and she is just drunk,” Polly was telling someone.

“I am not. I demand to have a sobriety test right now,” I said, in as dignified a voice as I could manage, considering that I was shocked silly and hanging upside down. “Call the police immediately, please, and an ambulance.”

Though Sarah began spluttering, a heavy male voice said, “Lady, doesn’t sound like she wants you around. Sounds like she’s got some good points.”

A man’s face appeared in the window. He was kneeling and bent sideways to see in. “I’ve called nine-one-one,” the heavy voice said. He was disheveled and stubbly and I thought he was beautiful.

“Please stay here till they come,” I begged.

“I will,” he promised, and his face vanished.

There were more voices now. Sarah and Polly were getting shrill. They’d hit our car. Several people had witnessed it. Them claiming to be sisters or whatever didn’t go over well with this crowd. Also, I gathered, they had two Fellowship males with them who were being less than endearing.

“Then we’ll just go,” Polly said, fury in her voice.

“No, you won’t,” said my wonderful belligerent male. “You gotta trade insurance with them, anyway.”

“That’s right,” said a much younger male voice. “You just don’t want to pay for getting their car fixed. And what if they’re hurt? Don’t you have to pay their hospital?”

Luna had managed to unbuckle herself, and she twisted when she fell to the roof that was now the floor of the car. With a suppleness I could only envy, she worked her head out of the open window, and then began to brace her feet against whatever purchase she could find. Gradually, she began to wriggle her way out of the window. One of the purchases happened to be my shoulder, but I didn’t even peep. One of us needed to be free.

There were exclamations outside as Luna made her appearance, and then I heard her say, “Okay, which one of you was driving?”

Various voices chimed in, some saying one, some saying another, but they all knew Sarah and Polly and their henchmen were the perpetrators and Luna was a victim. There were so many people around that when yet another car of men from the Fellowship pulled up, there wasn’t any way they could just haul us off. God bless the American spectator, I thought. I was in a sentimental mood.

The paramedic that ended up extricating me from the car was the cutest guy I’d ever seen. His name was Salazar, according to his bar pin, and I said, “Salazar,” just to be sure I could say it. I had to sound it out carefully.

“Yep, that’s me,” he said while lifting my eyelid to look at my eye. “You’re kinda banged up, lady.”

I started to tell him that I’d had some of these injuries before the car accident, but then I heard Luna say, “My calendar flew off the dashboard and hit her in the face.”

“Be a lot safer if you’d keep your dash clear, ma’am,” said a new voice with a flat twang to it.

“I hear you, Officer.”

Officer? I tried to turn my head and got admonished by Salazar. “You just