Gera sighed heavily. I almost cried. We parted on nothing, however, after walking about ten meters down the street, I stopped dead in my tracks because of an instant insight, a fragment from childhood that suddenly flashed before my eyes.
I was twelve. We were at our cottage. Sunday. Mom said that she felt really bad, that shouldn’t happen after the surgery, she urgently needed to return home to the city to call an ambulance. We were sitting on the bench under an apple tree. I kept silent. It was starting to rain. I felt that the several options for the future existed the day before abruptly collapsed into the only one – Death. I refused to believe it consciously and, as a result, I sent the terrible thought of Death to the Black Box of the Subconscious. And for a long, long time, almost until my mother’s transition to Another Reality, I would think that she would definitely recover sooner or later. I understood that I was about to weep. Not to upset my mother, I ran, «escaping the rain,» to the barn in the farthest corner of the garden, where my friend, the little White Rabbit, lived. It was raining. I ran very fast, weeping, biting my lips just not to scream in despair. Having pulled the door towards me with all my strength, I buried my nose in the center of a huge web, neatly woven along the width of the doorway. A huge fat black spider with a large cross on its back sat right in front of me, and I screamed, «MA-A-MAAAAAAA!!!…»
We talked with Nonna for a long time and even laughed at the ways the Knowledge used to come to us. She told me how my father had died. Then we opened our palms and held them opposite each other until Nonna said,
«You’re pushing, pressing hard! What a strong energy you have! I can’t stand that, put your hands away, put them away.»
When I told her the way I wrote spells, Nonna exclaimed,
«Amazing! You dragged me along to another time! I fell through and saw a poor room, you and me inside, you were in another body, in something gray, some kind of shawl, and a kerosene lamp was burning there. What was that, Alice? Silver Age?»
I shrugged my shoulders, and Nonna continued, «Now I see a book, yours. With spells. Magic. On the bookshelves. It will be released in less than a year, and you’ll become a famous spell-caster, do you believe me? The number „37“ comes to me. Take care of yourself! You can die. Surgery or something else. I see blood, a lot of blood. And if you survive, so then…»
The fortune-teller in Rome predicted a terrible car accident for me, but she didn’t tell me when. The palmist-astrologer in India didn’t say what exactly, but said «36». Nonna said «37», a surgery or something with a sea of blood. However, I had already been dying, and Death is not as terrible as doctors.
I didn’t get sick with anything and had practically no contact with the type of people who played the game «Let’s heal everyone!» and called themselves doctors, until I died for the first time at the age of 11 and was brought back. My cousin dreamed of joining them since childhood. Every time she stated that out loud, our grandmother sighed heavily and, like monks fingering a rosary, listed all the items that her granddaughter due to her girlish memory would be able to forget during a surgery in the patient’s body. However, someone was very lucky, since my cousin didn’t become a surgeon. She works with those called
