Mark


The first time Madam Miriam Maravoso the Miraculous Medium laid eyes on Hubert Davis, she figured he’d be an easy mark. There were a handful of skeptics that made their way to Healing Encounters Psychic and were willing to spend some cash if it meant poking holes in Miriam’s tricks, but Hubert was obviously not one of them. His hands shook as he wrote out the $60 check, and there were deep circles under his lined eyes.

He was handsome, particularly for a man his age. He didn’t look much older than Miriam, and his wrinkles were mostly smile lines. He was wearing nice clothes, though they hadn’t been ironed. There was a simple gold wedding band on his ring finger. He kept touching it. His hair was white, his eyes blue. He had a hefty watch on his right arm. It looked like it might be a real Rolex.

These were the details Miriam noticed, but they were not what she learned. From taking a good look at this man, she knew the following: He was grieving someone. He hadn’t been sleeping well. He hadn’t left the house in a while, but was making an effort to look presentable. There was no one ironing his clothes for him. He had, at some point, been married. He had money, good money, the kind unlikely to dry up after just one or two sessions.

His wife had died recently.

He was going to be an easy mark.


Mud

The fourth time Hubert Davis started crying at the black-cloaked table in the front room of Madam Miriam Maravoso the Miraculous Medium’s house, she wondered why she hadn’t just become a therapist. Therapists got paid better, and she was doing the job of one already. The difference was that in order to get Hubert to take care of himself, she had to pretend she was channeling the spirit of his dead wife.

She reached her hand out to him, but stopped just short of laying it on his arm.

“I’m sensing anguish from Clare, too,” she said, in the fake accent that had long since started to follow Miriam into her off-hours. “She wishes she could hold you close to her.”

Hubert sobbed louder. He wasn’t an ugly crier, Miriam mused. The redness made the blues of his irises all the more vivid. Her own eyes were brown. One time, when she was eight, her mother had told her in Italian that she had eyes and hair and skin like sand and dirt and mud.

Fango, fango, fango! She’d laughed, pulling down on one of Miriam’s frizzy curls. It’s all mud.

There was no mud to be found in or on or around Hubert Davis. He was so clean-cut, so Americana. In the first session, she’d learned that he’d been a dentist for three and a half decades. He’d been good, started his own practice, helped people, made them feel better. And then he’d retired, three years ago, to spend more time with his wife.

Oh, Clare. That woman hadn’t had a speck of mud on her, either. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed, the image of aging with grace. Last week, she’d had Hubert bring an image of her to focus the spiritual energies and cut back on interference. In her weaker moments since then, she’d stare at it and mentally tally all of the ways Clare was perfect and Miriam fell short. But she usually managed to snap herself out of it. Hubert was a mark and nothing more. She was only looking at photos of his dead wife so that she could do a better job impersonating her ghost. Had she ever done it for another client’s photo in her twenty-odd years of running this scam? No. But it didn’t have to mean anything. Hubert had good money, and Miriam was bringing him closure. This was the extent of their relationship. She had no desire for anything more.

The issue was that the more she told herself this, the flimsier it sounded.


Morality

The third time Madam Miriam Maravoso the Miraculous Medium kissed Hubert Davis, she didn’t even feel bad about it. Though they never believed it at the family reunions, Miriam had a moral code. She was a businesswoman, just like any of her sisters or cousins, and if the product she sold was different from theirs, what of it? It was a living. She wasn’t taking advantage of people. Crystal balls aside, she helped them find closure and they paid her handsomely. Nothing more and nothing less.

So the first time Miriam kissed Hubert, she felt a spike of guilt deep in her stomach. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t been building up to it. Hubert’s late wife had been dropping hints out of Miriam’s mouth about how much she missed being physically intimate with him from the other side of the veil. Miriam hadn’t given him her usual spiel, when he started looking at her differently, about how she was a voice for the sentiments of the dead, not a vessel. But despite all of the build-up, the first kiss still felt deeply, viscerally wrong. It went against everything she’d claimed to stand for for so long.

She’d drawn back.

Clare understands if you don’t want to kiss her through this body, she’d said.

Hubert had been breathing heavy.

But then the second time, he’d kissed her with such warmth, such tenderness, that the guilt became secondary.

Miriam had dated throughout the years. Of course she had. But Hubert did not kiss her the way the men from the bars or the internet kissed her. Hubert kissed her like he knew her, like he had always known her, like he didn’t have another date with someone hotter the next night or a meeting to get to or a flight to catch.

The small voice in her head, the one that sounded suspiciously like her lawyer sister Giulia, told her that he was kissing her the way he must have kissed his wife, his dead wife. Mamma’s voice chorused: Fango, fango, fango; mud, mud, mud. You are getting him dirty, vita mia.

But the third time that Miriam kissed Hubert, those voices fell silent. This couldn’t be wrong. Miriam didn’t believe in destiny, or fate, or ghosts. Of course she didn’t. But maybe Clare would have wanted her husband to find some material comforts even after she was gone.

That seemed likely. Clare had obviously been a very nice woman.


Miriam

The last time that Madam Miriam Maravoso the Miraculous Medium slept with Hubert Davis, no-longer-recent widower, she’d long since lost count of how many times she’d bedded him. She’d learned what he liked, what he didn’t; and, of course, what Clare had liked and what she hadn’t. Down at the deli, two years into the ordeal, the man behind the counter had called out “Order for Clare!” and Miriam had walked up, taken the bag, and been terribly annoyed at how wrong they’d somehow gotten her order.

One day, three years in, Hubert had brought her a golden wedding band and asked her, timidly, if she could wear it. Only when she was channeling Clare, of course.

And so it went, for four blissful years. Hubert surprised her with little gifts, and she’d place them on the altar they’d made together for Clare. Sometimes, when other clientele canceled and her phone bill came up, she’d pawn them, but most of them lived in a small box beneath her bed.

On the last afternoon that they’d spend together, Hubert finally slipped.

“Miriam,” he murmured, and his voice was so tender she could cry.

It was then that she realized it: she loved him. For years, now, she’d considered this strictly business. An unusual form of practice, certainly, but hardly unheard of. But it was then, when he called her by her own name in her house’s guest bedroom for the first time, that she realized she could no longer stand it. She was in love with Hubert Davis. And perhaps, if she did this subtly, did it right, then Hubert Davis could fall in love with her, too. The real her.

So she picked a place to start. Hubert was frozen, seemingly realizing the name he’d just said, and Miriam took the opportunity to speak.

“Say it again,” she whispered.

A strange look crossed Hubert’s face, and he put his hand up to his chest. He stayed there for a moment, an eternity, and then he fell back onto the bed, gasping, and she was frozen, and she watched, and then he stopped gasping, and she stayed frozen, until finally she snapped to her senses and started compressing his chest the way they’d taught her decades ago, when she still thought she wanted to be a psychologist, when she did a better job at pretending she was capable of helping people, and then she dressed him and dressed herself and dragged his body to the floor of the reading room and called 911.

They couldn’t save him.

Three weeks later, once Hubert Davis had been buried, Madam Miriam Maravoso the Miraculous Medium found the relatives Hubert had told her about in the phonebook and gave them a call to inform them that she’d known Hubert, and could feel his spirit reaching out through the veil. She left them with her address and her rate.

Elijah Bayuk  was born and raised in Parkland, Florida and currently lives on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia. They are the author of the 2020 chapbook Venus of the Swamp and Emory University’s Stipe Fellow in Creative Writing. When not writing, they can be found photographing fungi in the woods.