Judith Rochelle's Page

Released march 11 by The Lotus Circle
www.thelotuscircle.com

No. I’m tired. That’s all that’s wrong.
Mia Fleming put aside the art book lying open on her desk, closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. She’d just been staring at the photo of the Da Vinci painting too long, that was all. As art historian and assistant curator at the DeWitt Museum, she was immersed in research for the private collection due to arrive at the museum next month. Part of her job was to gather information for the brochures that were printed and the press kits they distributed. And as usual, she’d been overdoing it.
Shoving her long brown hair, the color of rich chocolate, back behind her ears, she pulled the book forward and began to study the page again. And there it was. Just as before. Shimmering in the center of the photo of the Da Vinci painting. An ugly rock that looked like a misshapen lump of clay, bumping along, wobbling back and forth, with a pair of hands reaching for it. Then nothing except the original picture, undisturbed.
God, not again. Please, please, please. Choose someone else, okay?
Why did she have to be the one these things happened to? Why did she have to have what her grandmother called a “special gift”? More like a curse than a blessing, she often said.
But she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the book. The image on the page kept shifting, first the photo of the painting, now that stupid little rock with its jerky movements. Finally, the shadow hands reaching for it. Like a broken record, the vision continued to repeat itself over and over again, taunting her to find its hidden meaning.
Mia slammed the book shut and shoved it away from herself. It was just like always. How on earth was she supposed to figure out what the vision meant? A rock was a rock, right? Still, she’d learned to be extra cautious over the years. The images that came to her without warning and at the strangest times were not always easy to interpret. She’d been wrong more times than she’d been right because she’d misinterpreted what she’d seen. Or because the visions had come to her after the fact. She had no training in deciphering these things and certainly no place to go to find any.
When she was younger there was a desperation in her determination to find answers. Getting people to listen to her was a battle itself. Her parents had always considered her a strange child—aloof, shy but apparently making up weird stories to capture attention. They never believed her stories about “visions”.
“Don’t keep telling people those crazy stories,” her mother said too often to count. “They’ll think you’re crazy. They’ll think we’re all crazy.”
“The neighbors are all talking,” her father admonished her. “I don’t want them pointing fingers at our family.”
They even sent her to a psychiatrist who was supposed to “deprogram” her. What a lot of fun that had been.
But still the visions continued to plague her. Too often the images had been too vague or misleading and now she’d almost become a pariah. When she did get someone to listen and she had success, the media called it a fluke. The frustration of not being able to make people understand the things she saw and the rejection because of her “oddness” had finally caused her to isolate herself from everyone else.
When she finally escaped to the University of Michigan, she convinced her father to pay the extra money for a single dorm room, then she eventually moved into an studio apartment. She chose art history as her major, because she could lose herself in the richness of the creations of the artists and sculptors, the potters and temple rubbers. The orderliness of delineating art history gave her a personal discipline that allowed her to exert some measure of control over her existence.
The visions, for whatever reason, came less frequently while she was at school, all the way through her postgraduate studies. When they came, they were so fractured she made herself ignore them, even if the effort sometimes made her physically ill.
But finally she was finished with her studies, sporting her brand new PhD, and the visions came roaring back. Not knowing how or when they’d appear, she isolated herself more and more except at work. She lived alone in her house, surrounded by the books and music she loved. It wasn’t that she was antisocial or weak, just self-protective. It took strength to deal with the impact of her visions and the primarily negative responses she’d learned to live with.
Her life, for the most part, focused on her career with the museum. Her job suited her perfectly, since it allowed her to work alone the majority of the time. She was always on edge that a vision would explode from nowhere and being isolated allowed her to deal with them without distraction or embarrassment. During those instances when she had to meet with the museum curator, she found herself praying that she would not be disrupted by one of her visions. They came without warning and she didn’t think Mr. Hunter would be too impressed by them. For someone who appreciated art, he was definitively black and white in his outlook.
Today, thank God, he was away on a trip and unlikely to wander into her office unannounced. Her newest vision had disrupted her work half a dozen times already this week. Just seconds each time. That was all. A brief flash. But it wouldn’t go away and she had no idea what message she was supposed to read into it.
She’d almost begun to believe that whatever was causing this to happen to her had disappeared. She hadn’t had one of what she’d taken to calling her “episodes” in months now and had almost begun to relax, thinking they’d gone away for good. Not so. Her stomach was doing the jitterbug as it always did at the beginning of one of her incidents and an aspirin-proof headache was already beginning to build behind her eyes.
She stacked everything in neat piles on her desk and put away her pen and magnifying glass. Okay, time to go home. She could only hope the vision would go away, or else somehow a sharper image, more defined with a clearer message, would be given to her. One she could interpret.