Steady by Allison LaSorda
“I’d reveal that they’d have a tough choice to make”
Fiction by Allison LaSorda
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You might look at me now and think I’m broken. But I used to work as a healer. How I came to this is about how you’d expect. I was up at my friend Bill’s camp by the Miramichi for the long weekend. We had a fire going one night and in the sparks of flames I saw this dancing figure wearing purple—which I later realized was violet, the third eye chakra—and decided I’d had this vision, and the vision had to mean something different for me. I told Bill, I’d have to move on to help people. I told him I was on a quest to become a new man. Bill said he didn’t see any purple but he was happy for me.
I didn’t learn any of the physical healing traditions. No plant remedies or mushroom brews. Those traditions take a lot of study time and I needed to hit the ground running. I needed to connect people to other states of being and other dimensions. Spiritual healing was the right fit for me at the time. I listened to tapes and took out library books on shamanism and clairvoyant readings, and memorized them. I drove four hours to this lecture on soul retrieval by a guru named Sage Walker, which I’m told is her given name. It left me steady on my path. I was pretty sure I had a gift for healing.
I got set up on Tuesdays and Thursday above a shop called Cultures and at first waited around a lot. I changed the tablecloths and incense to set the mood and used my meditation bowl. A couple clients came to me by default from the previous medium, who’d gone back to journalism school in the fall. He left me some notes, though, so soon enough I was trustworthy and churning out good readings.
New people started arriving here and there. Students asked me: What does my future hold? Will I pass biology? Who will love me? Other people asked about their dead relatives or the lottery or the odd estranged kid. Those got pretty tough some days. I told them new ways of relating to their journey, but those ways were the same for each of them. I tried real hard to be original otherwise, and never used a spirit animal twice. With each visitor, I’d reveal that they’d have a tough choice to make soon. And they’d nod their heads gravely, knowingly, like I understood their situation deeply, like they got the chills.
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Cover image by FAITH47. To see more of her work, click here.
Allison LaSorda's writing has appeared in Brick, The Fiddlehead, PANK, and Riddle Fence. She lives in Toronto.