Psychic Automatism – Jennifer Ostopovich
November 20, 2025
The lines danced in the periphery of his vision, connecting the unseen the same way he imagined they must have appeared in the mind’s eye of the first astronomer as he charted the constellations in the vast night sky. There were patterns everywhere, if one were only to look.
There is meaning here, he thought as he remarked on the the angle of the sun and the way the shadows from the barren elm fell across the frost tipped grass. If he could just put it all together. Connect the dots. He was sure it would lead him to something glorious. The world was both real and an illusion he surmised. The space between, that was where the answers lied. He had determined he must follow his wandering thoughts. Thoughts that snaked like the river Maiandros through its winding tributaries to whatever final confluence, however strange and foreign. He realized now that he had previously been held back by his rigid, linear thinking. If he could tap into the liminal, he just might be able to override the dimensional constraints of reality and transcend the material. He felt as though he were close. It was all within arm’s length, it was merely up to him to reach out and grasp it.
He scribbled his thoughts in a calfskin notebook and lifted his head as the sound of the door-chime announced a small woman in an oxblood red box coat and scuffed black boots. They clapped against the lacquered floorboards as she made her way to a table in front of the window, a sharp staccato punctuating his musings and commanding his attention.
He watched as she set her gloves upon the small marble table and settled into a well-worn green wingback. She removed her hat revealing a short blonde bob that cut in sharply at the chin and gave her round face an angularity that was striking in its incongruency. The waiter came by to take her order. Black tea and pain au chocolat.
His concentration now fully broken, the flow state of his thoughts falling like dominos into a disorderly jumble, he set his pencil down and rubbed at his temples with annoyance. He came at precisely two pm each day because it was just when the café was quietest. The five block walk from his flat activated his mental clarity and the continuous refills of strong black coffee—he was often five or six cups deep by the time he set his pencil down—served to stimulate and were delivered promptly without the need for him to break his absorption in his writings. He set to work again, but unable to find the loose thread of his thoughts he finally sat back in his chair and resigned himself to the state of things. He had a tendency towards rigidness, but part of his new process was about letting go and allowing things to unfold organically.
The waiter delivered the woman’s tea. He studied her profile as she sipped it gingerly from a carmine painted mouth that he decided was sensual and maybe just a little too broad. He observed her for a time as she stared out into the street at the passing traffic and fidgeted with the teaspoon by gently spinning it clockwise and then counterclockwise. After a few minutes of this she suddenly, and without warning, turned to face him. Her grey eyes met his with a startle of recognition. She held his gaze for a moment before finally turning away with a look of confusion.
He was now fully absorbed by her presence and had all but forgotten about the musings that had seemed so important just moments before. The brief spark that passed between them had ignited something within him. There was something here. He knew it. Could sense the undercurrent of electricity that flowed between them. An exchange of power; the type of solar charge that might provide the fuel for his ultimate photosynthesis.
Leaving her pastry untouched, she pulled her change purse from her pocket and set a bill on the tabletop then slipped her gloves and hat on and hurried out of the café.
Waiting a beat so as not to draw attention, he threw some coins on the table and then followed behind her. He tailed her from an inconspicuous distance while making sure to keep the bullseye of her red coat well within sight. She walked briskly for a few blocks before turning onto the avenue and skipping down the basement steps of a squat brown brick building with an embossed sign above the entrance that read: Psychic Readings.
He made note of the address and then backtracked and headed west, towards his apartment.
***
He poured himself two fingers of Lagavulin and slipped Coltrane’s A Love Supreme onto his turntable, then dropped down into the brown leather club chair that flanked it. It was the only other piece of furniture in the small apartment living room save for a single desk and wall-to-wall bookshelves crammed to the rafters and spilling out onto the worn oak floor below. He wondered about the encounter with the woman and the brief feeling of psychic connection he had experienced. His experiments seemed to be bearing fruit; he felt he was closer than he had ever been to transcending his physical limitations and tasting the wonders of the beyond. The limits of human capabilities were shrinking; the possibilities ever-expanding. He followed closely the work they were doing at CERN with particle physics, and also the meteoric trajectory of recent space exploration efforts. If The Soviet Union could successfully land the Luna 9 on the moon and transmit photos back to earth from its surface and the Apollo 8 could leave the gravitational sphere and remain in orbit around the moon for ten rotations—incredible feats that would have only a decades before been considered science fiction—anything seemed possible.
He determined that there was something worth exploring here and he must follow this white rabbit all the way down to see where it led.
***
He took up residence in the laundromat across the street from the squat brick building. It was easy enough not to be noticed in the unmanned facility with a couple dozen coin operated machines and a steady flow of launderers. Those that came and went assumed he was waiting for his laundry to finish and paid him no mind. He sat in the chair with the best view of the street and building ahead, reading an article on locating radio sources using the moon by timing when a celestial radio source goes behind the moon from a well-thumbed copy of Scientific American, while keeping the entrance of the building directly across from him in his twelve o’clock so as to spot any comings and goings happening within the fortuneteller’s.
Four people came and went down the basement steps between noon and two pm. After the final exit, the woman in the red coat emerged and turned left onto the sidewalk. Tipping his hat low on his head and popping his collar, he headed out onto the sidewalk and trailed the woman up the avenue.
She walked three blocks, stopping finally at a small Kosher deli. He held back a few buildings, ensconcing himself within the shadowy embrace of a recessed doorway. He lit a cigarette and waited.
The woman in the red coat emerged a few moments later carrying a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. She breezed past him on the sidewalk but then stopped abruptly and turned to look over her shoulder.
His collar obscured much of his profile, and yet, once again he detected the startle of recognition in her expression and was struck by the sensation of whole-body electric shock.
***
He watched her comings and goings from the building for four more days. Tracking her habits, noting when she was most likely to be found alone. It seemed she saw her last customer around 5:30 pm and that they would stay for twenty or so minutes. Then she would spend approximately five minutes afterwards presumably tidying before locking up for the evening. This five-minute lag between her last customer leaving would serve as his window of action. So, it was at sunset on the fifth day, a date which he marked as auspicious because of its correspondence with Samhain, he finally made his way down the steps and into the the small subterranean business at the very minute of sunset.
***
The anticipation had been building within him all day. He was near delirium; a horse worked to a frothy lather. White foam formed at the corners of his lips and his pupils dilated so that the dimly lit room, lit only by a single Tiffany lamp and a few flickering votives, seemed to fill with a shimmering light. The atmosphere crackled with a luminous evanescence. He knew the veil would be thinnest this day and so worried the moment might pass if he did not seize it. He was desperate to grasp the answers that he could see now lay just a hair’s breadth out of reach before this short window closed. He stood in front of the divining table, and implored the medium, “I come to you seeking answers. I think you may have them. Please. What can you tell me?”
There was no surprise in her features, only weariness. “Nothing. I’m sorry. I can tell you nothing. I’m unable to give you the answers you seek.” Her voice was firm and steady, but her eyes betrayed her anxiety.
“Please,” He pleaded, bone dry like a parched man coming upon a guarded well after wandering the desert. “I am a desperate man. You must share with me. Please, tell me what you know.”
She looked away. Searching for some refuge in the small space but finding only him she sighed and pulled a single card from the deck of tarot in front of her and flipped it onto the mahogany tabletop: the Wheel of Fortune reversed. She studied him for a moment and then said, “Your incredible appetence gnaws away at you; your desire is far greater than your capacity for understanding. I don’t have answers for you that you, in your rabid myopia could comprehend. I can tell you this, and only this; if you continue your pursuit, you will gain no new understanding and will destroy the vassal of the knowledge you seek.”
He found this trite answer and her lack of pity for his obvious plight unsatisfactory. That she knew him, understood his great need was proof enough that she could give him what he sought. Who was she, this small and insignificant woman, to deny him his greatest desire?
She had hold of knowledge that through some cruel trick of the universe he craved but had been denied. He was certain she had connected with the metaphysical, transcended the linear, and he suspected the essence of this remained still trapped inside of her. He decided if she would not share it with him, he would not beg, but instead would ferret it out of this miserly gatekeeper. He had sought answers as no other, had dedicated his life to this seeking. These answers were no less than his due.
He moved in closer, his large form towering over her diminutive one. She stood to gain some measure of distance and personal command and took a step back, but now hemmed in between the wall and the table, she found she could go no farther.
He pinned her against the wall with his larger form and wrapped his hands around her throat, marvelling at how soft and delicate the blue veined marble of her flesh felt as he pressed his thumbs into her windpipe. She jerked and thrashed under his grasp with all the frenetic energy of a rabbit caught in a snare, but he knew she must already sense the inevitability of what was to come. Her sacrifice for his greater need.
Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.
When her expression finally went slack and her body no longer writhed within his grasp, he removed his hands from around her throat and then set her down and laid her out across the cold tile. He unbuttoned her blouse with trembling fingers. He had waited for this; everything he had done—an entire life’s work—had culminated in this very moment. It was to be the actualization of his greatest desire, and he would now claim his prize.
From within his coat pocket, he extracted a knife, then pressed it to the flesh of her belly. He opened her up and set to the careful work of excising her organs. The truth was contained somewhere there within, and he would need to peer at her insides and probe the spaces in-between to divine it.