The Knowing: Awake in the Dark Read Online Free PDF Page A

something. As he turned and looked through the windshield he shaded his eyes from the glare of the sun. There squirming in the dirt was the mother cat.
    “Nooo! Oh, buddy! I didn’t see ya.”
    The boy bolted from the cab and ran to the spot where she now lay still. He lifted up the cat and held her close. Tiny rivulets of blood seeped from her nose. Tears coursed down his cheeks, “I’m so sorry” he cried into the animal’s fur. The boy gripped her neck and twisted, releasing her from suffering. His sense of loss was enormous and the boy was sick with it for days, unable to leave his bed. It was just a week later when his mother called and said, “Send the youngn home.”
    The boy didn’t want to go home. He’d adjusted to the way things were at the farm. He was sad to leave his aunt and uncle but he had no power in the matter.  The boy went home bitter with the powerlessness that he felt. He would never forget how his parents threw him away so easily just two years ago, no sir, he would never forget.

 
Chapter 3
     
    I gave my first psychic reading at the age of eight. I had no idea what I was doing. It was spontaneous and I hadn’t known I could do it until the moment it occurred.
    It happened while spending time with a new acquaintance, an adult. Her name was Angie and she lived in the neighborhood where we’d just moved, she lived with her husband and toddler son.
    We sat together at her kitchen table. An oscillating fan on the floor blew the bangs from my sticky forehead.  My elbows were planted firmly atop the round table covered with dominoes. My chin rested nicely in sweaty palms while my fingertips played my bottom lip like a base drum as I listened intently to Angie explain the rules of the game again.
    “Sammy, stop that now” Angie yelled interrupting her instruction to me.
    The toddler sat spread eagle on the floor just a few feet away in a circle of toys. Sam spit the matchbox car from his slobbering mouth and smiled a single toothed grin at his mother.
    How we met is vague in my memory but in my loneliness after our hurried move, I ended up at her house every day. I would forever feel like she was my first real friend because I bonded with her in such a unique way. Our iced tea glasses sweated wet rings onto the multicolored coasters beneath them and Angie continued to review the rules.
    “Now remember,” she said, “you can only pick seven the first time and if you get one with the same amount of dots on each end, it’s a double and those are good.”
    She smiled and I admired her dewy skin and hazel eyes. Her hair was blade-straight and fell like a thick, black shade to her shoulders.
    “Why don’t you go first this time,” she said as she winked at me.
    “Okay,” I eagerly agreed.
    My thumb caressed the smooth back of the ebony domino and I placed each one carefully on the tray in front of me. We played for a while when out of the blue Angie said,
    “I don’t know why I got married. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
    She exhaled her pent up breath and gazed at her son playing on the floor.
    I heard a voice in my head that said,
Yes you do. You wanted him to love you so you felt worthy even though you didn’t love him. He supports what you believe about yourself.
    Without thinking I repeated the information although it was well beyond my understanding. Angie said nothing as she stared at me, her lips parted as if she were going to speak. I felt her astonishment float like an invisible secret in the air between us and I regretted what I had said even as the words slipped from my memory. I
knew
without understanding that, what the voice said was a hidden truth that only she knew.
    I sat immobile at her kitchen table and I
knew
she didn’t love her husband and I
knew
he had hurt her in ways, I could feel, but not understand. I felt the essence that was him. I saw in my mind’s eye his curly, hair and boyish smile. I felt his stern and unbending, demeanor although I had never