Excerpt from “Psychic Simon”
He’d never even been to a psychic fair before, much less participated in one.
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What had surprised him right at the start was the astonishing amount of jewelry for sale, so much that at first glance, the show could easily have passed for a jewelry expo. The second-most common thing on display had to be candles, and after that, crystals. Almost everyone who sold candles also sold crystals. And almost everyone who sold crystals also sold, for some reason, handbags. A few outlier tables sold less spiritually-oriented things like T-shirts, equally divided between mystical iconography and pictures of Yoda, or word paintings featuring life wisdom from Gandalf or Dumbledore. There was even a table where a couple from Des Moines sold straw hats. They made an effort to claim that the hats channeled the Earth spirit Gaia directly into the wearer’s mind, but Simon suspected that they had just mistakenly booked a table at the wrong show and decided to make the most of it.
The hat-sellers’ lofty claims, though, weren’t noticeably more outrageous than most of the other vendors’. Simon formed an opinion of each of them as he passed, and most often that opinion was “scam.” He liked to think the best of people, but it was hard to think the best of someone who claimed that they could tell you when you would die, accurate to within one minute, by dangling a hunk of rose quartz above your hand on a string made of human hair. That person was lying. Most of them were. And it made Simon not want to be associated with them. His powers (though he hated calling them that) were real. They required him to go into a trance-like state using a top-40 pop song from 1990, but they worked. And it annoyed him that, to make use of his gift, he had to join the ranks of the crackpots, the wackos, and the out-and-out con artists.
As the Fair gradually filled up with customers, walking around the hall became a blur. He grew tired of the constant din of conversation and haggling, and wanted some more of those tiny donuts. He had splurged on a bag of them earlier in the day while waiting for sitters, and they had unquestionably been the highlight of the first day of the Fair. He was sad that it seemed he wouldn’t be able to afford more of them on the other six days.