The crash of a door being thrown open broke his meditation. "Sorry," he smiled apologetically across the table at the fat girl paying $5.00--and that's too much, ya know, since it's not even for real--for a palm reading. But there was no door, only the heavy canvas of the tent and some crazy-fast organ music outside, mixing in with laughing and talking.

"He's going to know. He's going to know ... " A feminine voice, nervous. He could almost feel a tickle of breath on his ear.

He stepped outside to air only a bit fresher than the cloying odor of the fat girl's perfume and sucked in a breath. Grease smells hung low, frying dough, onions and some kind of nasty sausages. Cigarette smoke. But at least it was cooler. The sky had become upset and threatened rain.

"Where the hell have you been?" A man's voice now--refined, deep. Anger that sounded scary and on the verge of losing control.

But that voice was not there any more than the crashing door. It played and replayed in the world inside his head. It was impossible to distinguish whether they were fragments of the past or the future, or only random puzzle pieces of someone's thoughts that he caught like a stray radio signal.

He scanned the crowd, not exactly eager to go back inside and read the woman's future. His name was Evan O'Leary and he was a psychic; but he was no carny hoax making clever guesses. He still wondered sometimes what the hell he was doing. A traveling carnival, for pity's sake. For all intents and purposes, his life was as good as over.

His "gift" for seeing what was going to happen, or what had happened in a past that he had not been privy to, was still new to him. Yet, it felt as much part of him as his own name or his favorite song. It was as much a part of him as his own memories.

It began with dreams. Horrific dreams of accidents, of death. He was losing sleep. Within a month of the first nightmare, he was unable to work all day without coming home from the restaurant in the afternoon to check on Bonnie and the kids. There was this sense of impending doom that he could not shake. He lost weight. His parents asked questions, and he could feel them watching him, more closely then they ever had when he was a kid. They suspected something awful, but commonly awful. Drinking. An affair, maybe. Bonnie however, was more forgiving. She begged him to see a doctor, and he ended up visiting a therapist who wrote the dreams off as stress and gave him a prescription.