By Cara Lynn Albert

The Featured Art is “The Illusion of Memory” by Greta Delapp

You drive to Cassadaga not because you really believe in psychics and spiritualists, but because you’re thirty-eight and feel like you’re running out of options. Because it’s January fourth and you just spent another holiday season alone while your family asks about the absent husband.

The was-never-present in-the-first-place husband. The would-rather-fuck-the-eighteen-year-old-dog-walker husband.

He’s been gone for two years, and good riddance. You pull a cashmere cardigan over your shoulders, a Christmas present from your aunt bought half-off at JCPenney, because it’s one of the few days out of the year where Central Florida dips below sixty degrees. Angels and bloated polar bears dance over crabgrass-infested lawns. Plastic icicles hang from gutters, though it hasn’t fallen under freezing here in three decades.

While you feel silly, driving over an hour from your home in Winter Haven to reach the Psychic Capital of the World, this is premeditated. You heard about Madame Caiman through a viral video. A woman with yellow eyes and sage scales for skin, claws-for-hands choked in silver rings like metallic earthworms. Around her neck swings clear quartz and obsidian crystals caught in chains. Her readings are the most accurate in Cassadaga, apparently. Couples are prophesied twins and learn they’re pregnant with a pair the following day. This kind of accuracy doesn’t come cheap, though. Madame Caiman charges two hundred dollars a session, and you’re just desperate enough to pay any fee.

You turn down a narrow, cracked street that parts shaggy pines like Moses and the Red Sea. Passing old buildings with rusted awnings, you find a pillared sign punctuated by a sunflower. Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp: closed from DUSK until DAWN. There are no holiday decorations, and you sharply exhale. Madame Caiman’s address displays a mature, two-story yellow home with a teal front door and matching window shutters.

Maybe you should take some responsibility for your failed marriage, too. Just because you had sex with a woman doesn’t mean it counts any less than your ex-husband’s infidelity. The night you slept with her, silk legs intertwining beneath silkier, lavender-scented sheets, she asked you about your astrological sign.

“Oh no,” you said, laughing with more patronage than intended. “Don’t tell me you believe in all that.” Her fingernails on your scalp felt foreign and transcendental, knuckles catching in the curls you were often too lazy to manage, pulling skin, though you liked those sharp twinges. You hoped some of her blushed polish would chip in your hair, so that you might find pieces of her the following morning.

“Like it’s any less plausible than Christianity?” she asked. You pulled her neck to you and lapped her bottom lip, still burgundy from the bottle and a half of wine you shared.

“Maybe I’m just more rational,” you taunted, and she made you pay for that. She rode you and tasted you in forbidden places never before touched by another woman. You wanted to scream, and she corked your lips in her salty palm, whispering, “I know, baby.”

You knock on Madame Caiman’s door, the old paint buffing your knuckles in green, though you half-expected the psychic to open the screen before your fist met the wood, because wouldn’t she have seen you coming? She answers, and, really, she’s quite lovely. You have typecasted fortunetellers to be ancient, but her reptilian scales don’t show age, at least not in the way that human skin rots. She doesn’t wear musty robes; a long, satin dress is cinched at her waist with a belt made of blue jewels. It runs past her feet, so she appears floating. Her snout is stretched. Her irises are captured sunlight. You want to melt in those slitted pupils like they’re hammocks.

Madame Caiman waves you in, smiling with predator teeth, though you’re not afraid. She pets the long, black braid snaked over her shoulder, hairs sprouting from an undefined source on her scalp. It has to be a wig.

When you told your husband about the other woman (it was just one night, though you dreamt about it every other evening since), he wasn’t upset.

“So you’re a dyke now?” he asked, laughing in needle pricks. At the time, his father was dying, he was two months away from his affair with the dog-walker, but this was a punchline.

I still like men, you wanted to howl, but you make me brittle.

Madame Caiman shepherds you through her backyard, gated by an arch of twigs and pastel petals that smell like baby powder. It’s no longer chilly, her herbs and fountains steaming in their own ecosystem. You shed your sweater. She seats both of you on white, wicker chairs at a matching table nestled between vines and cocooned in dew. No crystal ball. No ouija board.

“Not what you expected?” Madame Caiman says, and she takes your palm. Her voice is rich like an alligator’s purr. Her claws are stone but dainty around the joints.

You don’t wait for her.

“I wanted to ask about—” you begin, “I mean, I came here for some kind of proof.” Now you feel queer. You rouge at the thought of seeing her here, catching you begging for validation. She doesn’t need proof, of course.

Madame Caiman traces the scores on your palm with a single talon. A kind of ballerina’s dance. You didn’t know there were so many nerve endings beneath those lines. She doesn’t

speak, only breathes in low croaks, pushing and pulling the invisible thread between your chests. How can gray areas feel rational when humanity is steeped in binaries?

But Madame Caiman is not human.

Her talon moves to your wrist, to that fleshy space where both of you feel the thump of your pulse, and she lets you take her other hand, because you want to feel hers too. Your braided limbs, tender flesh and unyielding scales, make infinity. Above you, the clouds resign, and beneath you lies your discarded cardigan, wildflowers and mushrooms budding through the open weave. You won’t need it again.

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Cara Lynn Albert is a writer from Florida. Her work has been published in Catapult, Bat City Review, Post Road, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA degree in creative writing from the University of Colorado Boulder, and she serves as the Director of Marketing at The Adroit Journal. Cara currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee.