Signs

I think I can see the war coming. It's just a flash of light and then negative space. I will live alone and miss my family, sick with radioactivity. Glowing faintly, I will make my own breakfast, a Pop-Tart.

I think I can predict the war because I see the future. I'm not so much clairvoyant as I am attentive; I pay attention to signs and symbols. I call it realistic. I gather evidence. I intuit. It's a big-picture thing. This is how I know my mom doesn't make it.

I am thirteen, the same age as Lucia of Fatima when she had visions of the Blessed Mother. Her real mother beat her for predicting the world war. I have the book, the brittle pages with the cartoon saints. I also like Agnes, who went up in flames. And Christine the Astonishing, who had a name like a superhero, who scaled rooftops and trees like Spiderman but whose breasts leaked holy oil she ate to stay alive. I am waiting for my own vision, for the eighteen-foot Jesus suspended over the altar at our church to nod or wink.

The first sign is this: A weak cough, thin, what they call unproductive, unresponsive to cough drops and lozenges no matter how many she sucks.

"I dreamed last night that I stood at the bathroom sink and pulled out what was making me cough," she said. I was late for school; she handed me a Pop-Tart wrapped in a paper towel. "I just reached in and pulled it out of my throat. It was blood, all clotted, and it just kept coming and coming. I was gagging the whole time. Then I just rinsed it down the sink and it was gone."

"Gross." I said. I imagined her pulling a thick, knotted rope of clotted blood from her throat with a flourish, like a magician pulling scarves from his pocket. I left the Pop-Tart on the kitchen counter. It was the first day of eighth grade.

She'd been coughing like that all summer, but today I finally saw it: quick and barely visible, but alive in there and expanding. It threatened to spill out from behind her eyes and out her nose and ears. If I could rewind the scene and play it in slow motion, we might see it take shape, fully formed, black and toxic and standing between us. It marked her with an X. I saw it, and I wasn't even really looking. It was the first day of eighth grade and I was feeling like a celebrity.

Later, drunk on chemotherapy, she had a vision of her own: a man in long flowing robes swished into her hospital room. At first, she thought it was her Uncle Jack, a priest who lived in Texas near the cancer center. He sat on the edge of her bed. She felt the pressure of his weight shifting her own. He took her hand, and when he opened his mouth to speak she smelled something cold and dead.

"And what's the matter with this little girl?" he asked, and she—instinctively, she said—struggled to pull his hand to her mouth and tear her teeth through his skin.

"But there wasn't any skin," she said, staring at me with wide eyes, as if she was telling someone else's horror story, as if she held a flashlight under her chin.

"It was just hard and cold. Like a hoof."

"Come on, Carolyn," my dad interrupted. "You were dreaming." He was impatient with this story. I didn't want to hear it either. It was a burden. I already slept with them almost every night. I couldn't sleep in my own room between the flashes of Linda Blair's bloated, rotating head, and my nuclear holocaust, Day-After anxiety.

"I wasn't dreaming," she insisted. "I could hear you next to me reading the...