Diana the Soothsayer

A Nuclear Nerds Story

Told You So: Diana the Soothsayer

When you’re from Bumpass, Virginia, there’s not much going for you. Or, rather, there are a few things going for you, but they all suck. You either wind up dancing in the bars, getting married to some drunk, or getting the hell out any which way you can. But I was different.

When my parents couldn’t pay the rent on our shitty apartment, they skipped town after dropping me off at the stoop of the slumlord, Miss Morgan, as payment of the debt. I was ten years old. I became Miss Morgan’s indentured servant. It was, to say the least, an interesting place to grow up, a little shack off Zach Taylor Highway. And that hag owned every apartment and house in a ten mile radius.

So that’s where I met Diana, another girl whose parents couldn’t pay the rent, and so paid with their own flesh and blood. She had been there since she was just five. She was now fifteen. After my first day at the shack, cleaning, watching, learning, I crawled into my dirty little cot with an invisible wound slashed across my heart and cried. Diana ran her fingers through my hair and told me, “We will make it through every day together. I promise,” and in the morning, the half-dead rooster (from which Miss Morgan regularly drained blood for various divinations) crowed into the open windows and I knew that I would make it through that day as well. As long as I had her.

On that second day, after feeding us a tasteless soup, Miss Morgan expounded upon the “way of vision,” as she called it. For her, divination wasn’t hocum. It was true, all of it. The tea leaves and crystals and tarot cards and astrology. All of it was true, or at least a glimpse of truth. She told us that she would then compile the insights from each method into a single reading of fate’s hand upon the mortal world. Miss Morgan was a fortune teller–a straight up, no bullshit, modern soothsayer.

And as I lay in bed that night, Diana whispered into the glowing darkness, “I told you so.”

“Told me what?” I asked.

“I told you we’d make it through another day together. And we did.”

For ten years, things went on in this way. Diana and I learned the art of soothsaying in the infested little shack during the fall and winter months, and then we performed in the spring and summer at festivals, Renaissance Faires, beach towns and boardwalks. Miss Morgan taught us how to draw fate out of each individual as we read their past life and then prophesied their future. Rich housewives, forgetful old men, arrogant college kids, ditsy young girls–all paid to fall under the capricious hand of fate as we read it.

Then the bomb exploded, and Miss Morgan brought us before her. “I am the only true prophet left,” she told us in her weightless and airy voice, like vaporized water floating on thin air. “No matter what happens or what you hear, do not open that door.” Then she muttered an incantation over us, lingering over Diana for some minutes, her eyes closed and her lips moving wordlessly. And then she locked herself in her bedroom and we heard screams and cries for thirty-five hours straight. When we woke the next day to her silence, Diana and I banged on the door and implored her for guidance, but nothing. Then the nuclear wind, like a yellow haze, began to blow across the Appalachians, and we broke the door down. Miss Morgan was dead, a single bullet hole in her head. We dragged her corpse to the woodline in the backyard. We left her there with her clouded eyes wide open, and doubt rippled deep in my soul though I could not name it. It seemed blasphemous to think that this woman was not a prophet.

That nascent little thought was quickly washed away in the madness that followed, and Diana and I set to work upon that which Miss Morgan was incapable of doing–truly reading the future. We disemboweled birds, we beheaded cats, we spread tarot across the floor and chalked astrological patterns upon the black-painted wall. We let the yellow nuclear haze settle on our tongues and we deciphered the very taste of destruction.

What did it all mean? The doubt I had felt earlier slid back into me like a spirit. I saw nothing but child’s play, meaning forced upon capriciousness and blind fate itself. There was no meaning. There was no fortune telling. There was no prophecy. It was all a sham. Miss Morgan had killed herself out of fear when she stared into a future she could never read.

I worked in this way through the night, and on the second day I opened my mouth to tell Diana, but she cut me off, her eyes wide as she held the bloody entrails of a mouse in one hand, and the carcass, like a loose little money bag, in the other. “We head west. West!” she cried, and then she put her eyes close to the little liver. “Wait… no, okay! Yes, we go west!”

“No, Diana, that can’t be right.” I whispered as I dropped the set of bones I had been casting without faith. Doubt contorted my body as I gave voice to my blasphemy for the first time. “No, I don’t think. Diana, I don’t think this is what we think it is… the blast was west. We can’t go west.”

“Look,” she said, pointing to the bones I had just dropped. They formed a jagged kind of W on the floor. “West,” she whispered. The room went still then. Something quivered within me and I heard a kind of low whine from the backyard, like bottled wind, from the place where we had dumped the body of Miss Morgan. Diana’s eyes went wide and her mouth set in a straight line, as if listening to something. Or someone. And then she grabbed a knife and drew it through her palm and the blood ran out of her balled fist like a stream and bubbled upon the dusty floor in little domes. I couldn’t see it at first, as our two little cots blocked my view. But when I came around them, I saw it on the floor in dark little globs: WEST.

“I’m going west,” she said. “I don’t care what you do.” Her eyes burned like dragon-fire and her jaw was set and she looked at me for several moments, and I hoped that a tear would fall. But nothing. Nothing at all. “ I go west,” she said again. She stood and grabbed a hatchet and walked to the woodline in the backyard and she yanked up the stiff and leaf-littered corpse of Miss Morgan and hacked off her head and took it with her, her receding form disappearing down the ridge of Zachary Taylor Highway.

And that night, for the first time in many years, Diana was not there to tell me so. Without her, it was as if some faceless god had torn me open to look upon my entrails in glee.

I survived alone for many months, eating rats, drinking nuclear rain water, and watching my skin slowly turn green. I vainly hoped someone would come save me. Nobody did. And so one day I turned back to fickle fate and I read the tea leaves. They told me what I had known for a long time: I had to find Diana.

Shoeless and foggy-headed, I slipped some rat carcasses over my feet and cut a line of desperation through the middle of America, asking anyone I could find if they had seen the girl who divined, the one who told fortunes, the one who knew the future. Only whispers and rumors seemed to follow her. “I heard of that girl, over two towns,” or “Yeah, she told me I’d be dead soon,” or “Yes, she prophesied that the end would come in fire and water,” or “That damn maniac?” Nothing of substance. All air, like the disembodied voice of Miss Morgan.

In Texas, I came to a tent city where she was rumored to be. The tent city rested beside a rusted out railway in the shade of nuclear-burnt trees. The makeshift roads were dusty and dry and the survivors around me were shabby and restless. I drank nuclear tea and read the sediment that remained at the bottom. Merely out of habit, nothing else. But the sediments flowed and washed in the remaining bit of water, and I saw, as if in a vision, that this was the day. I felt it in the air, like crystal heat. I found a piece of plywood on a trash heap, and on it, in red paint, I scrawled “TOLD YOU SO.” I did not want her to miss me. I wanted her to know it was me, to know that we would still make it through each day together. I wanted her to know that I had made a mistake. Whatever the fates told me or not, I should have went with her.

Then the ground tremored and I wondered if it would swallow me up for my defiance of fortune. My lack of faith burned deep in me, and I held the sign close, as if holding Diana herself. But then the tremors stopped, and I heard a booming voice call from the middle of the tent city. “Everyone outside! Line up!”

A fat man bedecked in ancient military attire both horrible and laughable wielded a spear in one hand and a pistol in the other. Behind him, an entire troop of similar horrors descended on the people in the camp. The horrors struck out with clubs and blades. One of them, a thin young man with a face like a dog’s snarl, bludgeoned an old man with a sock-o-rocks, then dragged him bleeding toward the fat man. I closed my eyes, waiting his imminent death by bullet or blunt force. The sound would tell me. But then I heard only an airy word, like a whisper bouncing off particles of Texas dust.

“Told you so.”

When I opened my eyes, Diana’s form was there, dried herbs wreathing her body like some perverse goddess of peace. Her crystal ball held aloft, refracting the morning sunlight into a billion photons. But the voice. The face. It was all wrong.

The dog-face held the old man still as Diana dipped a paint brush into his open wound and painted something on a sign in short strokes. When she was done, the dog-face grinned and held it aloft for her to show the entire tent city. A sign, etched in blood, the mirror image of my own, “TOLD YOU SO.”

That face. That voice. I realized then. They weren’t hers. I opened my mouth to cry out her name, to save her, to stop her, to somehow erase whatever had happened to her, but her voice stole mine. And she spoke in tones twisted and contorted like a coil of snakes and I was torn between two worlds, my memory dragged through time and shredded upon a jagged knife edge, unsure of what was past and present.

“We told you,” I heard her say at some point in time, whether here or there I didn’t know anymore. “We told you that you wouldn’t make it through another day. And you won’t.”

My sign fell to the Texas dust, and then the massacre began…