The oven clock reads 12:01 – Jessica is right in time for lunch, which bodes well – but the house gloams in perpetual twilight, the curtains drawn and the air thick with incense and weed smoke. The shifting light of the muted TV is the main source of illumination, leaping across the shriveled potted plants, the bottles crowding the kitchen counters, the chipped Buddha statue staring serenely down at the ash-piled incense tray.
Most of all, wrappers clog every spare surface, spilling out of paper bags, and flocking across the floor, uncounted Baja-colored bells ringing in Jessica’s head. Twisted knots of sauce packets, the glimpse of an occasional corner label, a buzzing whisper of “Taco Supreme. Chalupa. Doritos Locos Taco. Burrito.”
In short, Jessica has never been in a place like this. Even the frat houses in college weren’t this bad.
Jessica hesitates by the door. Two human figures shift on the couch, mired in the seafoam of wrappers.
“What’d you bring?” The voice cracks out of the darkness. One figure sits forward, protruding into the embrace of the TV light. A woman, skinny and rigid, her teeth flashing with reflected light.
“What you asked for, Oracle,” says Jessica, bobbing her knees in something between a curtsy and a bow. “A Crunchwrap Supreme with potatoes and beans, three Doritos Locos Tacos, a large Baja Blast. I made sure they put in a lot of Diablo sauce.”
The Oracle’s hand flutters, gesturing her forwards. Jessica passes over the bag for the Oracle to examine, still holding the drink. The Oracle tears off the sticker and rustles through, assessing everything by feel.
“You understand the symbolism of this order, do you not?”
Jessica shakes her head, handing off the drink. The Oracle sets it on the coffee table, pushing aside wrappers, assorted crystals, and the tall tower of a bong.
“A Crunchwrap full almost to bursting. The round half-moons of tacos, like pregnant bellies, packed with flavor. Diablo sauce, full of fire, energetic as the quickening spark of life.”
Jessica’s breath sucks into her chest. She hadn’t mentioned her reason for visiting on the phone, yet the Oracle knew. “What about the Baja Blast?” she asks, but the Oracle has already unwrapped a taco and taken her first ferocious bite.
The second shape speaks up. “She just likes the Baja Blast. The drinks usually don’t mean anything.” He shifts and resettles on the couch, flicking on his smartphone. The screen’s light illuminates his prematurely lined face
“Oh,” says Jessica, and watches the Oracle eat, feeling that she is observing a beast in its cave. Entranced, it takes her a moment to remember the baggie burning a hole in her pocket.
“I uh…I brought you the extra offering.”
The Oracle is deep in her meal. The man leans forward to take the baggie of weed from her hand, reaching across the Oracle’s hunched form. He reaches for the bong, checking the bowl and emptying it into an overflowing ashtray.
“You said that would…help the accuracy of your reading?”
“Do not talk to the Oracle while she is eating,” snaps the man, making Jessica jump. Then he says, softer, “It’s best if you focus your intentions on what it is you want to know. That helps too.” He sets about packing a fresh bowl, apparently absorbed by the parade of ads on the silent TV.
The Oracle has finished her first taco and now takes her first sauce-doused bite of the Crunchwrap. Jessica tries to focus, struggling at first with anxious remembrances of all it took her to get here – awkwardly asking after rumors, the phone calls with the long silences, the friend of a friend who referred her to her husband’s weed dealer, the cop car that seemed like it was following her from the Taco Bell.
But no, she’s supposed to focus on the why, not the how. Her hands creeps unconsciously to her belly, to the empty womb that would not produce after years of trying and trying until the trying became a tiresome chore that scraped her like sandpaper.
The Oracle stops mid-Crunchwrap to take a deep pull from the bong. The fire illuminates a furrow in her brow, then flicks away. Moments later, she exhales an electrified billow of smoke.
Oh, that smell! Jessica’s insides twist her into the unwanted past: the smoking session before the drinking started, the way it felt like the joint was passed to her twice as often as everyone else. She got giddy and stupid, saying that all the memorabilia – pool cues and framed pictures of white men – made the frat house looked like a fucking Applebee’s. Then she got scared, and they told her a few beers would make it better.
That’s not why I’m here!
Or was it? On that night, stumbling home after her imprisonment, vomiting in the bushes, she’d slammed her fist into that filthy organ, and swore to herself in a drunken sob that if any child arose from this event she’d kill it herself.
Had she cursed herself for life in a moment of reactive unreason? She hadn’t known then how she would actually feel about children when she settled down.
The Oracle finishes the Crunchwrap and another taco. The wrappers join the pile bubbling from the crack in the couch. She takes a deep draw of her Baja Blast and, while she finishes the last taco, Jessica does her best to focus, asking the universe, fate, whatever god presided over this woman, what would become of her barrenness.
The Oracle finishes her lunch with a belch and a bong rip. Then she stands, her face pressing forward into the TV light. Jessica catches a glimpse of the high dome of her forehead, the thin lips pursing over those horse-like teeth, before she turns away and crosses the room to a dark doorway.
“Now what?” Jessica asks the man.
Without looking up from his phone, the man says, “She sleeps. She dreams. You wait. Sit, if you like.”
Jessica picks an armchair in the corner, her bottom sinking painfully into the deflated cushion. This, she thinks, does not bode well.
For hours she watches silent sitcoms, trying to guess at the drama unfolding between these lip-flapping characters. A blonde woman with plasticky make-up weeps through many close-ups. Was she troubled by an unplanned pregnancy? Why weep when she so easily had something Jessica might never have?
Meanwhile, the man puts in headphones and pats his knees while a haywire of breakbeats sputtered across the silence.
The oven clock reads 1, 2, 3. The gloom of the house deepens. Finally, at 3:43, movements from the darkness of the other room, and the Oracle returns, padding silently between discarded wrappers.
“I have dreamed,” she announces, her voice a brassy monotone. She looks not at Jessica, the man on the couch, or the TV, but towards a draped window, her eyes focused on some far distance.
Jessica twists towards her, heart pounding.
“Buy a Beefy Five Layer Burrito with extra sour cream. Return to your husband. This will break the spell of bad luck. The time is right. You will have as many as you like, in the end, but the first one will be the hardest.”
Jessica’s eyes sting with tears. “So what happened in college – it didn’t cause this?”
The Oracle turns her eyes upon her, but that gaze stares past her, through her. “No. There was no curse. It was mere coincidence. Go, now, before the time passes.”
Jessica’s knees hit the floor. She takes the Oracle’s hand – dry, smelling of smoke and salsa – and kisses it, thanking her through tears.
“You heard her,” cuts in the man’s voice, “Go on, now. Don’t waste it.”
Out the door, into the car, key twisting into the ignition. Back to the Taco Bell. She’s never been so hungry. She encounters no line, the order is out almost as soon as she reaches the window. Mouth thick with sour cream, one hand driving, one hand clutching the burrito like a lifeline.
She finds her husband still clocked in at his laptop. She casts it aside and fucks him right there on the couch. Crying out in animal pleasure, she thinks she hasn’t been this wet for months.
↜↝
The first pregnancy is hard, as predicted. The nausea for the first three months is so bad that her ribs start to show. Then the hunger returns, a ravenous desire for Crunchwrap after Crunchwrap. Her feet swell up in the last month, sticking her with needles all day and night.
The baby takes his time, on the inside and on his way out. But out he comes, sliding at last into waiting hands. Jessica weeps with joy as he is laid on her breast, his vernix caseosa thick and rich as sour cream.
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