I must thank my wife for providing the title and plot device for this story. I don’t know the context of when or how she said it, but I have a note file on my phone where I keep story ideas, and I came across this one that just said “Psychic Farts — From Amy” on it, so at some point it must have been hers. I appreciate the inspiration. The story went to a weird place, but I hope she feels it did the concept justice.
Psychic Farts
You start to have premonitions, and those premonitions come true. The first one hits while you are finishing up a lunch of homemade three-bean chili your mother dropped off, with saltines crumbled up in it for texture and a cut up apple on the side. As you are scraping the last spoonful of chili juice from the side of the bowl, you get a vivid, waking hallucination—no other way to describe it—of your neighbor getting rear-ended as he pulls out of his driveway by a pimply teenager in a Jeep Wrangler.
That evening, you step out onto your porch to grab an Amazon package, look up to see your neighbor pulling out of his driveway, and recognize that it is the exact same instant as the premonition you had. His clothes and hair are the same. His eyes flick down to his phone and off the rearview mirror in exactly the same way. You look to your left in the street and see the same Jeep with the same pimply teenager behind the wheel, also looking down at his phone.
“Hey!” you yell, throwing up your arms and stepping down off of your porch and onto the stone pathway that runs beside your yard to connect your front door with your driveway. “Hey!”
Your neighbor looks up from his phone and sees you coming towards him. He touches his brake. The teenager in the Jeep still doesn’t see him, but his straight-line path now happens to take him just far enough into the street that he misses hitting your neighbor by a couple of inches.
“…up, Neighbor? Everything all right?” says your neighbor, who starts to speak before his window even starts to retract, clipping off the beginning of his greeting.
“I… left something cooking inside. It’s burning. I mean, it’s going to burn. I mean, sorry excuse me.” You continue stammering as you back inside your house and shut the door. Your confused neighbor takes his foot off the brake, looks back down at his phone with a shake of his head, and drives off into the gathering night.
You, however, are affected deeply by this experience You didn’t save his life, but you prevented injury and property damage, and more importantly you just baseline changed the future by being aware of it and acting to prevent an outcome that was otherwise assured. You wonder what it means, and go to church for the first time since high school with your parents, and talk to a counselor who volunteers at the local YMCA, but she can’t quite appreciate how real it was, how vital, how impossible that it was just a trick of your mind.
The second time it happens you are waiting for a job interview to start. You’re applying to work as an apprentice assessor of water quality for the state’s Department of Ecology. You’re 29 years old and finally getting really sick and tired of figuring out (or more to the point, not figuring out) what you really want to do—what you describe sarcastically in conversation with similarly directionless friends as “my passion”—except that you know you want to make enough money not to worry and not have to think about work when you’re not there, and the two people you know who work for the state both say a state job does that, although both hate their jobs and tried to discourage you from applying.
But so you’re there, and you’re nervous, not because you’re even sure you want this job but because the idea of talking to strangers and having to answer questions about yourself fills you with dread even if the stakes are low. You keep feeling like you need to use the bathroom, and getting up and going in there but being unable to actually use it, and you start to have anxiety about whether you’re going to have to excuse yourself once the actual interview starts.
Then, while walking back from the bathroom for what you pray is the last time at this location, you pass a balding, middle-aged white man in the hallway, and you get a flash of him walking down the street, viewed from high above, wearing the same clothes he has on when you pass him, and bumping into a black woman about his same age, wearing a smart pantsuit, and you know in your soul that those two are going to fall in love and get married.
But what can you do? You literally cannot just make yourself blurt out that he should look out for his soul mate that day, and unlike with the car accident, there’s nothing bad to prevent, so you let him walk away and go back, and you’re so distracted that your anxiety disappears and you sit and perseverate on the vision until they call you in for the interview.
You sit in the interview and do your best to answer the inane questions that only regurgitate the answers you already gave in your application, across from a particularly uninspired and bureaucratic question-asker who makes you want to leap out the window of her office and fly away and never return.
That thought makes you glance out the window, and you see the balding man walking down the street, and you realize that the high-angle from this window is exactly the one from your vision, and you stand up in the middle of the interview without realizing what you’re doing to watch. You see the black woman approach him. But then, in the moment when they should bump and meet, instead he steps aside and lets her pass, and they walk away from each other without speaking. You start pounding on the window, unable to stop yourself, and yelling at them to turn back although of course they can’t hear you through the thick glass and wouldn’t listen if they could.
Suffice it to say, you don’t get the job, and the moment you exit the office you think about the paucity of your bank account and how you only have a month’s rent left in savings and actually you quite badly needed this job you don’t want and there was no reason not to want it since there’s nothing else you can do that you even fantasize about feeling more fulfilled by, and now you’ve squandered the opportunity to secure your financial future because you were yelling at strangers out a window.
You worry that you may be delusional, but therapy is expensive and despite having some kind of insurance through the exchanges, the process of actually figuring out how to start therapy and the possibility of copays bankrupting you and the humiliation of not even being able to pay the tiny share that your poor people insurance demands of you all feels overwhelming, and so you buy a box of the cheapest wine imaginable instead and get drunk in your apartment.
The next morning, you wake up with an insane, pulse-pounding-in-forehead hangover, immediately go throw up, and then get a rush of motivation and decide you’re going to go out for a walk to start your new life of mental health and self-care. But then on the walk you get a sudden attack of hangover-tummy and have to sneak into the corner brunch place past a long line of diners awaiting seats and absolutely destroy their bathroom.
On the way out, still hurting in the stomach but unable to justify monopolizing their single bathroom any longer, now intent on going straight back home for sixteen to eighteen hours more sleep, it happens a third time. You get a vivid image of a man alone in the same bathroom you just blew up, choking on a bite of food until he turns blue and keels over dead. You see that same man stand up from a table across the restaurant and hurry towards the bathroom. You follow him there, arrive just after he’s shut the door, and knock, but there is silence inside. You pound on the door, attracting attention from other diners and eventually from the manager, who tells you to leave, but you dodge past his guiding hand and throw your entire body weight against the door, splintering the lock and flinging it open to find the man face down, on the floor, blue but not yet unconscious, and the manager gives him the Heimlich and pops an oversized bite of veal piccata sandwich onto the bathroom tile.
You lie that you saw the man choking as he headed for the bathroom, deflect the thanks from both him and his crying wife, decline the offer of a free meal, and leave as fast as possible, anxious to get home where your gurgling stomach is unable to betray you.
It happens again after a birthday party at which you eat some dodgy shrimp cocktail, and in the Lyft on the way home you prevent your driver from plowing into a mentally ill homeless man who steps off the street in front of the car.
In between these occurrences, the fact that they are so rare starts to bother you. You find yourself going to crowded public spaces in your copious unemployment-based anxious leisure, looking around at the strangers and trying to receive a vision. Surely, you think, there are more people whose lives are going to be changed in your vicinity than one every couple of weeks. Surely it should be happening often.
Then you get the flu. On your way to the doctor’s office, wearing a mask on a crowded bus, trying unsuccessfully to suppress the flatulence that you really hope is just gas every time it wants to come out, you get a vision of the tiny hispanic woman currently sitting across from you. In the vision, she is cleaning a hotel room, and she finds a wallet stuffed with cash under the bed. She pockets the wallet rather than reporting it, and you know in the vision that her decision to do so will result in her firing, which will result in her eventual deportation back to Guatemala. So you look up how to say “return the wallet” in Spanish on your phone, and you get her attention, and say it to her repeatedly. She stares at you and calls you crazy, but you know that later, when she finds the wallet, she will remember this moment, and perhaps change her mind about what to do with it.
Suddenly, it hits you.
“Oh my God,” you say out loud, causing everyone on the bus to stare at you even harder and more suspiciously, “it happens when I fart!”
***
You are on the verge of committing to going to the grocery store to buy beans, to try to give yourself the farts. You are standing in a checkout aisle, buying them, not buying anything else because you really can’t afford another dollar, but going to buy the beans because they’re a reliable cause of intestinal gas because of your typically insufficient amount of dietary fiber, buying them because you just can’t not buy them, you can’t know you have this power and possibly be able to save or change people’s lives but not do it because it’s humiliating and painful.
So you buy beans. And you eat them at home, an entire can of chili beans, and you sit there and wait and sure enough two hours later your stomach hurts until it cramps and you pump out cut of cheese after cut of cheese, until you are groaning with each emission.
Nothing happens. You have no visions, no premonitions, no magic. It occurs to you not for the first time that you may be insane, or in some kind of coma, or in purgatory, but it’s too late to back out at that point from another two to three hours of gastrointestinal distress. It occurs to you for the first time that perhaps the problem is that you’re alone in your apartment, whereas when visions had come before you’d always been near the person about whom you had the vision. There are upstairs and downstairs neighbors, but you can’t see them, and since you really have no idea how the magic works, it would probably be best to go out in public.
You put on two pairs of underwear and swim trunks under a bulky pair of sweats, just in case, then go to the local mall and walk around the concourse. It’s Saturday afternoon, so there’s a crowd. You alternately focus your mind on trying to have a vision and try to think about something else. You run a dozen other experiments where you change something and then fart to try to initiate a vision, and you run to the bathroom a couple of times to check for spills, but nothing comes.
Of course, it’s likely that there’s just nothing life-changing happening at the mall that day. Most days at most malls, nobody falls and dies or meets their soul mate, people just buy sweaters and eat pretzels and then go home. And when that occurs to you, you wonder if perhaps your farts are actually causing these things to happen, like would that guy have choked in the bathroom if you hadn’t been there and seen it? Are your gut biscuits dangerous?
You hurry home with that thought chasing you, but you eat another can of beans and return the next day, and the next. A week goes by with you spending three to four very uncomfortable hours walking around the mall each day. You try to stop doing it. You try to search for jobs and fill out applications, but it feels irresponsible, as if you have some mission you’d be giving up on. Your body adjusts to eating a can of beans a day, and so you go buy some laxatives instead, and only after buying them do you realize that the purchase put your bank account balance below the number that you needed for your rent check not to bounce, and you now have less than a week until you are officially behind on rent. But, by then you have the Immodium, and you didn’t save your receipt so there’s no returning it, so instead you take a double dose and head to the mall. You wreck their toilet, then sit on a bench and try to bottom burp without exploding inside your doubled-up underwear.
“You’re from the restaurant,” says a bass-heavy, authoritative voice from behind you. “You saved the guy who was chokin’ in the bathroom.”
You turn and see Joe Picophine, whose name you do not yet know but which you have heard before on the local news. He’s a union leader—purportedly a laborer but with uncallused hands—and overall tough guy who wears a lot of leather jackets and has extensive interests in illegal gambling and other vice crimes in the region.
“I saw what happened,” Joe goes on. He doesn’t have a Jersey accent but he talks like he wants to have one, like he patterned himself so thoroughly on movies about wise guys that he internalized their mannerisms without actually doing an impersonation. “You came in with that ‘I-gotta-take-a-shit” look on your face and went and did your dirty work the second you walked in. We was laughin’ about it. So I get why you didn’t wanna stick around, but still, you saved that fuckin’ guy’s life, you shoulda got some dough or somethin’ for it.”
“I guess,” you say, the fear of him momentarily pushing back the discomfort. “I didn’t even think about money.”
“Two rules in life, Kid. Number one, always remember to get the money. Number two, never forget to always remember to get the money. How’d you know he was in there dyin’, anyway?”
“I saw him head for the bathroom and I could see he was freaking out,” you lie. “It just—“
“Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Kid,” he interrupts, friendly but dangerous, “I said I seen you. You weren’t even lookin’ at him. I didn’t just happen to find you here, I hired a P.I. to track you down. How’d you know?”
You stare at him for what feels like a half-hour but is probably five seconds or so. You literally don’t know what to say but the truth. There’s no lie that even makes it make sense. You slowly open your mouth, and it suddenly strikes you, really seriously, that you’re nuts and you’ve been shitting in a mall bathroom all week for no good reason, that even the local news gangster standing in front of you now isn’t real, you didn’t save any lives, you didn’t—
You’re so checked out that you aren’t controlling your pelvic floor for a moment, and a giant ass blast escapes, hardly muffled at all by the layers of underwear. Joe scrunches his nose up and blanches a little. He holds up his hands, and you see he’s got a gold Rolex on his left wrist, incredibly shiny and polished and expensive-looking.
“Fuck’s sake, I’m not gonna hurt ya. If you got some kinda psychic shit goin’ on, I need your help. I think somebody’s tryin’ to—“
Then it hits. A vision. You see the exact same view of Joe that you have now, exact same outfit, even the slightly greying hairs on his head in exactly the same relative position as they are in your waking vision. Then a single shot rings out, and a bullet passes clean through Joe’s neck, severing his spine and sending the light of life instantly out of his eyes. He is dead before his knees even hit the ground.
You return to your waking mind and see the same view, the same moment, already here with no delay.
“—kill me,” Joe finishes.
“Get down!” You scream at him and something in your eyes must be wild and convincing because Joe drops like a stone, just as a shot rings out from behind him. It passes so close over his head that it shaves away a lock of his greying hair, and you watch the hair for an endless moment, held aloft by some invisible air current thrown up by the mall’s climate control system.
Then the bullet ricochet’s off the tile floor and buries itself in a fake plant beside a coin-filled fountain, and screams of the mall’s other patrons crash over you, and you drop to the floor yourself. Joe has sought cover behind a stone bench, and with him out of the line of fire there are no more shots, but rather footsteps of retreat and shouts for the police, and you glimpse a ski mask on a running figure before it disappears out the mall’s front doors.
You crawl over to Joe, who is unhurt, sitting with his back against the stone bench, panting and trying to control his breath. He takes out a cigarette, offers you one which you decline, then lights one for himself.
“Can I have some money?” you ask. “Rules one and two and all that.”
“You’re hired, Kid.”
***
“You should learn to fart on command.”
It’s been two weeks in Joe’s employ. You’ve earned more money than you did in the year previous to that. You’ve saved Joe’s life one additional time, when his enemies shot at him from a moving car. You’ve also helped him avoid arrest once by identifying an undercover cop in time for him to avoid doing a drug deal with the guy. Joe has given you two raises and intends to employ you forever.
You expected that Joe would have trouble believing it, but instead, it seems to make perfect sense to him.
“Fartin’s a powerful thing,” he said after a couple of drinks one night. “It’s a powerful release, lots of chemicals go in your brain, so it makes sense it could do this.” You certainly don’t see sense in it, but you want to get at least a couple months he’d on rent for the first time in your life, and at the rate he’s paying now, you’ll be there pretty soon.
Your stomach, however has made other plans. After fourteen days of medicated farting and diarrhea, you are dehydrated and chafed, with newly formed hemorrhoids dotting your rectum. You know that you can’t go on like this. But when you tell Joe that, he treats it as a problem to be solved rather than an inconvenient reality.
“I don’t know how to do it, but I seen videos on the internet, guys can suck air up their butts and shoot it back out, they can fart a hundred times in a row. Shit, it’ll probably be an olympic sport in a few more years, the way this fuckin’ country’s goin’.”
As so often when Joe talks, he seems obviously ridiculous, yet it’s hard to actually articulate why he’s obviously wrong, so you go home and look up some internet videos, and discover that it’s not actually all that hard to spread your own butt cheeks and let air seep into them, then expel it in a very convincing fart. You practice for a couple of days and soon you can do it from a prone, sitting, or standing position reliably in just a few seconds.
Joe devises a test of whether it counts as an actual fart for clairvoyant purposes. He has one of his trusted men point a loaded gun at him, and assigns him to pull the trigger at a certain moment in time. Then sixty seconds before that time, he tells her to fart, and you cut a real mean one while staring him dead in the eyes. You think there’s no way, but you actually do have a vision of it happening, and when you come back to reality, Joe is staring at you with visible excitement on his face.
So now you start following this small-time hood around town, going to meetings with other small-time hoods and eating in hole-in-the-wall Italian joints and farting before everything to make sure Joe is going to be okay. It pays well and you can look at your phone or do whatever you want the rest of the time, but it just feels weird that this is what your life has become.
A few weeks more and it goes from weird to terrible and soul-sucking. You’ve finally found your niche, the rent is paid, you are thinking of buying a car, and all you can feel is exploited and guilty in turns. You feel you’ve been given a great gift, and you’re squandering it protecting, while perhaps not the worst person in the world, certainly not someone deserving of special protection.
Meanwhile, Joe starts moving up in the world. He feels confident to confront enemies and take on new partners because you make him untouchable. You want to quit, but the look in his eyes says in no uncertain terms that such a move would be futile. He’d rather see you dead. Speaking of which, you start to wonder if you can have a farting vision of yourself, if danger or opportunity presents itself. Would you know if Joe was going to kill you? What would you do if you did?
Joe isn’t brilliant but has animal cunning, and he sees that you’re becoming dissatisfied. He showers you with gifts, and also glowers in your direction if you don’t display proper gratitude and enthusiasm for them. A month goes by like this, then another, and either Joe kills whoever was trying to kill him but doesn’t tell you, or whoever was trying to kill him thinks better of it and gives up, because there’s no further attempts on his life.
You hope that this will cause Joe to be more okay with letting you leave, but instead his paranoia increases and he becomes more attached to your presence. He starts hinting that you should move into his house and let your apartment go, so you can wake up during the night and fart to make sure there is nobody about to break in.
On your occasional hours off, you start walking by pawn shops and gun stores to look at pistols, especially ones small enough to be hidden. You feel like a slave now, one who would be well justified in killing your master, but you can’t actually make yourself pick up a weapon and do it. You go to a gun range and practice shooting a pistol, and try to imagine that the little paper target is mean old Joe, who does occasionally at this point go places with you as his only bodyguard and would thus be vulnerable to a sneak attack, but you can’t see yourself shooting him. Not even as a premonition, you just can’t imagine shooting him or anyone.
Soon Joe is monopolizing every waking moment that you have. You are sleeping in his spare bedroom and setting alarms three times a night for preventative farting and you’re exhausted from the lack of REM sleep but Joe won’t listen to reason and you’re too afraid of him to insist. You know you can’t buy a gun, and poison is out for the same reason. You’re stuck.
You begin to wonder what you did to deserve this. You talk to God, in whom you are not sure you believe although it has seemed more likely since all this shit started, as you explain one of the first times you really pray. You cultivate a seething resentment against Joe, who is getting richer and richer with the new deals he’s doing now that he feels fully protected. He buys a completely cherry Pontiac GTO, a 2005 edition, which he won’t shut up about even though you’ve never expressed the slightest interest in cars. He starts leaving his other bodyguards at home more often, just traveling with you and what he now casually refers to as your “magic ass”.
Joe becomes more possessive, more controlling. He demands that you stop farting entirely except to serve his needs. You try to explain that’s impossible, but he’s so resolute that you finally agree and lie to him that all your farts are his.
This is all to say that you’ve been pushed pretty far when you finally return to the mall with him, where he takes a meeting with a drug distributor from the next state over who your flatulence assured him was not an informant for the FBI. Before you leave the premises, Joe tells you to fart-check again, so you obediently suck some air up your ass and then expel it with a minimal poot.
Instantly, you snap into a vision. You see Joe, wearing exactly the same outfit he’s wearing that day, shot twice through the gut, dead on the floor right outside the bathroom of this very mall. A familiar man in a ski mask is running away from him, pistol still in his hand. Joe is dead.
You snap back to reality to see Joe looking at you in horror.
“What?” he snaps at you. “What’d you see?”
You think for a long moment. What could this mean? Before you’d always seen something actually happening, whereas this vision was after something had already happened. And why would Joe even be over near the bathroom in the first place, when he—
Then it hits you. You realize exactly what this is. You wondered if these visions could protect you as well as others. You just never thought it could be like this.
“I shit myself,” you say. “It just happened. I have to go to the bathroom.”
“No vision?” Joe looks annoyed. It’s been a while since you saw anything, and he’s apparently feeling antsy to see the magic again.
“No,” you say, putting a guilty and disappointed spin on your tone as you turn and head for the bathroom. You walk with exaggerated steps, as if avoiding squishing what’s in your pants any further with an awkward step.
“I’ll wait here,” says Joe when you arrive at the bathroom, and takes up a position outside the door, exactly where he’d been standing in your premonition.
“I’ll fucking bet you will,” you think to yourself as you enter the bathroom. You go inside a stall but just stand there, listening, waiting. It’s only a few seconds before Joe yells and then two shots ring out, just as you’d known they would, just as you’d walked Joe into position for them to do. A thud as Joe falls to the floor, and then footsteps and screams as his attacker flees the scene.
You hurry out of the stall and exit the bathroom, walking into the exact same image that you envisioned earlier. The sense of creepy deja vu is still with you, as it is every time, as you see Joe’s body on the floor, twisted up and gut shot, already dead. You feel guilt, but only a little considering. You’ll feel more later, when the shock wears off, but only a little and only for a little while.
You stoop down and relieve Joe of the roll of cash he always carried in his breast pocket. You slip the gold Rolex off his wrist. You filch the key to the Pontiac GTO from his pants. Before the sirens are even in the parking lot, you’re in the car and on your way out, out of town, out of the state, out of your old life, scared as hell but gratefully away from the state job and the bodyguard gig and the apartment where your stomach hurt so bad for so long.
Where are you really going? Like really really going? You have no idea. But you’ve got eight grand in cash, a really nice watch, a cherry Pontiac GTO, and a sphincter that can see the future. The sky’s the limit.
END
Thanks as always for reading that unexpectedly long and rather scategorical story! If you enjoyed this read, please feel free to like, comment, or share with others. Hope everyone has a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday morning with something fun. :)
what a merry mix that is!!
Too funny! Another good one!