After my sister predicted our parents’ deaths, it became clear that she was anything but a normal ten-year-old. Using wax crayons, Anna painted a picture where my mother’s face was beaded with blood, her body coated in lacerations. On the left side, she painted a pair of shoes along with a conflagration of a car spewing flames. She said something sad was going to happen.

           

On my fifth birthday, a week later, the Sheriff’s Homicide Bureau and Los Angeles County Coroner’s Department officials shut down a stretch of Angeles Crest Highway to investigate the discovery of my mother’s dead body. No one could tell whether she was pushed or jumped out of the vehicle. My father’s face was described as “burned beyond recognition.” His car was found five hundred feet down the ravine near mile marker 46.5. It had spun out of control, drove off the side of the highway, landed in heavy brush, and exploded in flames.

           

Life in the United States was what my Greek-German grandfather did not wish for us most of all. He brought us to Europe, expecting me to outgrow the sense of sadness that had overwhelmed me. We spent our formative years in Uhlbach, near Stuttgart, where on certain summer days the sunlight angled down on the vineyards, dissolving into startling patches of an endless green fairness that left me numb. My parents were more present there than they had been anywhere else, and I struggled to locate a crack that would permit me to flee from reality.

           

I didn’t know what surprised me more at the time: the depth of my pain after our move to Germany or my sister’s willingness to forget them before the roses on their graves had withered.

           

Anna became a different person altogether. She was perversely proud of her power to predict the future. She mistook her ability to know how a story would end with the possibility of avoiding an average life. Her eyes narrowed, lightless and unfeeling, each time she was proved right. She spoke in a supercilious voice, as if she were an angel because she didn’t lose her patience with us.

           

Anna did not have faith in human character. She believed in plot points. Feelings could make no impression on a soul absorbed in predicting the events that spun one’s life around in new directions.

           

 

 

 

            FLOATERS      

    World Literature Today, United States, March 2014

 

Anna is a self-hating Greek-American psychic working for the German secret service. Her assignment? Travel to crisis-ravaged Greece and save people from suicide.