026

The words had barely left her mouth and already she wished they could be taken back. Not that this was an unusual thing for Josie to want, she had had her share of awkward moments. In fact, ever since she was a little girl Josie had managed to say not the wrong things, but the right things moments too soon. Her family thought she just didn’t pay enough attention to the way things worked and therefore hadn’t the social graces necessary for polite conversation. Her friends thought she paid a little too much attention.

Josie had the knack for guessing exactly what people would say before they had even thought about saying anything at all. At least that’s what they said. Instead the truth, as it happens, was just a little bit weirder. Josie didn’t guess what people would say. She was positively horrible at guessing and was far from being one of those intelligent types that can calculate the probability of something happening and make assumptions based on it. Assumptions that seem like eerie guesswork. No. Josie simply heard what was said before it was said at all. Her body and mind lived in the present, but her ears seemed to hear the future. Not the distant future, she could not hear something a few hours ahead. Her talent made her hear all things minutes before they were said. This had generated quite a bit of confusion.

This particular morning Josie had been bickering with her colleague at work, Sam, about the amount of changes he expected her to make (by noon) to her piece on the origins of human settlements in remote areas of the globe. They had already finished arguing and Sam was about to get on the phone with his wife when Josie had said it. One little sentence that would eventually get her an appointment with the company’s physiologist.

-“I’m not you honey and stop saying you love me”.

Josie had long since learned to cope with her “ability” to hear the future, and could usually force herself to answer in the present questions that she had heard in the past (but were actually the future). Unfortunately she wasn’t very good at it when she got excited over something. Having to re-write twenty information-laden pages, written over a period of three months, in less than an hour had definitely gotten her excited. She had controlled herself splendidly as she tried to find logical reasonings with which to support her point of view on the subject. That is, until she lost the argument and let her ears snap to the future where Sam told his wife he loved her before hanging up the phone. You’d be hard-pressed in trying to explain that to even the most open minded of mental health professionals.

Maria, the company’s physiologist, was a stout, middle-aged, latin woman that had a mouth like a toad and a face to match. She had the habit of biting on the corner of a red-tipped felt pen top as her patients talked. Also, she was definitely not open-minded.