AJ couldn’t find the office suite they were looking for. He slowed the car to a creep and squinted into the gathering dusk. Several of the building’s lights had burned out, making it tough to decipher the suite numbers. He circled the lot and returned for a second pass, nodding his head as his fiancé talked.

“I figure I’ll add some Sunday hours at the salon,” Irma said, blowing cigarette smoke out the car window. “Everyone’s being super generous, knowing the wedding is soon. So long as that keeps up, plus cutting back a little here and there, should make up for when we’re on honeymoon. Fingers crossed.”

She held up her free hand, the one not operating the cigarette, and crossed her fingers.

“And I’m planning on picking up extra shifts too,” AJ said, checking his app to confirm the suite number they needed. “Besides, people always give money at weddings. We could use some of that if things get tight.” 

“Hell no!” Irma said. “Wedding money is for commercial driving school. If things look tight, we can spend a few less days in Oahu. It’ll be worth it in the long run.” 

AJ’s grip tightened on the wheel.

Commercial driving school. He’d heard about long haul driving on a podcast, then done his research and liked what he heard. Good money. Open roads. No boss looming over his shoulder. Even the opportunity to own your own truck. But now he almost regretted telling Irma about it. She had this big, beautiful brain, that when put to a task couldn’t help but solve it. She’d found Dyson Driving Academy and got all the info. Payment plans. Registration deadlines. Job placement programs. For which he was grateful, without a doubt, and truly blessed to have such support. But now it seemed driving school was all Irma talked about. When he started commercial driver school. After he got his commercial driving license. The money he’d make and the opportunities that would create. A house. Kids. Maybe Irma going back to college. 

And like that, what had been just an idea became a major life decision.

“There it is!” AJ shouted, giving the horn a beep in celebration, thankful to be talking about anything other than commercial driving. He pulled into an empty stall and got out, waiting at the bumper while she discarded her cigarette. The suite they wanted was down an outdoor corridor, bracketed by waist high hedges and motion sensitive footpath lamps. A frog leapt from one of the hedges, crossing the walkway and vanishing into the other side.

MADGE BOYLE: FAMILY COUNSELOR, the suite door read. 

Beneath it, oddly, was a stencil of a mouth; no lips, no gums, just two rows of teeth, opened wide as if ready to chomp down. 

Most everyone they had talked to recommended pre-marriage counseling as part of their wedding prep. And after seeing what his parents had gone through, AJ didn’t think it was the worst idea. But neither he nor Irma were religious, nor did either of their health insurances cover “counseling.” But Madge Boyle had been cheap and had excellent Google reviews.

So here they were.

AJ pointed to the stenciled teeth and cocked an eyebrow. Irma shrugged and opened the door.

***

It struck Irma as odd that Madge Boyle’s office was only a single, square room. She’d been expecting a receptionist’s desk, some uncomfortable chairs, and maybe a fake ficus in the corner. Instead, strips of setting sun peeked through drawn blinds, the only light in the room other than a glowing salt rock. The leather couch, which Madge directed them to, faced a well-worn recliner. Stacks of books so tattered their spines had worn away surrounded the recliner, granting it the aura of a librarian’s throne. Just a glance revealed astronomical charts, sheet music, trashy romance novels, a pharmacist’s handbook, almanacs, and numerous bulging manilla folders. The walls were covered in all sorts of diplomas and accreditations, the bookshelves filled with random junk. A set of hand painted postcards from Florence, Venice, and Milan. Small human figures carved from wood. Multi-colored crystals and gems, each a different size and hue. A pair of candles shaped like crescent moons. Studying this collection of trinkets, Irma wondered if they were expensive or just exotic, and, if it were the former, how someone could waste money on such crap.

How loaded would I have to be to afford a rock collection, she wondered. 

Settling into her recliner, Madge popped the footrest and put herself at forty-five degrees. She had gaunt cheeks, terribly pale skin, and thin, white hair that seemed to glow in the ambiance of the salt rock. Off-colored blotches dotted her skin. Reading glasses thick as magnifying lenses hung from her neck. In her faded cardigan and boat shoes, she looked not like a doctor but a liberal arts professor gone to seed.

Again, not what Irma had been expecting.

“Don’t look so nervous,” Madge said, crossing her bony fingers over her belly. Blue veins crisscrossed her hands like exposed irrigation tubing. “Everyone gets shy as soon as they land on the couch. They think seeing a counselor is the same as being sent to the principal’s office. Like you’re going to get scolded. You’re paying me, remember? Wouldn’t do much good to scold the person paying me. More importantly, scolding wouldn’t help anyway. Most don’t react well to that sort of thing. It’s all a big power trip. Telling people what to do. That fixation’s too heavy for me. Gave it up a long time ago.”

Madge paused, and when neither AJ nor Irma said anything, she went on.

“Now, I’m famished, so let’s not beat around the bush,” she said, before shooting a hand up to her mouth, as if trying to catch the words before they escaped. “I mean, you’ve paid for an hour, and I’d like to maximize that time. What are we here for? Intimacy issues? Has someone stepped outside the marriage? Is there confusion about your relationship’s power dynamics?”

“We aren’t married yet,” Irma said, concerned that perhaps she’d read wrong and maybe Madge didn’t do pre-marriage counseling, and this whole session was going to be a waste of time and money. “We read counseling before the wedding is supposed to be helpful. And we both come from families that weren’t great at marriage, so we figured talking to a professional might help.”

A hungry twinkle came over Madge’s eyes. “Yes, of course, speaking with a professional could help any young marriage.” Leaning over the side of her recliner, she searched one stack of books, then another, in time pulling loose a manilla folder and withdrawing two slips of paper.

“Before we start, I need to know more about you,” Madge said, handing a questionnaire to each of them. “Your fears and your anxieties, as far as marriage goes.”

Irma took the questionnaires and handed AJ his copy. The paper felt brittle in her hands, as though it might crumble if handled too rough. And the questions on it were. . .odd. . .to say the least. Would you be attracted to your partner if they were a different sex? What sexual position do you dread the most? Would you hurt your partner if they asked you to? And it didn’t help when Irma noticed many of the certifications on the walls were for subjects like “Harmonic Frequency” and “Past Life Projection” accredited from places like the Institute of Fifth Universal Teachings or the Massachusetts Communal Collective. 

Despite her misgivings, Irma completed the form. 

They were paying for this, right? 

While AJ worked on his, Madge started talking again.

“You two aren’t the first to come to me for this type of thing. I’ve helped many couples over the years and almost all of them have been grateful for my assistance. Because marriage can be a scary thing. I remember my first marriage, and how nervous my husband was that first night…”

A strange smile overtook the aged doctor’s face, her pale, wrinkled cheeks contorting to accommodate the show of teeth. Her clouded eyes went slack, their focus disappearing into whatever memory she dwelled on. The smile, a hungry stretch of desire, widened, and Madge ran an absent-minded tongue over her teeth.

Irma looked to AJ, who looked just as uncomfortable as her. She hoped this old lady wasn’t talking about what it sounded like. 

“Those were delicious times,” Madge said, either not noticing their discomfort or not caring. Her eyes refocused on them. “So tell me how I can help? Or maybe we should start with some background. How’d you meet?”

“We met online. Seems to lead either to marriage or disaster, for us it was the former,” AJ said, volunteering to tell their story, as Irma had expected him to. She recognized this start well. It was how AJ always told their story. And there was no mistaking the pleasure he took in telling it. Irma found herself smiling as she listened to him, as she usually did. Though, to be honest, this wasn’t one of his better performances. He sounded distracted, the usual pop absent from his voice, and had to backtrack twice to get the details right. He started with the coffee shop where they’d met, then went on to describe how empty the place had been, how rude the clerk was, and how terrible the coffee had tasted. 

“Why’d you pick such a dive for us to meet at?” Irma asked, as she sometimes did at this juncture. 

“Some of the regulars at my bar recommended it,” AJ answered, well-rehearsed. “Probably should’ve been my first warning.”

From there, as usual, AJ told how it had been raining and Irma had been late, him thinking he’d been stood up. He went on, hitting the same notes as always, but as he did, AJ didn’t seem to notice a phone had started ringing. It had the distinct trill of a landline, and from its volume was close by. Irma glanced around, searching, expecting Madge to rise from her recliner and get it. But the doctor didn’t move. She looked absorbed by AJ’s story, nodding and laughing at all the right places. Left on her own, Irma checked for the phone first on the windowsill, then on the wall, then, following her ears, to the chair beside her. 

The ringing came from AJ, though he didn’t seem aware of it. 

As it rang, he kept chatting, now on to how shabby he’d been dressed for meeting his future wife, having discovered a hole in his sweater only once inside the coffee shop. But without a doubt, the ringing was coming from him. And not from his phone, which Irma could see peeking from his jeans pocket. No, the ringing came from him. More specifically, his chest, and deep inside it at that. Which Irma didn’t understand. And not knowing made her stomach clench. A sudden urge to reach for her fiancé, to touch AJ and make sure he was okay, swept over her.     

“Probably wasn’t the best first date,” AJ was saying. “But I guess it worked out pretty well.”

He reached for Irma’s hand and she squeezed back.

“That’s a beautiful story,” Madge said, pushing up from the recliner, wobbling slightly as she found her footing, using the arms of the recliner for assistance. She crossed the office, the phone trilling the whole time, and kneeled in front of AJ. “I mean, if I’m being honest, you hear one love story, you heard them all. But you told yours with such joy I couldn’t help but be delighted. But hush a minute, I have to take this call.”

With one hand she unbuttoned his shirt. Neither Irma nor AJ made any move to stop her, both watching as if transfixed. The ringing grew louder with each button undone, and, only once her fiancé’s chest had been exposed, did Irma notice the gleaming scissors in Madge’s free hand. And still, she made no move to stop the doctor, even as she parted AJ’s shirt and reached inside. Arm disappearing up to the elbow, Madge rooted around and reappeared holding a telephone receiver, its spiraling cord disappearing back inside AJ’s chest. 

Madge placed the receiver to her ear, saying nothing. On the other end Irma heard a faint voice, already mid-sentence.

“…can’t make any money. And what if I can’t do it? That’s a lot of truck. And all that time on the road. What if I flunk the tests? What if I have an accident?” it whispered, barely pausing between sentences. “It’s not just me now, it’s us. It’s not just me, it’s us. Us. Us. I have to do this for us, but what if I can’t? What if I’m not…”

Madge, her white hair blazing in the glare of the salt rock lamp, held out the phone to AJ.

“You know who this is?” she asked. 

He bobbed his head and stammered, “He keeps calling. And I keep picking up. Every time. I always pick up.”

“We always do,” Madge said. “But maybe this will help.”

With a theatrical flourish she snipped the phone cord. AJ’s breath caught, his eyes widening and his cheeks reddening. He exhaled and sunk into the couch. Taking a moment to make sure he was okay, Madge took the severed receiver and shuffled back to her seat. 

“Always grows back, but that’ll give you some peace for a time,” she said, settling into the recliner. Getting comfortable, Madge shifted this way and that, and once she found the right spot, she lifted the receiver to her face. Like a snake swallowing a larger prey, her mouth opened far wider than it should have been able to, her jaw dislocating with a crack as she shoved the receiver inside. The entire instrument disappeared behind a row of yellowing teeth and Madge’s mouth snapped shut. The doctor gulped as her throat bulged, and she smacked her lips and turned to Irma.

“You’re the one who booked this appointment, right?” Madge asked. A subtle change had overtaken the doctor’s appearance, her hair seeming to have thickened and gone from white to silver. Her voice sounded firmer, and Irma noticed the veins in her hands had receded back into the skin.

“You had excellent online reviews,” Irma stammered, at a loss to explain what she’d seen. Not just the change in Madge, but what she’d done with AJ. Discovering and severing the phone. The way her throat stretched. The look of satisfaction when she swallowed. Any one of those should have sent Irma running from the office as quick as she could. And yet she’d just remained there, sitting on the couch; not moving, not saying anything, not even batting an eye. A bizarre inertia kept her seated, almost like an invisible hand holding Irma steady, both physically and emotionally, while the doctor worked.  

“And you didn’t want to spend the money on a real therapist?” the doctor asked, arching an eyebrow that looked much fuller than it had a moment before.

Irma paused, surprised at the accusatory tone. 

“Our insurance wouldn’t cover it, and a wedding isn’t cheap,” she said.

Madge narrowed her eyes.

“Didn’t you start this whole appointment off saying how important counseling was? That you’ve both seen the harm a failed marriage can cause, and wanted to do everything in your power to avoid that?”

Irma didn’t know what to say.  

“Was that all bullshit?” Madge asked, a rosy flush coming to her cheeks. “Because if it really mattered as much as you say, I can’t imagine you’d let the price scare you off.”

Irma’s teeth snapped shut with annoyance. “If we want a half decent home, and a half decent future in that home, we have to be smart about how we spend our money.” 

Madge opened her mouth for a rebuttal but thought better of it. She turned to the bookshelf, hand lingering over the row of gems and crystals, moving first for the fat amethyst, then the peridot, before settling on a smooth, oval topaz. She handed it to Irma.

“Kiss it,” Madge said, puckering her lips. 

Thinking first about hurling the crystal across the office, Irma did as commanded, rolling her eyes as she planted a fat smooch on the side of the stone. The doctor took the topaz and examined it, bringing it close to her face, as if some message was encoded on the surface. What Madge found, she didn’t say, and after a few moments of study she palmed the topaz and brought it down hard on her knee. With a hollow pop it cracked across the middle. Madge pulled the stone apart, separating it along the center as if it were an egg, and Irma watched a rectangular paper, folded over in the middle, flutter onto her lap. 

Without understanding why, Irma’s chest tightened and her palms moistened. She shifted on the couch, straightening her legs and crossing them, then straightening them again. Leaning forward, she watched the doctor unfold the paper, her breath catching when she saw what it was.

“Three thousand dollars for plane tickets to Oahu,” Madge said, reading the receipt. She tsked. “And not even first class.”

The tightness in Irma’s chest became a painful squeeze. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get a breath. And neither AJ nor Madge gave any indication of noticing Irma’s struggle. He was watching the doctor, and Madge was reading the receipt, a rectangular slip that looked as if it came from a gas station cashier. They didn’t hear Irma gasp. Or see when she brought her hands to her throat. They were too absorbed watching the doctor rub her fingers at the paper’s edge, watching her pull loose another receipt stuck to the back of this one. 

Madge read it and her eyes went wide.

“Wedding dresses certainly have not gotten any cheaper,” the doctor said with a low whistle. Her fingers pawed at the paper’s edge and another receipt materialized behind this one. And then another, and another, and another. A receipt for a catering bill. For the rent on a salon booth. For a new bathing suit for a honeymoon. Irma knew what each of them were without having to read the receipt itself. On an instinctual level she recognized them by sight alone, knew the amount listed on each of them as well as she knew her own birthdate. $2,386.75. $1,150. $49.99. At the sight of them all her chest tightened, until the pressure became so great Irma thought her body might crack open from the strain. 

She wheezed and her vision wobbled, but still neither of them saw her.

Madge was at work with the receipts, stacking them together and folding them end over end, molding narrow flaps out of the flimsy paper. Once she had it the way she wanted, she reached over the side of her recliner and fetched a pen. Scribbling in the narrow flaps she’d created, the doctor folded the receipts a final time, forming an origami square with four distinct flaps and room beneath each for her fingers to fit. 

The doctor thrust the paper fortune teller in front of Irma.

“Pick a color,” Madge said, gesturing at the colors written on the flaps.

Chest aching, lungs crying for air, somehow Irma summoned the strength to tap the fortune teller.

“P U R P L E,’ Madge said, manipulating the fortune teller once for each letter. When finished, she held it out for Irma to choose between the exposed flaps. The doctor unfolded the chosen flap, smiled at what she’d written, and passed it to Irma.

“You only die once,” the fortune teller read. “Might as well die with all the stuff you need.”

Irma stared at the paper in her hands. The pressure loosened in her chest, and she inhaled a ragged breath.

“Keep that,” Madge said. “And listen to what it tells you.”

Without waiting for a response, Madge took both pieces of the topaz shell and slipped them into her mouth, licking her fingers when finished. 

She turned back to AJ.

“Have you finished with your questionnaire?” she asked, rising from her recliner with much greater ease than before. “You fill it with all the unsettling fantasies and worries that keep you up at night?”

Maybe it was that the light coming through the blinds had shifted, or that Irma’s eyes had finally adjusted to the dim room, but Madge looked different than when they first entered. What had been gaunt cheeks looked rounder, and tinged with a healthy, pink undertone. The veins on her bony hands were all but gone, as were the discolored blotches that had covered her skin. Even Madge’s eyes seemed to move with a renewed vigor, darting from AJ’s face to what he held in his hands, and back again. 

But it wasn’t a questionnaire he held. Gone was the brittle paper with its unsettling inquiries— cupped in his palms, was a muffin. Faint trails of steam rose off the golden-brown top, as if it had emerged moments ago from an oven. The delicious waft of fresh pastry filled Irma’s nose, and she looked down to find her questionnaire, formerly sitting on the couch beside her, had been replaced by a steaming muffin as well. 

“Oh, these look delicious!” Madge exclaimed, scooping up Irma’s first, then AJ’s, taking a healthy chomp from both. As she chewed, Irma couldn’t help but notice as the doctor’s hair steadily grew darker, patches of light brown sprouting around her temples. In only a handful of bites, Madge devoured her wares, and by the time she’d finished the wrinkles on her face had retreated to the edges of her eyes, and her little paunch of a belly had vanished too. 

Smacking her lips, Madge announced their appointment was over.

***

AJ waited until they were in the car to say anything.

“I don’t want to sound like a crazy person,” he paused and cleared his throat, watching his fiancé from the corner of his eye. “But did that shit really just happen?”

Irma had been looking at the paper fortune teller. She folded shut the flap she’d been studying and met his eye.

“You mean, did an old crone pull a landline out of your chest and then eat it? ‘Cause it sounds crazy, but yes.”

He laughed nervously and she joined him. 

“It was like I saw what was happening, and knew how insane it was, but couldn’t do anything,” he said. “Like I didn’t have the energy. Or the willpower.”

“But you feel better, right?” Irma asked, touching his arm. “I do. I mean, my thing wasn’t as invasive as yours. But I feel better after it.”

AJ did too. He felt lighter, and his mind clearer. Like a burden had been lifted from him.  

“Not like any counseling I ever heard of,” he said, shaking his head.

“More like getting our palms read,” Irma said, stuffing the fortune teller in her pocket.

“But somehow less clear.”

They laughed again.

“Well, at least we can check pre-marriage counseling off the list,” AJ said.

“One step closer to the big day.” Irma reached for his hand. “Can’t wait.”

He couldn’t agree more.

Garner Presser is an author of speculative fiction living in Las Vegas, NV with his fantastically supportive family. To read more of his work, please visit garnerpresser.com.