A Stroke Of Magic by Tracy Madison Page B

glance at the clock changed my mind. While my grandmother often stayed up late, Vinny was always in bed early. He’d had a heart attack not that long ago, and I didn’t want to disturb him. But, dear God, I wanted answers.
    Now that several hours had passed, I’d begun to doubt what I’d seen. What I’d experienced. Maybe I had fallen asleep and dreamed the entire episode. But then, just like before, I saw the rose petal now sitting on my coffee table. I picked it up again, holding it between my thumb and index finger. How could it feel so normal? You’d think something appearing out of thin air—on the heels of a ghostly woman—would somehow feel different. But it just didn’t.
    It bothered me, and not just because of how it had appeared, but because in the several hours since it had showed up, it hadn’t changed. Fresh and soft, supple even, as if it had been plucked from a rose mere seconds earlier and wasn’t several hours old. All things being normal, it should have been drying out by now, the edges curling up, the texture becoming brittle. But it wasn’t. Not that any of this was normal, but this one little detail bugged the hell out of me.
    I sat on the couch, tucking my legs underneath me, resting my head on the cushion, not really lying down but not fully sitting up, either. My finger and thumb still pinched the petal, so I dropped it into the palm of my other hand. Deep red against the pale white of my skin, it stood out, and as I watched, it seemed to lose shape until it was no longer the petal from a rose. It pooled in my palm, warm and liquid, then spread, easing into the creases between my fingers, slipping through to drip onto my denim-covered legs in a plop. Then another. Like the soft sound of a slow rain against a window.
    Plop. Plop. Plop.
    The color changed from red to dark purple as it oozed into my jeans, merging with the blue fabric. This, whatever this was, felt familiar. Anger came first, then sadness, and together, they became an empty, clawing pit of emotion that I’d never before experienced yet somehow recognized. I closed my hand into a fist, the warm stickiness of the melted petal against my skin.
    Pain came, sudden and swift, down the center of my palm. Opening my hand, I saw a cut from the bottom of my thumb that stretched diagonally across, meeting my little finger. Not deep. Not jagged. But enough of an injury to explain blood. My arms trembled and my stomach sloshed.
    I tried to swallow the sickness away, to no avail. Again, I noticed the stickiness on my palm, and a tremor of fear skittered in. What was happening? Why was it happening? My brain shifted through all of the various possibilities, trying to piece it together, trying to make sense of it all. The room dipped and twirled around me; the walls elongated and stretched, morphing themselves into another shape, another place. Oh, God. Another time. Don’t ask me how I knew this, because I can’t say. I just knew.
    With a sudden yank, it was as if I separated from myself, as if two parts of a whole were split down the middle and pulled apart. One and the same, but not. I floated upward, and weirdly it seemed I was in two places at once: hovering in an unknown space, and also sitting below me, directly within my view.
    The pain in my hand disappeared, and when I looked, the injury was gone. I wanted to believe this was the dream. This wasn’t happening. But it was too real, and it was happening, to me and to the woman below me, who sat on the ground, in a tentlike shelter, with just enough light to see her clearly.
    In the space of two heartbeats, I knew she wasn’t me. “Miranda,” I whispered. Her hands, which had been slowly rubbing her rounded belly, stilled, as if she’d heard my voice. “Miranda?” I said again. “Can you hear me?”
    Long dark hair hung loose, flowing around her face like water. She tipped her head up, gaze searching, shoulders shaking. Lightning flashed bright and hot in her eyes as they