(A Fiesta 10/13)
In movies, a flash-frame shot indicates a fleeting memory, a nail-splitting grasping and clinging to the jagged cliff of misted meaning as perception and cognition crash. Intangible. Then gone. The receding light, like a flashbulb, like the turning off an old tube TV, the falling away of a memory unkept.
Jennifer O’Neil has these flashes. A taxi. An renaissance painting. An old magazine. All without context or trigger, she’s left to solve a mystery without knowing the crime, who the suspects are and what the flashes even mean. Are the flashes just the lies of manipulated emotions? Quark-sized hallucinations?
Often, We’all will experience these rubbed-eye flashes. Not exactly memories or pictures or smells or words, but emotions. Short, sharp, shocked emotional pain as Michelle might say. Like a giallo, The Twitch of The Death Nerve. A single, long acupuncture ambush. The sustain of a single guitar note. The one second after you drop the baby. The second before an unstoppable collision. The second after you cough so hard, you can’t breathe.
No discernible trigger, only the churn of an inscrutable brain spitting chemicals. The emotional pain winded, but the white light receding residue lingers and settles. If only, our face could, like a Lovecraft monster, cleave open and our inside brainworks could spill out, coagulate, and manifest for others to see and understand. For us to understand. The weird emotions physical. Tangible.
With a mixture of curiosity and fear and the pull of the strange, O’Neill’s unique mystery becomes compulsory. Twisty & tightly-wound, sadly with a Black Cat resolution, The Psychic only stalls at the very end.
Do Y’all have psychic flashes? Or are they random images, smells, etc with a context you can’t discern. How much time do y’all spend trying to tie up all those flashes? What grooves and connections do y’all create to understand the chaos? Is the narrative driven by the connections?
As it’s our reaction to the world that defines character.
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