“It’s bright red.”

“Maybe it’s my high blood pressure. Ask me how come, I’ll tell you.”

“Your aura should be mostly blue. Yours is orangy red, Big, and way too wide. Doesn’t it hurt?”

“Only when you bring it up,” Bob Gibbs said.

Then she might get a scared look, eyes rolling up into her head before they closed and opened again and she’d say, in her squeaky little colored-girl voice, “She keep telling you, Judge, what you doing to yourself. She must’ve did a hundred times, you still don’t never listen.”

Sometimes he’d tell her, “Now quit that.” Or he’d snap at her, “What’re you talking to me like that for?”

Leanne might look surprised and say to him in her own voice, “Like what?” Claiming she had no idea what he was talking about. If someone had spoken to him, it was this other person occupying her body.

That was the first year or so of their marriage. Now Leanne claimed she could be present while the other person spoke, the other person occupying only her invisible etheric body, her spiritual self. See, while she remained in her actual body.

The one putting on weight.

Going on seven years of this, since the day she had her Experience.

The way Leanne thought of it, it began just after one in the afternoon of a gorgeous day.

She remembered rising from the underwater chamber behind the screen of air bubbles, their curtain for the show, and seeing the surface of the spring above shimmering in bright sunlight. She remembered flashes going off inside the glass front of the theater, families on vacation with cameras and little girls who wanted to be mermaids. She believed this was the way spirits might see our world, like looking at us through sparkly water and glass from over on the other side.

She remembered they were doing the magic show that day, one of the Kims working dry, playing the theme music and doing the narration topside.