Out of the blue, Granny Grozna showed up

Out of the blue, Granny Grozna showed up at Amanda's place. Amanda should have known this day would come, but she didn't expect the black chicken and bag of onions. Tarot had been

lord honey! make me some fried chicken!" Amanda stared around the shotgun shack holding her bag of onions. Who was this old woman? How did I get here? The black hen clucked.

CLUCK. CLUCK. CLUCK. Then all of the sudden Amanda found herself standing at the foot of a totem pole. It was cold, freezing, &...was that...an Eskimo? The black hen clucked again.

Naw couldn't be. Eskimos didn't usually come this far south. But there he stood looking as bewildered as I felt, surrounded by tall cedars with the sun barely peeking through

. Then he handed me a herring. "It's a herring," he husked hoarsely. He climbed back onto the pile of furs on his sled, whipped his huskies and disappeared. I never saw that Eskimo

again because I became snowblind soon after. I crawled back inside my igloo to contact my spirit guide. That night I dreamt I was trapped within the antlers of two dead caribou,

as my future children dueled with icepicks along the edge of the floe. Though I kept calling to them, they paid me no heed. I'd never had such a startling dream vision, and in

retrospect, I realized that it was time to make some changes that were long overdue. For one thing, I needed to move somewhere warmer. MUCH warmer. My future children in the dream

were simply that: a dream. Just like the wife, the job, the stable life. So I clenched my fist around the cash, limped over the dead clerk, and then drove south, never to return.