Why I am Psychic - Flash Fiction
Updated: Sep 20
A humorous flash fiction story about coincidence and belief. In “Why I Am Psychic,” Greg Luti follows a skeptical tutor who waves off psychics and astrology, then finds himself facing a student who is convinced he already knew what she was going to say.
I don’t believe in psychics.
I am not the type of guy who is interested in any of that new-age bs you hear from amateurs on social media who can barely keep a job. No thanks, is what I say when I hear of them predicting the future with their so-called knowledge. I can predict the future too and be wrong about it just as much as they are, and nobody calls me psychic.
I don’t go for astrology and any of that stuff either, where the gift of one individual is able to see that unseen world, as I am worried it is against the policies of a certain guy, a certain carpenter from a long time ago. If he may not like it, then I am not sure I should either.
I am the guy who when we speak of Nostradamus, I will even know about the French guy and some examples he said.
How he predicted JFK’s assassination, and the rise of Hitler, and I will even admit that some of the quatrains are very similar to how a Medieval guy would describe modern events. There are some features of JFK and Hitler that make them identifiable throughout history and Nostradamus got pretty close to describing them, for a guy who never met them.
But then I will also tell you that the entire idea of him predicting the future is shady, at best. The original words were not even in his native tongue, as they were gibberish. If you want to say there was code behind it, then I guess you can, but that is a stretch for me.
Anyway, I was teaching a kid, as I am a tutor on the weekends (It turns out the books and the article writing doesn’t pay that well) and I was talking to her, as adults normally do with high school students, trying to relate but in the same breath kind of bored by the lack of maturity from the child.
The girl brought up how one of her friends basically manipulated her best friend and started to hang out with her until the student was no longer in the picture.
Then she said that another girl in her group was kind of racist against her, as she is Columbian, and the other girl was white. I clarified whether or not the racist girl looked like me, and she said no, with more light hair and blue eyes, which is not how I look.
I then said that the entire thing is the trials and tribulations of a teenage girl. That was my way of saying what was going on, and not far from how I normally speak.
Then the student said that is so strange. I saw nothing weird about the comment. She said that she said that exact line “trials and tribulations” all day yesterday.
I told her that it is probably because we both watched the same news coverage and caught on to that line, and there is nothing more to be read into there. She of course, thought I was psychic somehow.
I didn’t think much of the exchange as there was more for me to teach the girl. We continued the lesson, with digressions on life in the middle, but never returning to the quote.
As I got home, I relaxed from a day of teaching and thought about the exchange of similar words. That is kind of strange when I think about it. I mean, if I was not the guy who said it, I would think it was weird.
I ran through the possibilities in my head. My first choice was that we were exposed to the same news, making that part of my word choice not that unusual. The more I thought about this, the more out there it seemed, as we did acknowledge in the discussion at a later point, that I don’t watch the shows she watches. We have different tastes in media.
Then there is the fun option, the option that says I am psychic. That for that brief second, I was able to read into the girl’s mind, and when I did, I for some reason, I picked a line that she recently used. That is stupid to me, as I am a logical person, so that is a no.
Then there is the boring choice, and that says that this entire thing was nothing more than a coincidence. I say a lot of words to a lot of people and when they match up I am not going around thinking that I read those people’s minds, so doing that here is silly on my end.
I am either watching the same news as a teenage girl. I am psychic and don’t know how to control it. Or I just had one of the strangest verbal exchanges in my life.
I am going with the first one and moving on.
Because all that stuff is nonsense anyway, right?
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