In For a Penny Read Free

is a crab leg,” Art said. “Hey! I’ll tell you what. How about a crab leg collection?”
    Nina frowned and shook her head in small jerks. “Those smell.”
    “And they’re dead,” Beth added. The telephone rang, and Beth stood up again to answer it.
    “Anthony Collier,” Art said, looking up sharply. The name had simply popped into his head, arriving out of nowhere, like a light blinking on.
    “Wait,” Beth told him, waving him silent and picking up the receiver, clearly assuming that he was starting to tell her something about his old friend Anthony, who had moved to New York the previous winter. “Hello,” she said, and then listened, double-taking just a little bit. She handed him the phone, her hand over the mouthpiece. “Anthony Collier,” she said.
    “Hey,” Art said weakly. He realized that his heart was racing now, and he replied in half sentences, finally begging off to eat dinner.
    “Wow,” she said.
“That
was a weird coincidence. What were you going to tell me?”
    “Nothing.”
    “What do you mean nothing? You started to tell me something about Anthony.”
    “Just his name. His name sort of flew into my head. It was weird, like the thing with the possum.”
    “I think feathers,” Nina said, looking at the parakeets, which had started chattering when the phone rang. They had two of them, both green, in a cage suspended from the ceiling. Nina climbed onto a chair and peered into the cloth seed guard that aproned the underside of the cage. She reached into it and pulled out a loose feather, smiling and holding it up for them to see before dropping it into the shoebox.
    . . .
    For the next hour Art was unable to concentrate on anything else. He tried to think out the
meaning
of the two incidents, possessed by the idea that they were a new category of experience, that they were evidence of … other things. He had never been a rationalist, and had always been willing to consider things he himself had never witnessed—ghosts, flying saucers, the hollow earth, New Zealand. But never had he ever been a party to a public display of these things. The paranormal was something he had read about, something that happened to others, whose stories were related in pulp-paper magazines.
    During the evening the phone rang twice more, and each time his mind supplied him with a name as he leaped up to grab it, but he was wrong both times, and he realized that he had been merely guessing. With Anthony he hadn’t guessed. The information had come from
outside
of himself somehow, independent of his own thinking, exactly as if it had been beamed into his head.
    He stopped himself. That kind of thinking sounded crazy even to him, and he wondered suddenly if this was some kind of schizophrenic episode, the precursor to a gibbering decline into nuttiness. Except, of course, that Beth had been a witness. She could misunderstand the possum, because she hadn’t been there, but she’d
heard
him come up with Anthony’s name out of the blue.
    He went into the pantry and dug out a deck of cards, then returned to his chair in the living room, fanning the cards out on the coffee table. Coincidence wouldn’t answer the possum question. That much was clear to him. Beth came out of Nina’s room, where she had been reading the nightly story, and she stood watching him move the cards around. He could see that she was interested. This thing had gotten to her.
    “Five of spades,” he said out loud, flipping over a random card from the middle of the spread. It was a queen of hearts. He tried again, naming the two of clubs, then the eight of diamonds, and then a half dozen other numbers and suits, dead wrong every time. The five of spades finally appeared, meaninglessly late. Beth had already lost interest and gone into the family room to watch television. He heard the theme song from
Jeopardy!
start up, and he put the cards back in the pack, giving up and going in to kiss Nina goodnight.
    “Read me one,” Nina whispered,