The strange things you hear while sipping coffee at a Starbucks…

(overheard from scruffy forty-something man in an old army jacket and acid-washed torn jeans near Pioneer Square)

“No kidding, man…remember the Satanic Panic back in the Eighties? That was bad. Not as bad as the Salem thing, but bad enough. Ask any gamer. But see, here’s the thing. They got all of it wrong. All of it. The problem ain’t Satanists. Never has been. It’s desire that calls magick, right? Desire. Like that puzzle box in Hellraiser. You gotta want it to happen so bad you can taste it. Ask anyone in the know. Point is, how much desire you think’s floating around in those megachurches when some guy in a suit and glossy hair gets on the End Times? One of these days, someone who really believes is going to get their mitts on something with serious oomph and then…pow! Watch out! That’s why all those really old bibles and stuff are under lock and key in top museums. What? Dead Sea Scrolls? Yeah, I saw them when they were here. Fakes, of course. The Israelis aren’t taking any chances someone might get ahold of any fragments, especially the really apocalyptic stuff. And the Vatican’s helping out. Those were Vatican Guards doing the security work on that exhibit…”

****

(A cheerful Asian girl, backpack slung over one shoulder, balances her triple-shot espresso and a brownie and chats with a house-mate at the next table over.)

“So Pablo’s been going nuts about that Burn Notice show on USA, right? He says he knows a guy that happened to. No, not like in the show…but the same sort of thing. The guy called him out of the blue–he’d had his bank accounts emptied, gotten fired, and ended up in some little bum town in Missouri, of all places. Totally weird. Pablo said he couldn’t leave, either. That’s the creepy part, yeah? So the big scaredy cat has to watch the show religiously now, ’cause he thinks the writers did this to his pal and are using his plight to generate plot. As if! Huh? Yeah, Pablo’s from Miami. So’s his bro. Why?”

****

The real reason the various light rail projects in Seattle have gone nowhere? Duh. It’s the feuding between the few local Cliomancers and a couple Geomancers who live in the I-District. Comes down to whether or not the chi flows the way it wants to, and how many potential historical sites get demolished. Yeah, I said ‘potential’. Not a lot of history builds up in only a hundred and fifty years. Except for the Space Needle, but nobody messes with that. Or Pioneer Square, either.