prompt: medium, title: the medium is the message in misc. flash fiction

Elaine was not a happy medium. It’d been a long time since she’d been happy if she’d ever been happy at all. She’d been miserable for years, from long before her recent situation, running from the law as a medium-at-large. She wasn’t sure if there were any real mediums at all, the ones she knew were largely frauds, small-time grifters with bottom-of-the-barrel scams. Getting in and out, making just enough to move on to the next, but never the big bucks. She’d been a success at that level, telling folks whatever they wanted to hear. Her cold-reads sold like hotcakes but when you come up from nothing, it’s hard to settle for low-to-medium. You need to push the envelope. You gotta try to make it super-sized.

When she stopped calling herself “Elaine Jones” and started calling herself “Sabrina Moldavia”, that’s where the down-low started going tits-up. When she got the psychic hot-lines and the cool television show, reinventing the afternoon quack-talk genre, playing with that hokey medium. It was no longer leading questions or accomplices following marks with hidden tape recorders, it was all sorts of techno-foolery to glean what the rubes needed to hear, from microchips to macro-lenses, infrared cameras to ultra-high-tech data hacks, there were no in-betweens she would not employ to convince everyone she was indeed a happy medium.

It all fell apart, because of course it did. There was big money for one little assistant to blow the whistle on all the simple tricks and nonsense. Maybe if she’d been more upfront with underlings. Maybe if she’d been able to see the future… but if she’d been able to do that, she would’a been a happy medium, not a small-time liar in big-time trouble. Maybe if she’d been able to learn from her past… but by that point, all that was left was to hurry up and bail out fast.

Elaine changed her hair and contacts, posture and means of travel, took another alias, a third if we’re counting, but she had a hard time with scams that once came easy, lost in her life’s new difficulty settings. A single palm read could end with her caught red-handed.

“You’re going to have to let them go,” a stranger told her on the street, incognito in The Outer Hebrides, “the big dreams and tiny lies, if you’re ever to be happy.” “How do you know me?” she asked the stranger, “did you track me by satellite? By phone?”

“You believe all the world’s a con but know, not all mediums are false, Elaine, it’s just real ones cannot charge,” smiled the woman with the gray streaks in her brick-red mane smiled, “because money ruins everything.” And for the first time in her life, she listened instead of just looking for a weakness. So, she ran into the hills to become a shepherd, and while her life is less exciting, no longer a roller-coaster, the highs and lows are often overrated, sometimes the medium is happiest after all.