I stir in my cage when I hear the man coming downstairs. His footfalls are muted by the soft leather of his loafers, but my ears have attuned to the sound. The wire grating of the dog crate rattles as I sit up and my ankle tugs against its chain. I am at home here. The cuff that tethers my leg to a pipe in the corner is padded, gentle. The kennel is filled with blankets and pillows for me to rest on. There isn’t room to stand, but I shouldn’t be standing anyways. He tells me I’m much too delicate. I am a great gift to him, a treasured thing, and he cares for me well. I want for nothing. He tells me I should be grateful. I try to believe him.

He walks down the wood slat steps carrying a tray with a pint of bubblegum ice cream, a spoon, and a plastic cup containing a dose of ipecac syrup. I can smell it from here, herbal and thick. The purpose of the ice cream is to provide a clearly legible medium while minimizing damage to my esophagus. If my esophagus is damaged, my work may be compromised. The man told me this, once. Ice cream and ipecac are all that I’ve swallowed in months. Maybe years. I’m unsure. Time goes fuzzy down here. Hunger puts me to sleep. Sometimes, forming a thought feels like sinking my hand down into a tar pit and groping around in the opaque molasses dark until my fingers close around anything solid, then heaving to extract it. It’s too much effort. My head hurts. My stomach is concave. My limbs are sinewy and atrophied. All my nutrients and hydration come through an IV fed into the back of my hand. I am cared for. Cherished. Kept.

Once a day, every day, the man lets me out of my crate and instructs me to vomit onto a sheet of black plastic. My gorge rises, the sweet, sticky slime boiling over, heaving and splattering. Positioned above the plastic, there is a camera feeding into a computer whose algorithms will interpret the shapes of things to come inside the puddle of my puke, scrying my regurgitation like tea leaves. The contours of the puddle’s edges. The swirls of color, pastel pink and blue. I am an oracle. There is great and secret knowledge hidden inside of me, waiting in the dark down in my hungry innards.

When I was younger, I used to get carsick. It got so bad my mom couldn’t even drive to the supermarket without me gagging in the backseat. She tried pills, and that helped some, but mostly they just made me so tired that retching would’ve taken too much effort. The last time it happened, we were on a road trip to see my grandmother. I’d met her once or twice before. She smelled like dust and artificial coffee creamer. This is one of the only things I remember, from before. My mom had fed me two bitter, chalky little tablets as I got in the car, but after a few hours on the road I woke up and promptly emptied my stomach onto the floor. Sighing and muttering, she pulled into a rest stop to try and clean up. When she pulled the rubber floor mat from the car, I watched her face go white through my passenger window. Eyes wide, mouth contorting, stretched into a rictus of fear. I could make out her skull, through the skin.

“My mother is dead,” She held up the puke-streaked mat, shook it at me, droplets flying. “What did you do? How did you know?” I squinted at the smear of half-digested matter, trying to see what she saw. To make it open up for me like a Magic Eye puzzle. For a half-second I glimpsed it, and it made me sick again. Watery spit-up spattering onto parking lot asphalt like rain. When we arrived, there was an ambulance outside of my grandmother’s apartment complex. She’d fallen in the shower. Cracked her skull open on the edge of the tub. I wondered what portents there might’ve been in the smears and swirls of soap-foaming blood washing down the drain.

The man is a gambler. I help him cheat. Sometimes he calls me his good luck charm, and I smile because he’s smiling at me and I don’t know what else to do. He bets on everything. There are websites, with other men like him, all placing bets. Right now is a very exciting time, he tells me, because we are at war again. War means lots of betting, on what the politicians will say in their speeches, on who will take what territory, on all of the different numbers involved. The other night I helped him hit a big parlay. Two schools in the same city were double-tapped by air strikes. Two hundred and thirty-seven dead. The computer saw everything, in the magic reflecting pool of my sick, twenty-four hours before it happened. We could have warned them. He came down the stairs dancing, turning in circles. Drunk and shouting and laughing loud. He unlocked the cage, hooked his hands under my armpits, dragging me to my feet. He told me to dance with him. My legs shook, and he pulled me close, draping me over his shoulder, propping me up against him. He was warm. Soft. The fabric of his clothes against my bare skin. Turning and turning in time to no music.

The second time that it happened, I was dancing. I was in college, at a party with my boyfriend. I don’t remember his name. When I reach for it in my head, there’s the shape of something there, but it’s too slippery and I’m too hungry. I miss him. The girl throwing the party, though, her name was Alison. It was her birthday. She’d taken something that made her pupils swallow up her eyes, huge and black and shiny. She was spinning to the music, wild and off-beat, ragdoll limbs flailing, entranced. I had gotten too drunk. I always was a lightweight. Watching her movements made me queasy, made my head swim. I tried to get into the bathroom, knocking frantically on the door. It stayed locked. People were fucking in there, maybe, from the sound that came through the walls. I threw up onto the living room floor. It was brownish-yellow and reeking, splattering outwards. You could feel it, humid in the air. Everyone backed away, exclaiming their disgust. My boyfriend held my hair back. He always did. It was sweet of him. Alison stopped dancing and drew in close. She looked at the spray of puke on her vinyl flooring. It was silent for a moment, apart from the music.

Then she said: “That looks like the president with his head coming to pieces.” Teary-eyed, I squinted. I saw it, then. She was right. It looked just like him. I could see his face contorted in agony, little fragments of his skull coming apart. Everyone saw it. Plain as day. Someone took a picture. Tinny little click of cell phone shutter. Alison kept mumbling, starting to dance again. “His head coming to pieces. Coming to pieces.” Early the next morning, someone with a 3-D printed pistol ran onto the stage at a press conference and shot the president in the face.

I was half-awake and hung over when they took me. Pulled me into a car outside my dorm and stuck my head in a sack, wrenched my hands into plastic cuffs, bending my shoulders backward. I couldn’t see anything but tiny points of light coming through the hood. A smothering night sky. It smelled in there, the stench of my own acrid breath. I was scared, confused, crying. I hadn’t heard the news yet. They took me somewhere. They wanted to know how I had known. If I had helped plan it. A woman kept asking questions with a voice that sounded automated, like a hold message on a telephone. Someone else kept hitting me with something heavy. After maybe a week, they gave up. That was when I started losing track of time. When I resigned myself to it. Then the man came and took me home. If I had to guess, I think he bought me. I rode beside him in the back of an SUV with the hood still over my head. He spoke gently to me, like he was coaxing a stray dog, or a stupid child. For a moment, when he let me out of the van, I could hear birdsong.

I eat the last melty spoonfuls of bubblegum ice cream while he sets up the camera apparatus. He asks questions as we get ready, to help guide my divination. Everything is about the war now. I’m not allowed to watch the news, but I can guess at what’s going on. It’s getting bad. Things are happening that have never happened before. People are being killed in ways that leave nothing behind. Thinking about it makes me feel sick. The man gives the signal. I puke on command.

We both wait patiently while the computer gives its readout. Usually, he logs into his accounts and begins placing bets right away, but not tonight. Tonight he’s quiet. I see beads of sweat on his brow in the blue screenglow. Talking on the phone, whispering. Measuring accuracy rates. He knows I’ve never been wrong before. He pulls away. Draws close to me. I can smell him. The spreading stains under the arms of his dress shirt. Sour as bile.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He’s taking a keyring from his pocket, unlocking the chain from my ankle. He’s running up the steps, opening the latches on the cellar door. “Go. Just go. Please.”

Knees knocking like a fawn, back hunched, I stand and walk unsteadily up the stairs, moving slow, knees knocking, leaning on the rail for support. The house is empty. I find the door and go outside. I realize I’m naked, staggering down darkened suburban streets. The air is cool. Insects hum. There are lights in the sky. Blazing bright. Falling like stars.

Exene F. is a writer, musician, and sex worker from Minneapolis. She can be reached on Instagram @exene.fag.