The town was called Abermorfa. It was the kind of town that appeared on maps at a scale too small for tourists to find useful — a single main street, a harbour, a church that had been deconsecrated and not yet repurposed, a pub that served food between twelve and two. The journalist who drove there in March on the assignment he had described to his editor as “human interest with an element of light debunking” arrived to find it empty in the particular way that Welsh coastal towns are empty in winter: not abandoned, but turned inward, the life of the place conducted behind walls, in kitchens, in languages that had been spoken there for longer than the roads that accessed it.
Her name was Sioned Parry. She was sixty-seven. She had lived in Abermorfa her entire life and had been practicing, as the phrase had it, since her early twenties, though she would have disputed the word “practicing” — it implied a discipline that was acquired, when what she had was simply present. The journalist, whose name was Daniel Morrow, had a file of documented predictions attributed to her, assembled from local newspaper archives, council records, and the testimony of a retired GP who had known her for forty years and whose account of a specific conversation in 1998 Morrow had so far been unable to dismiss.
She lived above the harbour in a house that had been her family’s for three generations. She received him at four o’clock, in a front room overlooking the water, with tea that she had made before he knocked. He noted this. He wrote it down.
“You knew I was coming,” he said.
“I knew someone was coming,” she said. “I made enough for two.” She poured. “That’s not impressive. When someone writes to arrange a visit, you tend to expect them.”
He had expected evasion of a different kind. This directness was, he found, harder to work with than mystification would have been. He asked his questions in the order he had prepared them. She answered without deflection. Yes, she saw things — that was the word she used, without drama. No, she could not control what she saw or when. No, she did not consider herself a practitioner of any tradition, though she was familiar with several. No, she had never charged for what she did. No, she did not consider herself unusual.
“Then what do you consider yourself?” he asked.
“Unlucky,” she said, and looked at him for the first time with a directness that had a specific weight to it. “Would you like to know what I see when I look at you?”
He said yes. He said it as a journalist — as someone collecting material, testing methodology, noting responses. He said it the way you agree to something you expect to be trivially wrong and therefore useful.
What she told him was specific. This was the first thing he wrote down afterward, when he was back in his car at the harbour with the heater running and his notebook open. It was not the vague, hedged language of the professionally psychic. It was not the kind of statement that could be made to fit any life. It named a person — not by name, but with enough precision that Morrow knew immediately who she meant. It named a situation. It described something that had not yet happened but that he recognised, in the way you recognise something you have been trying not to think about, as the next thing in a sequence he had been aware of for several months.
He wrote down the words she had used. He sat in the car until the harbour lights came on.
He went back the following morning. She answered the door as though she expected him, which she said she had. They talked for three hours. He asked her about the predictions that were documented in the file — the one from 1989 that had named a flood date to within forty-eight hours, the one from 2003 that had described the circumstances of a death three weeks before it occurred, the ones that were in the council records because two of the families involved had insisted they be noted. She confirmed them without embellishment. She did not claim credit for them. She described them, instead, as things she had reported, the way a person with an unusual kind of sight might report what they could see from a window that others could not reach.
“Does it frighten you?” he asked. “Seeing things that are bad?”
“It did,” she said. “When I was young. I used to think it meant I was responsible for the things I saw — that if I saw something coming and didn’t prevent it, I had participated in it.” She looked at the harbour. “I no longer think that. What I see is not a warning I have been given to act on. It’s more like —” She paused, finding the word. “Information that arrives ahead of schedule. Whether anyone uses it is not my concern. My concern is accurate transmission.”
“And the current predictions?” he asked. “The ones that have been described to me as dark? More specific than you’ve been before?”
“They are what I see,” she said. “I am sixty-seven. I have been seeing things for forty-five years. The specificity increases with time — I don’t know why. Perhaps the signal becomes clearer. Perhaps I have simply become better at translating what I receive.” She turned from the window. “Is the argument that I should stop?”
“The argument some people make,” he said carefully, “is that specific dark predictions, repeated, create a kind of — atmosphere — in a community that is harmful regardless of whether they prove accurate.”
“Yes,” she said. “That argument is made. It has been made to me directly, by the GP, by the council, by a woman whose son I described to her in terms she found upsetting.” She was quiet for a moment. “If I could stop, I would consider the argument. But stopping is not available to me. The only choice I have is whether to say what I see or to say nothing.”
“And you choose to say it.”
“I choose to say it to people I believe can use it, or who deserve to know it, or who ask me directly,” she said. “I don’t announce things. I answer questions. You came here to write a piece that would establish me as a credulous woman who has accidentally organised a community around her neurological eccentricity. I understand that. I am telling you what I see because you asked, and because not answering would be a form of lying that I am not willing to practice.”
Morrow drove back to Cardiff. He sat with his notes for a week. He wrote three drafts of the piece he had been commissioned to write, and in each one he found himself omitting the specific thing she had said to him in the car-light of the first evening, because to include it would require him to address it, and to address it required him to take a position on it that he could not honestly take.
The thing she had described happened eleven days after his first visit. It happened in the precise circumstances she had named, to the person he had recognised from her description, in the way she had said it would happen.
He called the GP whose account was in his file. He told him what she had told him and when. The GP was quiet for a moment and then said: “Yes. That’s how it works.”
“How does anyone —” Morrow stopped. “How does anyone live with knowing that?”
“She does,” the GP said. “She always has. Most people don’t ask the obvious question, which is: how does she live with knowing things and not being able to change them? The answer, I think, is that she decided a long time ago that the knowing and the changing are different functions, and that she only has one of them. It’s made her — not peaceful, exactly. But settled, in a way that most people aren’t.”
Morrow did not write the piece. He filed a different one — a profile, cautious, without a conclusion, that his editor ran with a headline he disliked and that did not capture what the experience of Abermorfa had actually been. He drove back there six weeks later to talk to her again. She made enough tea for two. She did not say she had expected him.
She did not need to.