Note: On June 4, Laura Oliver and Andrew Oliver will be reading stories as part of the Spy Night Series at the Avalon Theatre. Doors open at 5:30 pm

Three years ago today, when I started writing these weekly stories, I confided, “You might as well know up front that I believe in life after death, mental telepathy, and mind over matter.” I was being a little facetious since I also mentioned having spent my childhood trying to make my cat Purrfurr levitate. But I’ve created a book of these columns now and titled it “Something Other Than Chance” because when I think about how we met and about the other intriguing connections we’ve explored, I do believe we experience inexplicable miracles of timing that may be an expression of a power we have yet to comprehend.

As a panelist at the Washington Writers Conference two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to pitch this next book to several of 12 literary agents who had come for a ‘pitch fest.’ If this sounds kind of fast and aggressive, that’s because it is. Each pitch is precisely five minutes. Having sold my first book without an agent, I’d never subjected myself to a multiple pitch fest before. It’s like Speed Dating meets Shark Tank.

Here’s how it works. You line up ahead of your appointment time outside the pitch room, with the 11 other writers pitching one of the agents in that time slot. If your appointment is, say, 11:52, then at exactly 11:52, on the dot, the door opens, and you all crowd in simultaneously, scanning the room for the desk at which your target is seated. Once you find her, you have until 11:57 to vacate your seat for the next hopeful. If you don’t get up on your own at the sound of the bell, you are tasered.

Not really. You are escorted out by a very polite timekeeper.

Having helped other writers prepare queries and pitches, I had learned a few things about this process. Like know who your target readership is, which means who will buy your book? And the answer can’t be “Humans.” Or “Earthlings,” or “Everyone with eyeballs.”

So, you sit there wishing you could just do a Mr. Spock mind-meld—put three fingers on the side of the agent’s temple and telepathically transmit your book into her brain so that you don’t even need your whole 5 minutes. Instead, you must articulate your subject, audience, books similar to your own that have sold well, your ability to market, and your credentials– in a charismatic yet professional way.

In 300 seconds.

The gun went off, and we all pressed through the door only. I couldn’t recognize which agent was mine because all the seats filled immediately. Bewildered, I approached desk after desk as if searching for a seat in a game of musical chairs, only to realize someone had taken my spot and was using up my precious five minutes pitching her book out of turn. The timekeeper saw my distress, recognized the interloper and made her leave, but by that time I had less than 240 seconds. Four minutes to explain how the agent would make money helping me get my book published and why I would be a low-maintenance, super-fun person with whom to collaborate.

I think I said I love dogs because I knew from her bio she had a labradoodle. I hope we bonded over All Creatures Create and Small. The stakes felt so high at the time, though less than 1% of agent requests to see the manuscript become a book.

The high stakes made it feel like the proverbial life review when we make the transition from this life to the next. When we end this book and start another and hope for a 4-star review or a positive blurb.

This is my story, you say, and I am the only one who could have written this particular tale. I needed a lot of help, thank you. It’s full of conflict and loss, and the protagonist is deeply flawed, but she knows this and works hard to improve.

Here, you see the timekeeper edging over, and you revert to sputtering everything you know about plotting a story and crafting a life. And nothing is as it appears! Someone goes on a trip! A stranger comes to town!

“Sorry, you’re out of time,” the timekeeper says, and you rise to stand in front of the person who holds your fate in her hands.

A girl loves a dog. Has babies. Makes bad choices, then better ones. 

“Is there transformation,” the agent asks?

I hope so. After all, that was the point of this effort, this book, this life.

“What’s the genre?” the agent asks. “ Adventure? Romance? Mystery? Coming of age?”

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

“Sum it up in one line,” she says as the timekeeper touches your arm. “What’s this book really about, and why would I read it?”

“Because it’s about you,” I say, suddenly realizing this is true.

And because, in the end, it’s a love story.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

Here’s what old people do. They talk about their aches and pains and what they had to eat at their most recent meal.

Grilled cheese, and my hip hurts. Ha ha.

I know you’re reviewing your last conversation with furrowed brow, so I’m trying to make you feel better.

To make myself feel better, I’m engaged in an experiment. I have a pain that only manifests when I lie down on my left side, but it’s really interfering with my lack of sleep. That’s another joke. Read it again.

An MRI has identified what could be the cause, but according to the pain management specialist, the source of my pain could be this, could be that. A spinal injection has helped a bit, but to avoid doing another, the doctor has suggested a month of acupuncture three times a week.

Acupuncture is not covered by my insurance, so I have been agonizing about what to do because the intense, accelerated schedule of appointments will, by necessity, be expensive, but I discover there is a practice called “community acupuncture,” which is very affordable because it is done en masse. Picture a South Korean wedding where 5,000 engaged couples gather in a stadium. Like that.

I walk in the first day and see 10 mesh lounge chairs of sorts, lined up five to a side in a moderately-sized, dimly-lit room. Almost every recliner has a person lying on it with needles in various places, I assume, but can’t verify because I don’t look as I make my way down the center aisle to an empty chair. One of the things I will come to learn is that privacy does not require the usual physical barriers. There are ephemeral, spiritual boundaries that make it feel as if every person is in a room of their own.

White sound from a fan and faint music masks any conversation between the acupuncturist and patient so you are barely aware when one person’s session is complete, their needles removed, and they silently slip from the room.

I roll up my pants to my knees, I’m barefoot in a sleeveless top, and I offer up my extremities to my practitioner. How can you do this? I whisper, curious. How can you minister to what hurts when you only have access to 40 percent of my body? And not the part that hurts? She just smiles and says, Because I’ve been doing this 18 years.

Okay.

I am quick to enter other people’s realities when they seem better than my own.

And success speaks for itself. No matter what time of day or what day of the week I go, the room is nearly full. People love coming here. And they skew young although I see middle-aged people as well, and as many men as women.

Not that I’m looking.

She puts the needles in my hands and feet and the top of my head and leaves me there to cook. Within a few minutes, I feel my body reject several of the needles. I swear I’m not moving—they just fly out and hit the floor. Is that a good thing, I wonder?

I gently place Air Pods in my ears to listen to music. But the music makes me weep and think of things to tell you that I can’t write down and won’t remember, then I can’t wipe away my tears because my hands are full of needles.

So. This is awkward

Unfortunately, I didn’t have a playlist prepared, and the selection I picked on Spotify changes genres and is suddenly too loud and not continuous. Now I feel like I’m trapped at a rock concert too close to the stage.

I take a cautious glance at the wall clock and inadvertently see that all the bodies around me look like we are in suspended animation for a journey to Mars. I’m waking up first.

That makes me remember the YouTube video of the Rhodesian Ridgeback in the kennel who figured out how to nose open the latch of his cage, then raced down the run setting all his delighted fellow inmates free.

The next time I come, I vow to just lie there and let go of my thoughts like my friend Ned does six hours a day, trying not to have to incarnate again. He is in a big hurry to be done with Earthly existence in a spiritual way. But every thought that might flit past my consciousness like a cloud (the analogy meditators all use), I chase, knock down and rope like a calf in a steer-roping contest. Gotcha! Then I spring up, get back on my pony, and mentally look around for the next thought to lasso coming out of the shoot.

Got one! I am failing acupuncture. I’m doomed to get another spinal injection…

But our brains are phenomenal expectation machines. False flattery affects us even when we know it is untrue. (Looking good, you!) And when part of an object or word is missing, our brains fill it in. And when given a placebo we believe is medicine, we get well. But even better, when given a placebo and TOLD it’s a placebo, we still get well!

The implications are so huge I get lost in them. So, I lie there wanting to heal my hip and my heart and in love with my acupuncture points. Yes, there is Mound of Ruins and Tears Container, but there is also Spirit Gate, Shining Sea, and Grasping the Wind.

I try a mantra. “I’m healing,” I tell myself and any spiritual beings that might want to make me not a liar. “I am healed,” I try—going for broke.

“Not just my hip, but everything in my life.” That’s possible, right? That healing is like love? Nonselective, boundaryless? Did you know there is an acupuncture point called Soul Door?

You can’t change your feelings until you change the words in your head. Say them now, because if you say them, in some small part of your brain, you’ll believe them.

I am healing, I am healing,

I am healed.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

Every morning, when I get ready for my day, I sit at my dressing table, known as a vanity by the judgy, and check out my face in a mirror that lights up and magnifies by a power of 15.

“Why do you do that?” my mother asked when she was alive. And “Stop doing that!” my former dermatologist groaned. “No one expects perfection!”

I smiled at him sadly. He was, of course, a man.

“You’ll never see anything better than you saw the day before!” Mom predicted, but it’s not that I think I’ll discover I’ve gotten younger-looking overnight; it’s that I am searching for the newest sign of deterioration. Stemming the tide requires grand-scale scrutiny. And if you have fair skin and blue eyes, it also requires pretty vigilant screenings by a dermatologist as you pay in spades for those days before sunscreen when you grooved to tunes on your beach towel in the Outer Banks.

But a magnifying mirror would not have saved me this Monday when I visited my new dermatologist after a weekend hiking through the woods of the Blue Ridge. I was chatting with the doctor as she updated my records when I felt something itchy about two inches above my hairline on the back of my neck. Without thinking, I slipped an exploratory hand up to touch the place and discovered a small bump.

Dr. Aguh was still studying the computer screen while I sat there, semi-horrified to realize that the itchy bump was a tick I must have picked up over the weekend. Now, I would have to dislodge the critter and offer it up like a creepy present. “I’m meticulously clean! I wash every day! And, oh yeah, here’s a bug I just found in my hair.”

So when Dr. Aguh beamed her bright smile on me at last, I was perched on the edge of my hardback chair in my gray jeans and white sweater, pinching my new friend with his tiny flailing legs between my thumb and index finger.

“I can’t believe this,” I confessed, “but I just found this tick …

“(I know! Gross!)

“And he was attached… (I know! Grosser!)

“Right here.” I pointed at the back of my neck with my other hand.

She didn’t look.

“A tick?” Dr. Aguh stepped backward involuntarily.

“Put it in here,” she suggested, handing me a specimen cup at arm’s length.

“I was outside all weekend,” I called after her as she abruptly exited the room. I peered in the cup at my new friend, left to ponder our effects on each other’s lives.

I walked over to the window, put my captive on the sill, and immediately googled “ticks that cause Lyme disease” on my cellphone. A nasty lineup of the usual suspects appeared. I began comparing mugshots. “Number One. Dog tick, step forward.” By the time the doctor returned, I was fairly certain this was not a Lyme disease perp but a harmless imposter. Still, we weren’t sure, so I was told that if I wanted an antibiotic after further research at home, I could call.

In my office, I taped the defendant to a piece of white paper, took his photograph, and then enlarged it. Which brings me back to things we size up and how this is not a good thing most of the time. Very little benefit comes from looking at something way larger than it appears to the naked eye. Or that is normally hidden. You think your dog is cute? Ever pulled back those lips and had a look at those teeth? Who’s cute now? How about your horse? So beautiful, so noble, but pull up those lips and call in the clowns.

Likewise, the person speaking on Zoom! You can change your zoom settings to automatically enlarge the speaker, you know. Please don’t do this in my workshops. I like to think you are seeing me as I’m seeing you—very small, with little detail, from a galaxy far, far away.

What else suffers from magnification?

Anxiety enlarges my impatience, makes me snap at the dog, say bad words to inanimate objects. I sound mean, but I’m really worried; about injured children in warzones I long to hold to my heart, about rising tides and temperatures. About my vanishing savings. And fear magnifies my inclination to criticize. I sound judgmental, but I’m scared. For my children, their children. For humanity. You.

But we can also magnify the moon, the Milky Way, and the light from distant stars. And magnification makes things appear closer, like age, but they are not really closer. In fact, they are not even right-side up!

All cameras, telescopes, and even the corneas of your eyes bend incoming light to produce an image that is upside down. It is your brain that receives those signals, decodes and interprets them, then constructs an image of the world right side up.

Sometimes it feels as if I’m seeing the world upside down from very far away, and my brain has not yet righted it, but it could.

The primal brain is ego-centric. There is only self. So, giving love feels like receiving love; extending compassion, feels as if we have been enfolded in loving arms. Praying for another feels like blessings raining down. A conversion accomplished by the brain but experienced in the heart.

When mom wanted me to feel the consequences of a questionable decision, say accelerating through a yellow traffic light, she’d ask, “What if everybody did that?”  Well, what if?

What if everybody did that?

Gave away, relentlessly, what we want to receive. Justice. Empathy. Mercy.

When that is the light by which we see, it will right the world.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.