The Urges

by Jacob Clifton

After spending their teens in a holistic commune, learning to control their mental powers, all Nadine Blumenthal and her best friend Apache want to do is drink margaritas, work part-time in retail, and become old maids in the Bartleby Creek Trailer Park. But after Nadine's marriage fails spectacularly, she receives a recruitment letter from the mysterious Halcyon Clinic, a psychic healthcare facility with an agenda to redefine the limits of human thought.

"The Halcyon Clinic is one of seven facilities across the United States built in the last five years in response to new developments in parapsychological and metaphysical medicine. Our As many things can go wrong with the human soul as with the human body. By the same token, as many things can go right!"

It seems like a dream job. But forgotten betrayals, family histories, psychic healers and telepathic surgeons, an all-girl witch militia, Teiresias as a Unitarian pastor, lady-killer shamans and brownie-baking psychopomps, Mozart's architecture and Anansi's whiskey, ritual magic and cybernetic implants, and the meddling of a crotchety old Goddess could mean the end for their friendship, or—if they can't pull it together and assume control of their immense abilities in time—for Nadine and Apache themselves.

115 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 24, 2015

About the author

Jacob Clifton lives in Austin, Texas. Previously: Austin Chronicle, Tribune Media, Television Without Pity, Tor.com and Gawker.