Terry Iacuzzo

We fell asleep listening to stories about how Grandma passed her psychic ability on to our father. While he lay in his pram, Gram clipped his pinkie fingernails, boiled them in horseradish sauce, then poured the compound on a patch of dirt behind Fluffy’s doghouse. Father told us that to complete the transfer, he was later ordered to visit Transylvania and make love to a chubby, pale-skinned woman. (When our mother was nearby, he left out the sex part.) None of this compares to Terry Iacuzzo’s family ghost stories. The freakiest thing isn’t even the half-human, half-spiritual apparition that would show up to warn the Iacuzzos about impending tragedies. It was that their family pet never, ever died. Funny, our Fluffy is still alive, too, sixty years after Gram’s ritual.