Five of Pentacles
None of the mugs steamed. The Jewels hadn’t touched their teas or coffees.
“Sorry I’m late,” Julie Brooks said. The group of four women and one man did not acknowledge her. Their corner of the cafe was humming with energy. The Jewels talked over each other; others in the cafe threw curious, annoyed glances around the rims of their cups.
Brooks took her usual seat in the corner by the windows. The others had ordered for her; the mug was cold. None of them looked up. “Sorry I’m late?” Brooks prompted.
All five of the Jewels looked up, eyes wide, briefly shocked to silence. Brooks almost giggled.
“Brooks is here,” young Julie Wright announced. Wright was the first to smile; she was practiced at appearing genuine. She straightened her dark hair, heavy lashes, and older-than-she-was shawl, then held out her hands. Brooks placed her right hand in Wright’s, palm up, and Wright set to reading the lines.
“Yes, we can see that,” replied Julie Woods. The old lady’s face wrinkled back to its usual resting state: seemingly cranky, but one corner of her lips on the verge of a knowing grin. She glanced over at Parrish, beside her.
“Did it happen to you, too?” Jules Parrish asked. He leaned in, touched his thick glasses, compulsively tugged at his unruly beard. Parrish’s bow tie and suspenders matched, for once.
Before Brooks could answer, Julie Xiong tutted and wagged a finger. “Let her settle in. Her tea went cold, poor thing. I’ll be right back.” Xiong tottered to her feet; before Brooks could protest, Xiong waved her off. For a brief moment, Xiong’s eyes followed as Parrish stroked his beard, then she leaned on her cane and set off on the trek to the service counter.
Juline Nunes slapped a tarot card onto Brooks’s right hand, earning a withering squint from Wright. The Ten of Cups, reversed. Nunes stared at the card, then up at Brooks, an unspoken question in her dark eyes.
Brooks looked around the table, bewildered. “What’s going on?” she asked. “What has you all in a tizzy?”
Nunes and Parrish gasped, Wright shook her head at Brooks’s palm, Woods glanced wide-eyed at Parrish, and Xiong hustled back over with a new mug of Brooks’s chocolate chai.
Typically, Wright took the lead. She straightened her shawl again. “Did it not happen to you?” she asked. Parrish rolled his eyes, but before he could say that’s what he said, Wright continued. “Something happened to us last night. It’s all anyone can talk about. “
“What?” Brooks asked.
“Something magical,” said Xiong as she pushed the tea to Brooks.
“Life-changing,” added Wright. “Everything we knew is wrong.”
“What happened?” Brooks asked again. “I swear, if no one tells me what’s going on, I’ll -“
“She didn’t do any readings last night,” Nunes interrupted. “Get your deck. Do one now.” She shuffled her own cards, needing something to do with her hands.
Brooks frowned at Nunes. “Why? What -“
“Do it,” said all the Jewels, not quite in unison, but close enough for Brooks to reel back against her chair.
“All right, all right,” she said. The intensity was disconcerting. Brooks almost wanted to jokingly ask who died, but she shook her head and retrieved her tarot deck from her purse.
The deck was a classic Rider-Waite in an impressionist style, mysterious landscapes with hidden wildlife. Brooks slowly shuffled her deck without looking – the decades-old cards were soft and worn, recognizable from their backs if she paid attention. Instead she watched the Jewels, their earlier excitement turned to silent, perfect focus.
Again Brooks’s instinct was to joke, but the ominous silence bade her swallow instead. She placed her deck on the table, cut it once, and turned up the Five of Pentacles reversed: the symbolic hope of a sapling emerging from a burned field, turned to the misery and disgrace of the lone survivor who failed to move on with the rest.
“Well?” prompted Wright.
“I…” Brooks licked her lips. “I’ve been… left behind? Y’all experienced something I didn’t?”
Nunes touched the card on the table, then the silver eye pendant on her choker. “You… you don’t see it? I thought, since we both read the tarot, your experience would be similar to mine.”
Wright cocked her head. The others seemed concerned, but Wright was more curious. Almost pitying. “She doesn’t see it.”
“I don’t see what?” Brooks asked. More rudely than she’d spoken in a decade, she demanded: “Will someone please tell me what is going on?“
“Last night, all of our readings -“
“They worked,” Wright interrupted, her expression manic. “For the first time, our readings really worked. We saw the truth.”
“Quite embarrassing, really,” Parrish said. “I’ve been writing the farmer’s almanac for nearly forty years, and now I know it was all… merely guesswork.” He wouldn’t meet Brooks’s eyes, the shame positively radiating from him as he fidgeted with his suspenders, his bowtie, his moustache, his glasses, the buttons of his shirt.
Brooks chewed the inside of her cheek. She still did not understand what they meant. Their readings worked? They saw the truth? “Someone please explain this to me, as simple as you can.”
Even the old witch Woods wasn’t smiling anymore. She leaned in and took Brooks’s hand. Her eyes were fiercely bright. “Last night, I cast my dinner bones before bed. Like I always do when cleaning up. Just for fun, you understand. You know I don’t believe in these things the way some – well.” Woods cleared her throat, looked around the table. No one interrupted. “Well! When I cast the bones, my vision went black, all except for the bones. Then the bones changed. They became words. The bones told me to bring in the laundry, because it was going to rain overnight.”
Woods said this dramatically, victoriously, as though it were some deep revelation. With the almost-grin on her lips again, Woods released Brooks’s hand, leaned back, and crossed her arms.
It had rained overnight – a nice little thunderstorm – but Brooks brought her own laundry in because she heard the forecast on the radio. She nodded slowly, her lips pursed.
“She doesn’t believe you,” Wright announced.
Brooks shook her head. “No, I do, it’s just -“
Xiong raised one hand with a creak of her elbow, loud enough to draw attention. She winked at Parrish, who half-smiled and glanced at Woods. With silent yet dramatic flair, Xiong raised her cup of tea, swirled it above her head, closed her eyes and gulped the too-cool drink. Eyes still closed, Xiong slammed the cup down on the table and leaned over it.
Xiong opened her eyes and studied the leaves. The other Jewels waited and watched, gripping the edge of the table.
“A squirrel,” Xiong announced, “Is in the trash can outside.”
Brooks frowned and looked around, but Wright shushed her before she could speak.
“The squirrel will be startled by a passing Jack Russell terrier, its owner distracted by a phone call. In a panic, the squirrel will leap over one of the patio tables, slip on a newspaper, and jump into the open pickup window, causing the barista to spill the coffee she is handing to a takeout customer. The squirrel will re-orient itself and leap back outside, but the barista will panic and slip in the spilled coffee, flipping a plate of cookies. One of the cookies will hurtle across the store and land directly in Brooks’s tea -“
Xiong opened her eyes and handed Brooks a newspaper. “Cover your face, dear.”
Brooks took the paper but couldn’t help laughing. After she lost the farm and moved to the city, her tarot reading made her a pillar of the neighbourhood. She never quite believed it was any sort of real magic, but Brooks trusted how the cards played with her intuition, and very rarely was she wrong. A reading even saved her life once, when she believed even less.
Xiong’s tea leaf reading worked the same way as Brooks’s cards: by providing a window into her lifetime of wisdom and intuition, allowing her the focus to piece together details she’d never noticed consciously. But the level of specificity Xiong claimed was absurd. It was impossible to –
A bark and a screech outside. Something black hurtled in the takeout window. The barista screamed, dropped a coffee, fell, accidentally slapped a plate of –
Brooks gasped and covered her face with the newspaper just in time to avoid the cookie’s splash.
Wheel of Fortune, Reversed
Julie slapped the alarm clock straight off the nightstand. Three in the morning. She hadn’t slept.
She leaned out the window. Not a hint of dawn yet, half the stars obscured. Something big rolling in. She could smell it.
Julie reached for the farmer’s almanac and tarot deck in her nightstand. Ma thought both were malarkey. She never got along with grandma, always wanted to get away from the farm, stared daggers at grandma when she gifted Julie the deck. Julie wondered if she’d find the cards in the trash one morning, but she never did.
Not that she believed in ’em much either. She shuffled, but it was only a cute morning ritual to get her focused for the day.
And today she truly needed it. Final notice on her overdue property taxes expired tomorrow at close of office, five p.m. sharp. If Julie worked hard today, from dawn to dusk, and sold at least three-quarters of the produce at the farmer’s market the next morning, she’d have enough to pay her bill and keep the farm.
She drew. The Wheel of Fortune, reversed. Bad luck and unforeseeable consequences.
It wasn’t the message Julie needed. She drew again.
Death. Transformation and experience. In other words, change. Change could be good, but Julie didn’t want change. She wanted things to stay the same. To keep the farm.
One more draw, since this wasn’t serious anyway.
The Tower, reversed. Danger. Destruction.
She shook her head. Bad luck, death, destruction. The cards were telling her she had no chance with the farm when what she really needed was the courage and strength to save it.
Desperate for something, Julie pulled the farmer’s almanac from its place beside the tarot deck. The almanac called for mild weather with some clouds, and unseasonal heat. Not particularly motivating.
Julie snorted and threw the almanac and cards back into the nightstand drawer. The cards scattered. What a bunch of baloney.
She got dressed and stomped out to the garage, kicking small stones down the gravel drive. She breathed in oil and cut grass. She checked and topped up the tractor’s fuel, oil, and air in the tires, then threw an extra cushion on the seat. She inspected and hooked up the plows and secured the wagon behind. She gave the venerable, rusty tractor an affectionate pat.
Turning over three fields of potatoes would be the quick, easy part. An entire day of bending and kneeling and tossing potatoes into the wagon would be agony. She had no choice.
With a mighty kick, Julie flung the garage doors open and took a deep breath. She frowned. The air smelled… not quite like rain. That too, but with something sharp and tangy lurking.
The darkest part of the sky grew darker, not lighter. Julie frowned deep. The almanac said tornado season ended two weeks ago, but if she didn’t know better, she’d almost think…
Her morning tarot draw blustered in her memory like a pressure front before a storm. Bad luck. Changes. Danger.
She took a long breath, sucking in the scents of grass, oil, and tangy not-quite-rain. Julie didn’t believe in the cards. They couldn’t predict the future. They nagged at her, though, like ma used to.
If it was going to rain, Julie would have to start turning up the potatoes now. Once the earth got wet it would be too heavy for the old tractor. She would run out of time and lose the farm.
If it was going to do worse than rain…
Julie began strapping the tractor, plows, and wagon to sunken eye hooks in the concrete. Secured and chained the garage door. Headed back toward, but not to, the house, aiming for the storm cellar. All the while shaking her head in disbelief at her own actions.
Julie strained and grunted to lift the doors up and open. She paused at the lip of the cellar, standing atop poured-concrete stairs older than she was, and looked up at the sky.
Black clouds drifted overhead. The front had long passed, so she couldn’t identify the shape or type of cloud. She searched for any sign of a tornado. No storm, no unusual green tint, no swirling funnel. Only the swirling knot in her gut, a screaming sense of wrongness Julie swore was only there because of those darned tarot cards.
Was ma right? Or grandma?
Julie chewed the inside of her cheek. The wind picked up and clacked the cellar doors on their hinges. She glanced down at them. They were solid, heavy wood, not prone to blowing in the wind.
Perhaps that was one sign too many. Julie stepped down, growled as she pulled the cellar doors shut, and barred them behind her. She sat in the glow of one bare electric bulb, staring at sparse shelves once stocked with a week of canned goods, now only enough for one meager meal.
Julie was safe in the cellar when the F3 tornado ripped the farm to splinters.
Hierophant
Julie Brooks lowered the newspaper. Drops of tea and cookie crumbs lingered on her knuckles and fingertips. She gaped, wide-eyed. “You… Xiong, you… saw all that? How?”
“I don’t know,” said the older woman. The lines of her face deepened. Brooks could tell Xiong had enjoyed the spectacle, but something about the vision concerned her, too. She wasn’t the only one. Parrish couldn’t stop rubbing his beard, a sure sign something was bothering him.
Nunes looked at Brooks with concern – the cards were Nunes’s whole identity, so she must be worried that Brooks, who shared her reading type, saw nothing unusual. Still, Nunes shuffled her cards with sharp, jerky motions of excitement.
Only Woods and Wright read as unreservedly pleased with the whole situation. Woods kept sneaking peeks at Parrish, her crush on him (and rivalry for it with Xiong) obvious to everyone but Parrish.
Wright could surely tell that Brooks was disoriented, focusing on the others so she wouldn’t have to think about why –
“Let’s get back on track, please,” called Wright, tapping the table with her mug as if it were a gavel. “Now that Brooks is here, we can formally declare this meeting of the Jewels begun.”
The others all composed themselves and nodded. Brooks took a long, deep, scalding drink of her chocolate chai and did her best to focus on Wright. Young Wright. Somehow the group’s leader. Always-right Wright.
“Brooks,” said Wright.
She startled, nearly spilled her tea. “Um. Yes?”
“Would you please begin with your usual reading?”
“Oh. Yes.” Brooks licked her lips and began to shuffle her deck. Haltingly at first, then smoother and more comfortable, settling into the familiar feeling and rhythm of decades of card work. By the time she’d finished her shuffle, a shroud of calm – or at least habit – settled over Brooks.
She looked around the table, considering who to ask to cut the deck. Typically she chose either someone who hadn’t in a while or someone who looked like they needed guidance. Today Nunes seemed the most conflicted: her ceaseless card shuffling, a slight twitch to one eye, her gaze darting back and forth between the other members of the group.
“Nunes, would you please cut the deck?” Brooks asked.
Nunes smiled, faltered, smiled again. She took a small handful of cards off the top and put them on the bottom.
“Thank you.” Brooks turned up the card, examined it, and slid it to the center of the table. “The Hierophant. A great red-leafed oak tree, reaching across the sky. Tiny birds scamper at its base, looking up in awe at the vast reaches of the oak: a place to climb, to seek, to explore, to take shelter. The great tree provides blessings and shares knowledge, but in its negative meaning may also represent spiritual crisis as one reaches too far.”
Brooks didn’t have to bring up the reversed meaning. Why did she do that?
“I do feel some points of spiritual crisis around this table,” Brooks said. She looked around the table. As she thought, Nunes, Xiong, and Parrish twitched slightly as Brooks focused her attention on them – a quick glance aside, a compulsive scratch, a licking of the lips.
And of course Brooks herself fought to control the questions spiraling in her head. Why not her? Why all of them but not her?
“Xiong,” Brooks said, her hands open and inviting. “Would you like to share with us?”
Xiong fumbled with her cane. “We don’t know anything about this. Why did it happen? How long will it last? Is there a price? Are we seeing things that are fated to happen or are we causing things to happen by seeing them? What does it mean that Brooks…” Xiong paused, stared, and looked away.
Brooks chewed the inside of her cheek.
“Are you saying we shouldn’t use this gift?” asked Wright.
“Not necessarily.”
Parrish leaned forward, managed to keep his hands from his beard. “Last night I was writing for next summer and I saw the weather plain as day. A tornado. June sixth. An F3, at three-fifty-seven in the afternoon, when a storm front rolls in with a pressure differential.” he glanced at Brooks and ducked his head in shame for the millionth time. “I wish I could… People trust me.”
Brooks took a shaky breath and looked away. Nunes stared intently, still jerkily shuffling her tarot deck. Brooks understood. If all their readings provided true visions for the first time last night, it meant none of it was real before last night – including Nunes’s tarot readings, which meant also Brooks’s tarot readings.
Brooks wasn’t ready for that. She redirected. “Wright, you said you saw the truth. What did you mean by that?”
She smiled. “I did a palm reading for a customer. I can’t share its contents due to client confidentiality, but somehow I knew, immediately, that it would come true.”
“So you saw your customer’s future?”
“Yes, and in fact only hours later she called back to say I was right, down to the very last detail.”
“You all saw the future?” Brooks asked. She looked around the table. The Jewels nodded in unison. “Have any of you tried seeing the past or present?”
“Oh, what a clever idea.” Woods reached into a pocket and pulled out her knuckle bones. That was what she called them; they were really just the cleaned bits from an oxtail meal. She closed her eyes and whispered a question, too quiet for Brooks to hear. Woods moved her coffee cup and cast the bones into the saucer.
The bones took a moment to settle, stymied by the ridge of the saucer. Woods huffed in impatience. Finally the bones ceased their movement and Woods glared at them.
After a few moments of silence, Brooks gently coughed. “Anything?”
“No,” whispered Woods.
“Well, how would you have interpreted this result before you could see the future?”
“Oh,” Woods said as though it hadn’t occurred to her. She leaned over the saucer and studied the bones, their orientation, their relation to each other. She shook her head. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel real anymore.” She looked up at Brooks and grimaced. “Sorry.”
Brooks shook her head. “No, I understand,” she lied. “I’ve always been open about my readings feeling more like a tool to access my intuition. Some people believe I did more, but I never…”
She trailed off, unsure of where she’d meant that sentence to go. She took a deep breath and found it unsteady. Why not me? thundered the question she could no longer hold back. “I’m sorry, I need a moment.” She stood and fled from the cafe.
The World
“Now, before we begin the panel discussion, I’m getting a powerful sense that six of you in particular have something very much in common.”
Julie Brooks sat in her assigned seat for the panel on cold reading at MagicCon. She’d misinterpreted the purpose of the convention – bought her ticket thinking she’d be attending a show for the mystic arts when actually it was for stage magic. In other words, an event for performers of entertaining deceit, not for those in search of truth and meaning in the esoteric.
She was having a great time.
“Six of you in the crowd today have… the letter… J in common!” declared Dr. Charlie Mysterious, the famous mentalist. He spread five fingers over the crowd, and with a wink, added a thumb from his other hand. “I see… numbers. Seven. Twelve. Twenty-three. Twenty-six. Thirty-three. And… Forty-seven. Could these be… Ages? No, I see no young children in the audience today. Perhaps… seat numbers? Would the audience members in seats seven, twelve, twenty-three, twenty-six, thirty-three, and forty-seven please stand up?”
Julie turned to see the number written on masking tape with black marker on the back of her seat. Twenty-three. She shrugged, and, curious, stood up.
So did five others. Two older women, a girl barely out of her teens, a woman somewhat younger than Julie, and a man in suspenders.
Dr. Charlie Mysterious grinned and spread his arms. “Thank you. And what are your first names? Starting with you, please.”
“Julie.”
“Julie.”
“Julie?”
“Julie!”
“…Julie. How…”
“Jules.”
The crowd gasped and cheered. Dr. Charlie Mysterious frowned slightly at that last, then shrugged and laughed. “Wonderful. Thank you very much! You may sit down now, if you wish.”
Julie – Brooks – sat. The other five were in various states of amusement, awe, and shock, clearly all wondering how Dr. Charlie Mysterious managed such an incredible feat of reading the crowd. Julie Brooks knew, though.
“You may be wondering how I managed such an incredible feat of reading the crowd. While I’m certain you’ve heard the phrase a magician never reveals his secrets, that is in fact the very purpose of this panel. So here’s the secret: you all booked your seats in advance by name, and I have access to the list.”
Groans and laughs rippled through the small crowd.
Julie Brooks recognized some of the techniques explained by Dr. Charlie Mysterious and the three other guest mentalists as things she’d intuited on her own for her tarot readings. After tarot saved her life at the cost of the farm, she’d been shocked to find that readings were in demand in the city, that grandma wasn’t the only one who believed. For the first year she’d worked out of her brother’s apartment until she managed to save up enough for her own. Two floors, with the lower as her tarot studio. A meager living at first, but as she made friends and contacts, she managed to do alright. She didn’t learn anything new at the panel – merely put words to feelings and techniques she’d fumbled into over the years – but Dr. Mysterious showed the crowd a good time.
After the panel, on her way out to the vendor floor, someone called out to her.
“Julie!” came a high-pitched, young voice. “Julie, it’s Julie!”
Julie spun around to find Julie right behind her. The young Julie, the barely-out-of-her-teens one, wearing a brand-new shawl designed to look old. “Hello, um, Julie,” said Julie. “I’m… Julie.”
“I know! Isn’t this weird?” laughed young Julie.
“It sure is.”
“You must be wondering why I stopped you,” asked the young Julie before Julie could ask. She nodded, and the young one continued. “I wanted to get everyone together. Come on over!”
Julie barely had time to wonder what Julie meant by “everyone” when the other three Julies and Jules approached, awkward but smiling.
“Oh, hello!” said Julie.
“Hi!” said Julie.
“Hello everyone,” said Julie.
“Hello,” Jules said.
The young Julie was full of energy and couldn’t stop bouncing between the others. “Now I know the thing at the panel was only a cheap trick, but it did get me thinking: what are the odds of finding six Julies in a room of only fifty people?”
“Jules,” he said.
“Close enough. The point is – the six of us being in the same room was so unlikely it had to be fate. I want to see what this means.”
Julie’s habitual tarot reading this morning drew the World. In her deck, it was a colossal polar bear wrapped all the way around the globe from pole to pole and touching paws around the equator, representing cycles completed and the embrace of belonging.
Could the cycle be what the tarot begun with the loss of her farm, completed now by bringing her to a new home with this unlikely group?
“Why don’t we all grab a coffee? But if we’re going to do this,” she said, laughing, “I think we’ll need to go by last names. I’m Julie Brooks.”
Eight of Cups
Brooks curled up on the stone edge of a raised garden bed, just around the corner from the cafe, where her friends couldn’t see her through the window. She held her deck in her hands, covered top and bottom.
All she could think was why not me? Why could all her friends see the future, but not Brooks?
She sighed and watched a few sparrows pick through the weeds for crumbs and insects. Little birds didn’t know or care about the future. They followed their instincts and lived in the moment. The future was a luxury – or curse – for only a relative few in this world.
As perceptive as she could be with others, and even sometimes herself through her tarot cards, Brooks was well aware she tended to avoid her problems. As she had the day of the tornado – a seductive incentive to carry on the same way, proof that burying her head in the dirt could actually save her life.
Sometimes moving on felt the same as giving up. She’d fought hard to keep her family’s farm… until that final day. Not that she should have died for it, but… ugh.
What was the problem here, now? Did she feel jealous, excluded in her lack of vision? Maybe. She preferred to believe she was concerned for her friends, how their visions would affect the lifelong passions now proven – not necessarily false, but at least inadequate by comparison.
A sudden light pressure on her shoulder. Julie gasped and leaped half off the garden edge.
“Sorry,” said Parrish.
“It’s fine,” Brooks said, trying to convince herself.
“Do you mind if I sit?”
“Go ahead.”
Parrish sat in silence for a moment, looking to the horizon hidden by the glittering heights of downtown. He fidgeted with his suspenders, his beard.
Brooks knew he couldn’t hold back forever, and a moment after she thought it, he proved her right. “Some of the others are having a hard time. They’ve passed through excitement and arrived at the fear they’ve been frauds for years.”
Her eyes slid to the side, watching him. “The others?” she prodded. “And you?”
“I’ll never stop apologizing for my edition that cost you your farm.” He raised his hand before Brooks could interject. “I know now that I couldn’t have known. Not the way I do for the one coming next year. And in a way that makes it worse. How many others did I fail like you, thinking I perfected a method that turned out to be guesswork?”
Parrish kept steady, his eyes fixed on that hidden horizon. His voice quaked.
Brooks leaned against him, shoulder to shoulder. “Educated guesses,” she said. “You may have missed out on specifics, but you’ve always done fine work on seasonal trends. You saved my crop far more often than the one time I lost the farm, predicting droughts, heavy rains, and bugs.
“Besides,” she added, “I’ve always been guessing, too, and – well, I don’t hear back from everyone I read for, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the Jewels have been happy with my readings?”
He nodded.
“I mean, not to brag, but if you’re like me, then you’ve helped far more often than you’ve hurt.”
He leaned too, matching her pressure. “How is it you’re the only one who couldn’t see the future but you still see the right things to say?”
Brooks nudged him with her elbow. “Years of practice. Now, don’t lean too long, or your admirers will get jealous.”
Parrish pulled away, an incredulous frown on his face. He still didn’t know!
“Forget I said anything,” Brooks said, muffling a smirk. “You should get back to the group.”
He gave her an awkward pat on the shoulder and meandered back to the cafe. Brooks barely had a moment to herself before Nunes appeared.
“Hi,” she said. “May I sit down?”
“Why not,” shrugged Brooks.
Nunes held her own deck in her hands, and for a moment stood frozen, staring at Brooks’s. Then she sat down, and in a rush with barely a moment between words, she blurted: “I’m so sorry you didn’t see anything. I thought it would be the same for us. It must feel awful to know that all your readings were false.”
Must it? Brooks thought. Were they? A surprising reaction, but rather than confront the thoughts directly, Brooks turned it round. “Are you sure you’re talking about me?”
Nunes snapped her chin up and stared at Brooks. “Maybe you’re right. I thought – since we’re so similar -“
“Are we?” Brooks asked gently. “We both read the tarot for a living, and for both of us it’s a core part of our identity and place in the community. But we’re not the same person.”
“You can’t handle spicy food,” Nunes said.
“You still think October is cold,” Brooks retorted.
“You’re still a country girl who gets lost in the big city you’ve lived in for twenty years.”
“You’ve lived in cities so long you got scared of how dark it was the first time you went camping.
They stared at each other. Brooks broke first; her snort triggered Nunes’s braying laugh. They giggled at each other.
Nunes wiped a tear from her eye. “You’re right. You’re always right. Not like Wright who only thinks she’s always right.”
“Hey,” said Brooks with a rebuking finger-wag, “Wright is an excellent palm reader.”
“True. Not that she needs it anymore.”
A long pause, into which Brooks suggested: “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
She turned to Nunes. “What happens if this future sight goes away and you all have to go back to what you did before?”
“Hm.” Nunes turned and stared at the horizon, somehow the exact same spot as Parrish had. “I don’t know.”
Brooks motioned to Nunes’s deck. “Your readings have been good enough for all this time. Has that really changed?”
Nunes looked at her cards. Hefted the pack, turned them over and over. “I… guess not.” She considered for a few moments, then stood. “I’m going back in. Are you okay? Are you ready?”
“Be there in a minute,” Brooks said, and waved off Nunes with an attempt at a smile.
“Hey, Brooks. Get over yourself.”
She frowned, looked up, and glared. Wright stood there, hands on her hips, shawl behind her like a cape. “Excuse me?” Brooks demanded.
“Sorry. That came out too harsh.” Wright sat beside Brooks.
“Is the whole group coming out for therapy sessions one by one?” Brooks asked.
“Harsh.”
“So were you.”
“Sorry. I mean I know you’re overthinking when you’re trying not to solve everyone else’s problems so you don’t have to think about yours.”
Why was the youngest of the group always the most cuttingly insightful? Brooks sighed and rested her chin on her hands. “You’re right.”
“That’s my name,” Wright replied with a cheeky grin. “But really. You’re always giving others advice and won’t listen to yourself unless it comes through your cards.” She stood, straightened her shawl, and headed toward the cafe entrance. “Come join us?”
“In a minute,” Brooks replied.
She looked at the well-worn deck in her hands. Brooks drew a card. A breeze flicked it from her fingers – it didn’t fly away, merely tumbled to her feet. The card landed face down.
Had it landed face up, most tarot readers would see a sign. An added emphasis or level of meaning to the card. Open to the reader’s interpretation but certainly a cue to analyze deeper, weigh the meanings with greater intensity and focus.
The card was face down. If Brooks were to take that as a message… perhaps it didn’t matter which card it was.
She bent over, retrieved the card, and stared at the faded, scratched, and creased back. Without turning it over, she shuffled the card back into the deck, smiled, and returned to her friends.
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