tarot

Spirits Follow Me Here, Too: a Short Fiction (Part II)

May is National Short Story Month, and in honor of National Short Story Month, I decided to write a short story combining my interest in tarot and witchcraft with fiction. I hope you enjoy the result. Here is Part I.

Immediately upon seeing her, I knew she was everything I was not. She let light in places where I had locked myself in the dark. It was a bar, and though Dennis knew I was only seventeen, he also was more than happy to look the other way if patrons chose to buy me drinks.

When she sat down at my table, I had already been watching her. She had been raucous – loud and unmistakable. I saw her at the bar, munching on some of the peanuts Clifton, one of the bartenders had put out before the bar opened. She drank beer from a green glass bottle and spoke in a hearty voice as though she knew everyone, and they certainly knew her.

By the time the band hit the stage, she was already swiveling her hips as though she had grown up at The Crow’s Nest, and for all I knew, she had. Then, exhausting herself, she plopped down at my table. At first, I don’t think she even noticed me. I didn’t have a client and I was doing a spread for myself. A simple Celtic cross.

She had been gulping down a dark liquid from a glass when her bright, curious eyes caught mine. And, as cliché as it sounds, something altered. What was hard in her softened. What was loud became gentle. What could not stop fidgeting – froze.

She slid me a green glass bottle like the one she had been drinking from. It collided with the cards I’d drawn out on the table.

“Oh, Jesus,” she exclaimed as the beer foamed, threatening to spill over onto my cards. She scooped up the bottle just before its foamy head splashed onto the deck, but this girl, this tornado, looked bewildered nonetheless.

She chugged a big gulp of it down. “I don’t even know if you drink,” she admitted, “I just saw you sitting here alone and wanted to buy you a drink.”

I cleared my throat and gestured toward the tarot cards.

“Oh,” she replied, sucking in on her lower lip and furrowing her eyebrows. “Solitaire?”

“I do tarot readings,” I corrected, staring into her intense brown eyes. They were riveting. Such a deep shade of brown, they could almost black. I could hardly distinguish her pupils from her irises.

For the second time, she said, “Oh,” but this time, she sounded startled, “I’m sorry. I know last month, Dennis hired a palmist and some fire eaters. He had to downsize and let the fire eaters go. They got to be too much of a liability. Are you trying to work? Should I go?”

I laughed. “You can stay.” I piled the cards I had drawn and shuffled them back into the fold. I inhaled deeply before closing my eyes for the briefest of seconds. “Would you like me to do a reading for you?”

“Yeah, and how much is that going to cost me? Just a down payment on a new house and my life?” She smirked.

I arched an eyebrow.

“Sorry,” she muttered, “my grandma poisoned me against psychics. Said y’all are a bunch of swindlers and con artists.”

Rolling my eyes, I replied, “You can pay whatever you like or nothing at all. My nonna taught me how to be a witch, and it’s just being in tune with your own gifts. So, maybe next time, don’t swallow the poison,” I suggested.

She nodded, flinching slightly at the barb of my words. “Can we start again? I’m Vee.”

I smiled. “Nice to meet you, Vee. I’m Nikita.”

And the spirits giggled for they knew, this was the beginning of something much bigger than me.

Isabelle Palerma

This short story is entirely my own content – no A.I. used to create this.

Spirits Follow Me Here, Too: a Short Fiction (Part I)

May is National Short Story Month, and in honor of National Short Story Month, I decided to write a short story combining my interest in tarot and witchcraft with fiction. I hope you enjoy the result.

For the past three years and seven days, I have carried a deck of gilded and black tarot cards in my worn-out messenger bag. My nonna had given them to me when I was seventeen but taught me to read when I was thirteen. “A gift,” she had told me, “every teen girl should know.”

She had warned me about the responsibilities associated with owning my own deck. She described the difference between the waning crescent moon and a waxing gibbous moon. She had braided my hair and wished to take me to find stinging nettle and mugwort. My nonna had wanted to collect crystals with me and to charge them under the full moon.

But she told me too, there were seasons for these things, and my season was not upon me yet. I was too young. By the time she felt my season was upon me, her cough had turned to blood and her hair was falling out on her pillow case in clumps.

Nonetheless, she tried teaching me. I listened, her voice enchanting me with its ebb and flow, but as she shuffled her tarot cards – the black and gold ones – I found myself ensorcelled by their haunting images.

Later, when the cancer ate away at the good parts of her, spirits rose like whispers in the dark. Before she passed, she taught me not just how to read the cards but how to cleanse them too. Her hushed voices spoke of the different spreads, her gnarled hands passing over the cards as practiced as a magician. Despite all my attempts with her, I still fumbled.

I wanted to make my nonna proud. I did everything in my power to become the witch she was teaching me to become, trying to train my gestures to be smooth as I read the cards, trying to keep the trembling out of my voice when I read for others.

After a few years, the cards became creased and a little worn, but my knowledge had grown. I no longer needed the paper with my nonna’s web-thin penmanship, but I kept it near as a reminder. As they passed over the cards, my hands were methodical, utilizing gentle, polished movements.

Though some interpreted my tattered cards as a sign of accumulated gifts, I just took it as a more storied past. After all, before they belonged to me, my cards were held by my nonna. Who knows what history those cards nurtured? When my mama kicked me out of our apartment at seventeen, I needed a job. Fast. And luckily for me, I found my calling.

A smoky jazz club called The Crow’s Nest had set up a small table for me to read my cards. They covered it with diaphanous scarves and told me to make myself look mysterious. I didn’t know how to make myself look mysterious but wore my dark black hair long and partially covering my eyes.

The club’s proprietor set the scarred table up with the fabric and a handful of stumpy candles. It was wedged between a small, makeshift stage, the bar, and the kitchen. He offered me a crooked grin. “You good, baby girl?”

I nodded.

People brought me strange gifts, hoping that by holding items that had belonged to their deceased loved ones, I’d hear their voices. And yes, their voices called me. From a wedding band, I heard a father beg his widowed wife to remarry. From a handkerchief, a great-grandmother reminded her great-grandchildren, the ones who scarcely knew her, to live.

But the tarot cards were where my heart belonged.

That first October night he set me up at The Crow’s Nest, I drew a single card for myself before anyone approached my table. One solitary card that would predict everything.

The Ace of Wands.

I nearly wept. The Ace of Wands has always represented the seed of potential, new ideas, and even though I didn’t know it at that time, the Ace of Wands would herald a new beginning in my future.

And right as I flipped the card to face me, that new beginning strolled into the bar.

The spirits around me danced, rustling awake from their tombstones, and resurrected from their sleep. I, on the other hand, simply felt the dust brush off my cards and knew it was time to begin again.

Isabelle Palerma

This short story is entirely my own content – no A.I. used to create this.