Davis watched the cards flip through smooth brown hands with a single silver ring, half-hypnotized by the blur of time-softened cardboard. The colors were faded, but for a few vivid images that stood out more than expected in the dark room as the woman continued to shuffle.
A man and a woman, embracing. An impression of laughter he couldn’t have described. A lantern, held by a beckoning man, and he had the absurd urge to follow into the image to see what path he might wander down toward what fools called adventure.
He jiggled his knee under the plain wooden table, tearing his eyes away from the endless sound of shuffling. There was less pageantry than he’d expected when Chrissy had talked him into this nonsense, no gaudy colors or scarves. Only a neon hand, an eye at the palm to signify a psychic, and that bright pink in the cobwebbed window. He could appreciate a fraud bold enough to forego dramatics for clarity.
“Focus,” the woman murmured without lifting her gaze.
He gave a halfhearted smile of false apology she missed entirely, and wondered when it would finally be over.
A card dropped from her hands to land on the table, stuck between two boards poorly spaced. This one was oddly bright and stiff, as if new. It quivered, and with the movement came rising dread as he locked eyes with a painted figure, one moment jovially upside-down and the next radiating with the serenity that came with wisdom.
Had this card with its unsteady image been part of the deck all along?
Davis leaned forward to inspect whether it was what he grew up calling a flicker sticker, reaching a finger to feel the presumed lenticular surface. The woman’s hand snatched the card away.
“Hey,” he protested.
She held up an imperious hand, a single silver ring glowing in the tawdry neon glow.
“Go. Go, and dance the familiar until it becomes strange. You will find your answers in the shadow of the hanged man, on an eve when shadows stretch.”
A blink, and Davis found himself outside the tiny room, Chrissy eagerly awaiting his results and her turn.
“What’d she say?”
He shook his head, unsure why he didn’t laugh as he’d expected and tell her. The experience didn’t feel real under the streetlights, outside the commanding presence of the witch.
“Something strange, and incomprehensible.”
Behind him, the neon hand shut off with a snap of electric fizzle. Chrissy groaned, and began to pout.
It occurred to Davis, not for the first time, that whatever her expectations, he did not particularly like this woman with whom he had invested five months’ time and effort.
He interrupted whatever background noise she was chattering about this time. “I think I’ll go home now.”
He left her, angry shrieks increasing as he distanced, knowing she’d reach her apartment safe because she lived two buildings over, and headed for the park six blocks away.
Davis did not dance, as the woman had suggested, but he’d walked this path a thousand times. Damp leaves blew across the paved path, scattering stubborn chalk art and reflections of streetlights in small puddles from a the day’s rain.
Lights that looked suspiciously like glass lanterns, the longer he walked on feet grown leaden. And in the outstretched shadows that did not end, a glimpse of the hanged man, stretched thin with a whisper of mocking laughter.
And with that, Davis knew.
***
A single prompt for something different at MOTE this week!
