Allegories of the Tarot (13 page)

“Why you abandon your pupil, teacher?”

I tapped the lantern and its brightness increased
three fold. An orb burned like a miniature sun inside the cage. The dragon’s
eye on the table crawled slowly toward the box from whence it came. Zelda’s
eyes narrowed, but she continued to smoke, unmoved.

“Challenge is...” I said.

She rested the cigarette in a long, amber ashtray, and
flipped the third card.
Hermit.

“Is not funny, old one.
Not
funny.” She stood. “I want you to go. Zelda no care why you came, she no care
what you see. I no want to see you or anyone.”

“Zelda, wait,” I said. It was only then that I knew
for sure why I had come. Frustration wasn’t unfamiliar to me. I remembered my
mistakes in Monte Carlo, my pride and arrogance, and the way I had set out on
my own for far too long.

“Zelda, the Light shows me many things—some I want to
see, and some I don’t. It’s a powerful tool, but it’s not the only truth. Did
you know that?” She refused eye contact for a moment, and I heard myself sigh. I
took a deep breath, and continued, this time more softly. “I know you might not
want to believe me, but I did come back for you. We would have slain the dragon
together, my dear, but I fear you were already too strong and too bold to wait
for an old man like me.” I stood and moved the lantern to her side of the
table. “My darling girl,” I said, and she winced visibly. “You have a chance to
walk a different path to wisdom than your arrogant old teacher did. This troll—he
loves you?”

“I think so, yes,” she whispered. Her face seemed as
smooth and lineless as when she had been that little girl with the dragon’s
eye.

“Maybe loss and loneliness aren’t the only paths to
wisdom,” I said. I pointed to the lamp.
“My gift to you.”

Zelda fell backward and nearly collapsed into her
chair. The ashtray upended and her cigarette dropped to the floor. The area rug
beneath it sizzled.

“Zee...Light of God?”

I stepped away from the table and headed through the
curtain for the exit. “Let it light your way, my student.”

“You no take your necklace?”

“You earned it, Zelda, I could never...”

She crossed the room and pressed the necklace into my
hand, and her lips onto my face. She kissed me not like a needy child, but like
a loving friend. For a moment, I knew I could pull her closer, but I chose
instead to pat her sweet orange face and walk away.

Behind me, Zelda’s television
blared
the start of a daytime game show.
“Wheel!
Of! Fortune!”
the studio audience blared. Where the Wheel would take me next, I couldn’t
know. For the moment, I didn’t want to know—I couldn’t care. For that one
golden moment, it was enough it had brought me here.

***

Red Tash is a journalist-turned-novelist of dark
fantasy for readers of all ages. Monsters, wizards, trolls, fairies, and roller
derby await you in her pantry of readerly delights. Tash is the author of the
Amazon best-selling dark fantasies
Troll
Or
Derby
and
This
Brilliant Darkness
; and a columnist for both LouisvilleKY.com and
InveterateMediaJunkies.com, where she does double-duty as a comic book
reviewer. Tash’s own work in comics is included in Scary-Art’s
The Pit and the Compendium
,
Filthy Cake
, and is featured in Arcana
Comics’
Steampunk Originals
. Prior to
beginning her career in fiction, Tash wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper
column on parenting and family life, among other publishing credits. A rabid
social media junkie, Tash can be found on every conceivable corner of the
internet, so just google her—she dares ya. Beyond writing, Tash has absolutely
zero interest in anything, unless it is rehashing her glory days as rollergirl
Tyra Durden of the Derby City Rollergirls & RollerCon’s TeamMILF.

You can find Red Tash at
RedTash.com

***

WHEEL OF FORTUNE

Vista Bridge

By MeiLin Miranda

The first suicide off the Vista Bridge after Juanita
moved to Goose Hollow was a girl. The news said she was fifteen. Juanita didn’t
see her jump, but she saw police and medical examiners swarming the light rail
service road where the girl landed.

The second time, a forty-seven-year-old man jumped.
Juanita was waiting at the train stop nearby. She looked up, and there he stood
at the railing. She felt the bad luck radiating from him even at that distance,
and she wasn’t surprised when he stepped over the side into the void. He landed
on Jefferson Street in the middle of the morning commute. She called 911 so the
cops could get there right away. No one should see that. She wished she hadn’t.

Juanita had lived in Goose Hollow five months when the
third, fourth and fifth jumped. The neighbors said it had always been bad, the
Vista Bridge suicides, but this year was the worst. The city started scraping
up funds for a barrier, but modifying beautiful, historic bridges took time. “It’ll
be months, maybe a year, before they finish the fence,” said the man down the
hall. “I’m organizing a volunteer suicide watch. Do you think that’s something
you’d want to do?”

County mental health trained Juanita to talk people
down, and she took her place among the volunteers who walked the bridge. The
first time she stopped a jumper, it was another teenaged girl. Juanita managed
to touch the girl’s hand, just long enough to turn her luck around. They sat
holding hands on one of the concrete benches set into the bridge until the
paramedics came. She listened to the girl’s story: pregnancy, abandonment, and
ostracism. “It’s going to be okay,” said Juanita, and it was. They stayed in
touch. The girl’s repentant parents took her back. She arranged an open
adoption with an ecstatic couple, found a scholarship and started college.

The second time, a month later, Juanita offered a woman
lingering near the edge a cup of coffee from her thermos. Startled, she took
it; their fingers brushed, and again, it was enough. The woman went on to turn
her failing business around and become a crisis counselor herself.

After she stopped the third jumper the next month,
Juanita acquired a reputation.

This morning, Juanita watched alone; her partner was out
sick. She didn’t mind. Nothing would happen today. The odds were against it.

Juanita knew about odds. She’d worked for thirty years
in a casino as a cocktail waitress before she retired. She had a reputation
then, too. She’d been pretty—still was, if older—but the house didn’t pay her
extra for her looks.

“Table three, honey,” the pit boss would murmur.
“Guy in the plaid jacket.”

“Do I have to?” she’d complained at first.

“Life isn’t fair, Juanita, at least not here.”

Juanita would walk over, tray held high, and touch Plaid
Jacket’s shoulder. “Can I get you a drink? They’re on the house.” She’d bring
Plaid Jacket his rum and Coke, or just Coke if he wanted to stay sharp and keep
his astonishing lucky streak going—and then he’d start losing. If Juanita liked
Plaid Jacket—he’d tipped well, he’d been good to the other waitresses, or he’d
just struck her as a well-meaning soul—she wouldn’t touch him again. He’d walk
away with about what he’d come in with, give or take. But if he didn’t tip, or
if he squeezed her ass, she’d bring him drink after drink, tapping his shoulder
or brushing her hand against his each time, and he’d lose his shirt. No one
knew why, least of all Juanita, but everyone in management knew she carried bad
luck.

She never told them she could also be lucky. She didn’t
do it enough to raise suspicion, but often she’d see a loser, someone raw,
inexperienced, over his head and radiating desperate bad luck—people’s luck
shone all around them. She’d touch his shoulder, bring him a drink and his luck
would change enough to save him. Life wasn’t fair, but it didn’t need to be so
harsh. Sometimes the losers quit while her touch lasted; sometimes they wouldn’t.
Juanita only touched the unlucky once, with one exception: a foolish woman she’d
heard had come to earn enough money for a child’s surgery. When the woman
walked out with twice the winnings she needed, Juanita stopped her near the
door. “Don’t come back,” she said, “don’t ever come back, not here, not another
casino. No gambling, ever. Your luck is played out. Got it?” The woman nodded
and hurried away, still crying. Juanita never saw her again, and she wondered
if there’d been a child. She never touched someone like that again.

Her own luck, she left alone. She worked hard, lived
clean, and saved her money. She still got flats, had her heart broken, caught
the flu, but things worked out, mostly.

Juanita talked to many people on the bridge, most just
neighborhood walkers and sightseers there for the spectacular view. Of the rest
who came to the Vista Bridge, some were mentally ill. More were unlucky. She
couldn’t help the crazy, but she could help the others.

Now, six months in, Juanita strolled along the bridge
walkways in the early morning mist, her coffee thermos and some melamine cups
in the bag slung at her hip. The cars hadn’t started their daily trek down
Jefferson Street far below, but the warning bells of the MAX trains as they
pulled away from the Goose Hollow stop floated upward, their shrillness hushed
in the morning air. When she looked toward the sunrise she could see the train
tracks, the tall buildings downtown—you couldn’t call them skyscrapers—the
luxury cars lined up on the car dealership rooftop on Jefferson Street, and
trees trees trees. Somewhere in the predawn clouds lurked Mount Hood. She loved
this view, the little city in the trees she’d adopted as hers when she’d left
Las Vegas for good.

She came to the sign at the span’s end reading, “We can
help you cross this bridge” with the suicide prevention number in bold. Below
it, another volunteer had taped a neon green hand-lettered sign: “Hi, you
matter! Can you talk for a second? Please?” around a big felt-tip marker heart.
Juanita turned back toward an identical set of signs at the other end.

A woman stood near the concrete bench at the other end.
Juanita quickened her pace just enough so it wasn’t noticeable; the woman might
merely be walking, and if she wasn’t, Juanita running toward her might spook
her. The woman stayed where she was, hands braced on the railing, sometimes
looking out at the trees and the almost-skyscrapers and the luxury cars, and
sometimes down at the train tracks and the asphalt far beneath.

“Good morning,” Juanita called.
“How
you doing?”
The woman turned her head, her gaze patient and expectant. “Can
I get you a cup of coffee?
On the house.”
This didn’t
always work with the men, but sometimes it made the women hesitate, at least
long enough for Juanita to get close enough for them to see and hear her more
clearly. She tried to get a read on the woman’s luck, to no avail; it hid as if
behind a door. She couldn’t read the woman’s face, either. It constantly
changed. Was she old? Was she young? Juanita couldn’t say.

The woman didn’t move as she came closer. “Let’s sit
down and have a cup, okay? We can talk things over,” said Juanita. The woman
drifted to the bench between its two ornate lampposts and sat down. Juanita
breathed again; maybe she wasn’t here to jump after all. Juanita kept her
movements deliberate and slow as she sank down next to the woman and pulled out
her thermos and a cup. Juanita believed “real” cups, not paper cups, might make
people less likely to jump. If they had a real cup in their hands, somewhere
inside they might be afraid to break it, even though the melamine ones didn’t
break; she’d never thrown one from the bridge, but that’s what she’d heard. She
handed the woman a steaming cup and a packet of sugar, making sure to touch her
fingers.

The woman smiled and handed back the packet. “No sugar,
thank you. Life is sweet enough, isn’t it? Though I suppose it’s bitter
sometimes. It depends.” Her voice bore a vague Mediterranean accent.

“Life isn’t fair sometimes,” agreed Juanita.

They sipped the hot coffee and looked toward the West
Hills, the impending sunrise at their backs. A car passed, headed south across
the bridge to the road rambling like a goat trail past the big houses of the
city’s well to do.

Juanita began to relax; this woman wasn’t a jumper. “So
can we talk a little? My name’s Juanita. I’m a crisis counselor. If you’re in
trouble, I can help. What’s your name?” The woman murmured something that
sounded like Tuh-kay, and Juanita decided not to attempt it. “What brings you
out this morning?”

The woman took her hand. “You do.”

Juanita smiled and squeezed it back. “We’re here because
we care.”

“Not ‘we,’” said the woman, “you. You can’t do this
anymore, you know.”

“I can’t what?”

“Juanita, you have your finger on the wheel. I cannot be
parceled out like this. I am random.”

Juanita turned away from the West Hills toward the
woman, trying to gauge meaning from her expression, but it shifted from second
to second. “I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you? Think of a roulette wheel. What would your
bosses do if...let’s say if they knew you put your finger on the roulette wheel
to make it stop where you wished it to from time to time, not where they wished
it?”

“But I never did that. How do you know I worked in a
casino?” Juanita tried to pull her hand from the other woman’s grip, and stand,
but her legs wouldn’t work and her hand held fast. A car traveling northbound
purred by; she briefly thought of hailing it, but what would she say?