Allegories of the Tarot (27 page)

When she could finally move again, she reached out with
trembling fingers and took the pills waiting for her on the table. Her seat was
damp; at some point during the monster re-announcing its presence in her body
she’d wet herself.

Anna sat and waited for the morphine to work, looking at
the sun-kissed skin on her hands and crying quietly.

***

She didn’t use the next piece immediately. She found keeping
the lid open at night meant she slept easier—the nights she let the perfume
into her room meant nights she only woke up once to take her morphine.

***

In December she booked a train ticket to London. Jess
booked a taxi and got her onto the train, and she sat very still in her seat
for the two hours it took to reach Euston station. The train was quiet, but she
waited for the passengers around her to collect their bags and step out of the
carriage before she opened the case.

The middle piece held two four-legged creatures. Anna
thought they were a dog and a fox. The figures radiated bronze and copper
against emerald grass, a shiny jet path winding between them. The fox glanced
up at her and winked. The dog panted, chased its tail, then paused and stared
at her.

“Hmmph!”
Anna said. She was
careful not to touch the velvet inner of the case this time as she lifted the
sliver out.

She hesitated, holding it cradled in the palm of her
hand, and both of the animals sat down on their haunches and waited.

“Thank you,” she whispered, and popped it into her mouth
without checking for a response. She didn’t want to feel guilty for eating
them, but she did. They’d guarded her sleep for weeks; it felt like discarding
old friends.

The wafer dissolved in her mouth. At first it was sweet,
but it quickly turned bitter and sharp. Anna grimaced and swallowed hard. She
felt something lick the inside of her cheek, felt the soft pad of tiny paws
over her tongue. Her throat distended briefly as something feeling like a
foxtail brushed against it.

She swallowed again, with the bitterness of a thousand
tears resting in her mouth, and the warmth she’d been praying for flooded
through her body.

Anna sighed and closed the case.

***

She spent Christmas with the children, and ate too much
stuffing. She played with the baby, now just starting to walk, and slept
without pain in her daughter’s spare room. Every so often, she’d feel something
furred rub against her from the inside, and the taste of tears gathered on the
back of her tongue.

She took the morphine pills on the train twenty-one
minutes before the pain was due back just as they left London. An extra two
hours with her family against possible public humiliation was worth the risk.
It paid off; she was cresting the morphine wave when the beast roared to life,
and she’d made very sure to use the bathroom before she got on the train. Although,
when the time came she must have made some small noise, because the girl across
from her looked up from her magazine.

At her stop, Anna shuffled slowly off the platform and
made her way to the parking lot where Jess waited with the idling taxi.

Jess took her home and made them both a cup of tea. Anna
sipped and told her about taking the wafer, and how the baby had wrapped the
dog in tinsel on Christmas morning.

“Anna,” Jess said. “Come stay with me.” She leant
forward and grasped Anna’s hands. “I don’t like you being by yourself now.”

“I can’t be under your feet all day, Jess. And your
clients—“

“Bugger the clients!” Jess snapped. “I don’t get any
bookings from now until almost February anyway, you know that. Let me help you.”

“You have,” Anna whispered. “You already have, pet.”

“Have I? Have I really?” Jess let go of Anna and buried
her face in her hands. “Part of me thinks I haven’t helped you at all. I’m
watching you fade and bloom and fade again, and it’s killing me to watch it.”

“I’m sorry,” Anna said helplessly.

“No.” Jess lowered her hands. “No. You must think I’m
the most selfish creature, Anna. Don’t be sorry. But let me help you for this
last bit, please. I’ll beg if you want me to.”

Anna snorted at her. “You couldn’t beg if your life
depended on it, woman.” She reached out and touched Jess on the arm. She could
feel her warmth, emanating through the soft cardigan.
Her
life.

“I’ll come. Tomorrow,” she added, looking around the
little kitchen she’d spent so many years in. “I need tonight here.”

Anna drifted slowly from room to room with Mitzi padding
along behind her. Here the bedroom, where she’d lain with Arthur for forty
years, and the awful time just after his passing, when she’d cried
herself
to sleep for months wearing his shirts. Here the
children’s room, now just another spare bedroom with a white and yellow
comforter and a print of Paris on the wall. Here the bathroom, with its
cracking, ancient bathtub and the toilet tucked modestly into a corner. Arthur
had put the plumbing in himself. The lounge was dark and tiny. She barely used
it in winter; the kitchen was large, bright, and easier to keep warm.

She sat at the table with Mitzi perched awkwardly on the
seat beside her, and had a cup of tea.

“It can’t be that hard, surely,” she told the cat. “People
do it every day.”

Mitzi yawned, showing sharp little white teeth.

“I think I’m nearly ready.” Arthur would be waiting for
her, and the little one she’d slipped at seven months. She remembered the tiny
little fingers and soft skin, before they took him to the Angels Yard behind
the old hospital. The church wouldn’t bury an unbaptized child, and she’d never
stepped into a house of worship since.

Mitzi would be taken care of, and she’d signed the house
over to Jess. She was
ready,
and past ready to be free
of the monster.

She’d wait though, for the New Year. No use spoiling everyone’s
Christmas.

***

Two days into the New Year, Jess caught her crawling to
the bathroom. There was nothing left on her frame; Jess picked her up and
carried her to the toilet, then back to bed.

Anna asked for her pills and Jess sat silently beside her
and together they waited for the morning.

“She talks to me,” Anna said, as they watched the stars
fade.
“The moon.”

Both of them glanced at the slim case beside the bed.

“What does she say?” Jess asked softly.

“She tells me it won’t hurt. That I will dance, if I
wish it, in silver light. She says...” Anna licked her lips and Jess handed her
the water glass. “She says I am loved.”

“You are,” Jess said. “You are.”

***

Mitzi curled up at the foot of Anna’s bed that night and
didn’t wake up.

They held a little funeral in the back, and buried her
near the roses. It was unusually warm for the season, and Jess managed to
scrape a little hole for the old cat to rest in.

Anna didn’t speak for the rest of the day.

***

That evening she came slowly into the lounge, holding
the case.

“Are you sure?” Jess asked.

Anna nodded. She’d taken nearly a handful of pills and
they hadn’t done a thing. She was sure.

It tasted of sunlight, of roses, of friendship and a
warm smile.

***

“Dance with me, Jess.”

She was light and young and free, and they danced
around the old couch and armchair.

Anna broke away and twirled. She looked at Jess and
smiled.

“Love.”
She said, once,
clearly. Her voice filled the room.

“Love,” Jess agreed, and watched the clock hands turn
behind her friend.

***

The author of
Wolfsong
,
Blood Moon Dance
, and the Blue Moon
Detective series, J H Sked was born in South Africa and moved to London,
England in 2003. She currently shares a flat with a long-suffering housemate,
several hundred books, and a kindle, and has an on-going war with pigeons and
most forms of technology.

You can follow her misadventures at her blog
jhsked.blogspot.com
or chat with her
on twitter
@jhsked
.

***

THE SUN

The Strange Case of Sal and the Solar Elixir

By Tristan J. Tarwater

Sal pulled her hood back, looking over the cramped chaos
of the caravan's interior. The medicine man had advertised "Astronomical
Remedies, Cure-Alls and Liquid Solutions" on the side of his cart and in
his grandiose speech given under the shade of the oak tree in the town square.
Her ma warned her against venturing too close to the man and his cart at night.
Her pa laughed to himself while the tall, dark man with braided hair and a top
hat spoke of the miraculous quaffs lying beyond the curtained entrance to his
cart.

But she had been crying in the copse when his orange
cart had rolled past, praying to the Red Father to bring her something,
anything to get out of marrying Lem. Sal heard the clink, clink, clank of the
large metal bells he had tied to his cart. The sight of the white horse and the
orange cart threaded through the line of trees like stitching and Sal watched
and followed behind the cart, joining her family in the town square.

Medicine men weren't to be trusted, Ma had told her. Her
father said, “Any man with no family and of able body should be fighting in the
Frontier War. Give husbands and fathers the chance to love on their families
and plant their fields.”

But Sal watched the man speak, holding a bottle of
something in a color she hadn't ever seen before, promising vivacity,
uninhibited loquaciousness, and other words Sal didn't understand but could
tell were good things, things to desire in
oneself
.

“I'm here to see what you've got,” Sal said, feeling
nervous and quite certain it was the correct way to feel.

The medicine man looked up from the small stove, his
face shining with sweat. Sal wondered at all the shelves, boxes and bottles
crammed on shelves in what seemed like a meticulous manner throughout. “What's
your name, woman?” he asked. He stood up, seeming taller in the small room.

“Sal,” she answered without stammering. That was enough.
She knew better than to give strangermen her full name and this was one of the
strangest she had come across in her life. But he'd come to their town and had
something she wanted, at least Sal hoped.

“Sal,” he said, and his voiced whistled. “What do you
want?”

Her mouth fell open but no words came out. What did she
want? She wanted a lot of things. She wanted to get out of Green Ravine. She
wanted to not have to wash clothes in the creek only to have the wind blow them
into the dirt. She wanted her brother back from the Frontier War, where the
plains met the forest, dark and wet and cold and full of sharp arrows and
swords and guns. She wanted Lem to not want her. She wanted to walk past the
field of sunflowers full of seeds and see the great nations.
Miz
with its spires and vast navy.
Qamer with its chains
and silks.
To burn her apron and visit the temples of
deities both alive and dead.

“You said in your pitch you have things people don't
know they want or need,” Sal said. She heard the horse snort outside, as if
laughing at her. “
I's
hoping you could tell me.”

“A pitch, eh?” he asked. He smiled, looking over his
items, holding his hands out towards them. “Well, Sal, I am no psychic,” he
said. The way the medicine man said it made Sal think someone else was a
psychic. She looked around, foolishly, no one in the room but the two of them.
“You will have to help me.”

“I'll do what I have to,” Sal said. She wished she
hadn't, once she had said it. Now the man made a sound like a snort, laughing
at her. “I mean to say, you can count on me. I'll tell you what you need to
help me.”

“You sound so desperate and so bold,” the medicine man
said. He held one finger up, letting it pass over the boxes and bottles like an
antennae, trying to pick up something. The bottles seemed to flicker with light
as his finger moved over them and Sal took another step closer, to make sure
she wasn't seeing things. “I hardly think you need my help,” he murmured.

“Things ain't always what they seem,” Sal muttered back.
She watched as he stopped short and turned around, crossing to the other side
of the caravan and opening a cabinet that looked too big for the small space
but there nonetheless. The medicine man produced a key from a chain around his
neck and he opened the cabinet. Something fell out. He said something that
sounded like a curse under his breath. Papers rustled and things that sounded
lighter than paper rustled.

He pulled out a box, square in shape. It was made of
some kind of dark wood, the top carved with circles within circles. He placed
it on the table and undid the clasp keeping it closed and raised the lid.

Sal sucked in her breath. As he drew back the lid, light
shone from inside. Within the box were the same circles, like tracks, and vials
of glowing, colored liquid embedded in the dark material of the base. The odor
of something burning and metallic filled the air and Sal drew closer. If she
squinted hard enough, she could swear the tiny vials were moving slowly in
their tracks. Did the box have some kind of mechanism in the bottom? What was
this?

The center of the box held the biggest vial. It glowed,
yellow-white. The medicine man picked it up gingerly, holding it in his hand
like a baby bird he didn't want to crush.

“You can have this,” he said.
“For a
price.”

“What do you want?” Sal asked, looking at the round
vial. She wanted to reach out and touch it now but it looked so hot, she
wondered how the medicine man held it.

“Bring me something,” he said slowly. “The start of
which is so insignificant, the result of which is so far removed from its
beginnings,
it
seems like...a miracle.”