James DeMille First Prize (2012)
Fortunes
Kate Barss
They’re in bed when it starts. Moira is near-sleep, blue cotton sheets pulled to her shoulders, when Dave breathes heavily into her ear: “Your road to truth will be paved with misfortunes of your own creation.”
“What?” replies Moira, turning to face him, stroking the early laugh lines along his cheek.
“The stars burst and fall, and you must be ready for the long trials ahead.”
“Why do you sound like a bad fortune cookie?” she laughs, wrapping her fingers through the small curls in his hair. It’s then, in the glow of the streetlight flowing through the window, she notices the dilation of his pupils, his brown eyes blackened and orb-like, charred moons.
He mutters “The day sings lightly and tomorrow’s melody comes too soon, persevere.” Then Dave falls silent and still, will not wake no matter how many times Moira nudges or prods, sticks her cool feet against his warm back.
The next morning, they eat poached eggs and silence swells between them, neither mentions the night before. But as Moira sips the last of her tea and attempts to return cup to saucer, David’s hand suddenly reaches out and pulls it from her fingers. He stares raptly into the cup’s abyss, with a look similar to the one Moira often sees when he’s trying to solve Sudoku. He shoves the cup towards her, shoulders slumping as he despondently proclaims the clump of tired brown leaves sitting at the bottom a “northwest facing mountain goat”. Moira stares into the hollows of the cup, but she sees nothing more then a circle of soggy tea-brown splodge. Though, she supposes, if she squints, several of the leaves do jut out in a horn-like fashion.
Some days after, Moira catches Dave sprinkling sage and rosemary on their bed as if it were a roast chicken. She asks what, in Christ’s sake, is going on. Dave tells her he can see, he has the sight. “Eyesight? Foresight?” she jokes tentatively. Solemnly, he looks at her and utters “No, seer-sight.”
Later, as Dave burns candles, carefully marking on a legal pad the precise direction and length of wax drips. Moira wonders if she could have seen this coming. He had always been obsessed with horoscopes; whenever they fight he blames her star sign. “God, you’re such a unyielding Virgo”, he says after she yelled at him for never putting the ketchup in the proper fridge shelf. And maybe she should’ve been more suspicious of his love of fantasy novels. She remembers how after he finishedĚýDragonflightĚý(or maybe it wasĚýThe Hobbit), he became melancholy. “I just want something amazing to happen” he said, “to me. I just want it to exist.”Ěý Moira only ever reads books about history, or biographies of famous figures (Martin Luther King, Joan Didion, Patti Smith); she wants her heroes to be real.
The small apartment becomes crowded.Ěý Various packs of opened tarot cards and dice overcome the coffee table, star charts line the bathroom tiles, small blue and white crystals are scattered on top of the microwave. At night, she comes home and the smell burning incense fills the apartment’s air like the scent of another woman’s perfume.Ěý
She tries to organize, places the crystals in a small brown canister she once stored sugar in, puts the star charts in a magazine rack, and arranges all the candles by height. She has always hated asymmetry. Dave is angry, he yells at her, now he will be unable to read the wax and couldn’t she just be a little more considerate?
She goes for a run, thinks about Dave, his candles and the day they met in a dirty bar, and she wonders if she can accept this new part of him. When she gets home, tired and flushed, he wraps her arms around her and tells her he’s sorry. He feels like him again, she relaxes, letting her body sink into his as easily as stone to water.Ěý
The day he reads her palm, she is sure she still loves him. They are at the park, sitting on a rock, throwing bread to the ducks. Dave grabs her free hand, starts to slowly trace the lines across her palm, naming each one, dwindling at the points they connect. She listens as he tells her about her long headline and how it intersects with her heart-line, indicating her compassionate yet determined spirit.Ěý Moira asks about the line she sees running from between her wrist and thumb. “Hmm,” says Dave, walking two fingers up it, “well that’s your life line.” He grins teasingly “Awful short”, and grabs her around the waist squeezing her. She laughs, and punches him gently on the cheek.
But days go and the day by the duck pond fades. Dave shakes a deep velvet bag, pours it onto the carpet, tiny polished bones rattling and spilling out across the floor. He stares at them, evaluates their positions and repeats. Dave watches the candle drip, and he never goes to work.Ěý Moira sees him attach a burnt-looking bird foot to a string around his neck and he replaces his work boots with Birkenstocks. He talks about auras and moon movements, he doesn’t listen when Moira talks about books or groceries or her sister. He forgets her birthday, skips her office party and blames it on the equinox. He still sleep-prophesizes, calling out fatalistic abstractions about spiritual plane’s while he sleeps, Moira buries her head in a pillow to drown him out.Ěý The predictions start to seep into his waking life, at the breakfast table, brushing his teeth. One day, he and Moira are making love on the couch. He is sucking her nipple when his eyes go glossy, planet-round pupils and he starts shouting about the location of the eternal heart. She never finds out where it is; she isn’t listening.
The next day, Moira packs her bags.
When she comes out of her room, Dave is shuffling Tarot Cards on the sofa, shaking his head, sighing, dealing over and over again.Ěý
“I can’t be here anymore,” she says.
“I know,” he says quietly, not looking up from the tarot cards.
He turns one over,Ěý “The soldier, a wall, loss, a divide, a separation-- I’m going to miss you”. She lifts her bag, feels the weight of it, leaves.
Sometimes she thinks of Dave. But she will see him again only once. It is several years later, and through a window of a teashop. His hair will have grown past his shoulders and face will be covered in long stubble, she will have trouble recognizing him if it were not for the familiar laugh lines that now spread like small cobwebs around the corners of his eyes.Ěý She will remember nights running her fingers along them, circling down his cheeks, she will remember feeling together yet separate from him, she will miss it. Moira will contemplate going in, hand briefly brushing the door’s metal handle, but then she will notice the jacket in the chair across from him, and watch as a long girl wearing beads walks towards his table. Dave’s crinkling eyes will never leave the girl as she sits across from him. Moira will watch as he grabs the girl’s palm, staring deeply into it as if it were a crystal ball, she will still be watching as he takes two fingers and gently drags them up her lifeline.
Ěý