Not Tarot, Directly

Because I am LARPing this weekend. Instead, have a short story-ish-thing that I wrote some years back, when I did a bunch of microfiction based on Tarot cards or runes. This one is about the Four of Pentacles: stasis or stability in material things, caution, security.

There’s a hole in the back of the closet, and the sky beyond is a different color.

There’s a path between the buildings where a strange light shines, not quite sun or moon or stars; not fluorescent or incandescent.

There’s an archway made of flowers she never saw in her life, and she’s sure they’d be in no book either.

She always pauses. She always hesitates. She always thinks this should have happened when I was younger.

Younger, you don’t think about the practicalities. You don’t wonder whether the world beyond has air you can breathe or food you can eat, much less birth control and dental work and a good facial scrub that doesn’t take too much effort. You don’t wonder how you’d get by. You can think of running away for a summer and washing dishes to get by, and not remember that you hate washing dishes and you hate retail and what if you break a leg out there without any insurance? Younger, everything is excitement. Saving the world. Talking white horses and summer days with no mosquitoes.

Younger, you don’t think how hard you’ve worked to get here. You don’t have those summers of eternally standing behind a counter that smells of Windex and raw meat, or the winter nights trying to grind the principles of algebra into your brain so that you would pass and pass again, or the desperate months of resumes and interviews, praying that the stockings will wait to run and the manicure will wait to chip until after because People Notice These Things, remembering names for references, storing experience away like dragon gold–two months makes a year and two years makes five and then I’ll be safe, then I’ll be okay no matter how bad it goes here.

Hurdles, one after another, like the track meets she never ran or the gymhankas she read about when she was younger. And then…

…then a place that her grandparents would have envied at her age, that plenty of people would still give their right eyes for. Safety. Stability. Security.

“S”, twisted little serpent-sound, is such a weird letter for solidity, and yet there it is. Again. There’s a joke here about other words that begin with “s”, but…it’s a pretentious little joke, a perennial-extra-in-RENT, clove-smoking, never-had-to-pay-your-own-bills bit of idiocy. Youth, again. Adults take the good job and the nice place and the steady relationship and are grateful.

She thinks all of that. It should satisfy her. It shouldn’t hurt.

And then she looks at the doorway again, whatever form it’s in this time, and she thinks about balance, and whatever the fallacy is that says effort on its own justifies more effort.

She thinks that younger, she wouldn’t have been able to say goodbye, that she’d have been someone’s job to look out for, that even a note wouldn’t have reassured anyone. She wonders how much it would reassure them now: I don’t know where I’m going, but I think I’ll be all right.

The air on the other side smells sweet when she takes one half-step forward, and it doesn’t kill her. The flowers brush against her fingertips without raising red marks.

She thinks that maybe, if she were in charge of…whatever…she would pick someone old enough not to expect featherbeds and pastel horses. Maybe she’d pick someone old enough to be cautious, to turn away and go about her business the first time, or the second.

She thinks maybe there’s a place between foolish and…

…she’s not sure what the word is.

She stands, and reaches her fingers out, and doesn’t step forward.

Not just yet.