I am Cursed (and it's Horse Related)

This Horse Related Curse is Madness

Even though the apartment was right above the smoky intersections of I.P Pavlova the room was completely silent. Climbing up the stairs I could hear the screech of the 22 tram outside loud enough to wince, but the moment I entered the apartment the universe went quiet.

"Greetings Mark, I have been expecting you." Not for a moment did I consider whether I mentioned my name on the phone. The mood was far too mystic for me to think about technology.

"Dobry Den," I said, trying to make sense of her eye-shadow. "Thank you for seeing me at such short notice." She blinked with slow purpose. Bright emerald eyelids watched me from two circles of white that extended well past her eyebrows. It didn't feel like we were alone in the room.

"So, uh, do I just tell you about my problem? There's this horse—"

"No need," she said, "the cards will reveal all." And then, she led me to the table. A single candle flickered next to a deck of cards. The rest of the apartment was in complete darkness. Somehow, even though I was in the heart of a crowded city, it felt like I was sitting at the bottom of the ocean.

"The thing is," I said, after she began shuffling the cards, "I think I'm cursed. Is there any way that you could help me with that? There's this horse that keeps on appearing—"

"Take a deep breath," she said, spreading out the stack of cards across the table, "Take a deep breath and pick three cards."

Even though we were in the part of Prague that smells exclusively of smog and fried food the air of the dark room felt like a forest meadow after a thunderstorm. I picked three cards from the collapsed stack, unsure of how they would help me resolve my problem with the horse.

"Is your heart satisfied with the cards you have picked?" she asked.

"Uh, I think so." Calling my heart satisfied would have been an overstatement, my present predicament with the horse had definitely progressed my blood pressure by a decade, but my pulse had no qualm with the three cards.

She blinked slower than before; as if she was letting her emerald eyelids get a proper look at me. "Good," she said, "Now turn over the first card and let it speak."

"Oh no." The words left my mouth without permission. From the table a grim reaper of charred bones stared back at me. He was angled towards a rising sun. He sat on a familiar horse. The words on the bottom of the card read DEATH.

"Don't worry dear Mark," she said, smiling, "The card of death doesn't mean that you will die. It simply means that there is a big change coming in your life, a change that might seem daunting and destructive, but it is a change that is not yours to resist. The card of death is a card of endings, but within every end there is an unavoidable rebirth."

A year worth of memories crawled across my skull; the glare of the refrigerator at three in the morning, the constantly rising infection bar charts, the sentimental scrolls through ancient TripAdvisor reviews. Sunday. That's when it would all end. The thought of tour guiding again made my stomach uneasy, but it made me calmer about the death card.

"Should I turn over the second card?" I asked.

"What does your heart tell you?" she said, smiling.

My heart spoke in a language I could not understand, but it didn't seem to have any disagreements with what was on the table. I flipped the second card.

Her smile quickly faded away.

A second death card. The grim reaper was no longer looking back at me. He was riding the familiar horse into the sunrise. In the dim candlelight the bright card almost hurt my eyes.