Natalie's Legacy [sequel to Natalie's Diary]

[2] Ten of Wands

TEN OF WANDS

Rhys

Morning came too fast and not fast enough. Every dark hour had potential to see a dream come true, and not in the Cinderella way. Every minute awake shaved slivers off our attention spans, our ability to focus, on grades in class.

Jane left for her 8am class and I slipped upstairs to apartment 202. Even a number on a door had seemed threatening once in a dream before I ever knew what it meant.

It was still quiet, the right time to shower off a night of cold sweats. The right time to hang onto just enough paranoia that when I shut off the water and stepped out, I half-expected a hand print in the middle of the mirror. It was so easy to teeter on the edge of losing my mind. 

I wouldn't look at my own dark eye circles, crossing the hall into my untouched room, abandoned too many nights in a row waiting for something to happen.  It existed somewhere between a college dorm room and a magic shop, the kind of place piles of laundry I hadn't done at the occult books I had yet to read could exist in tumultuous harmony. 

I pulled on clean clothes, trying to be just put together enough to look like I had slept a little this week. I tried to ignore the cards beckoning from my desk, promising unwanted answers. 

It was easier to blame them instead of accepting that the only displayed a fate that was out of their control. The cards would not lie.

I gathered the deck from my desk and took them with me into the kitchen. 72 possibilities. 72 suggestions for what I could do, or what I would do when a premonition gave me so little to go off of.

Action was Jane's game. The future should have belonged to her. What was a history major doing with precognition? 

In one long summer in Cullfield without Jane, juggling court dates and a short-lived stint in counseling, Deborah Travers gifted me a deck of cards and taught me how to read them. She may well have been the last neutral person left in Cullfield who believed in a conspiracy tied into psychics.

She may have been the last person left in Cullfield I tolerated. As last man standing in the middle of Natalie's mess, the subject of the saga of the hanged man in the woods, the boy in the coma, and witness to Dean Garnett being gunned down, my hometown was insufferable. I didn't know anybody there anymore and they didn't know me. Maybe we never did. 

I shuffled the deck. What do I do next? 

Deborah had taught me how to hold questions in my mind while pushing the cards through my hands into new arrangements, slipping them into the order the needed to be in. I fanned them out, plucking cards out one by one and flipping them into the five card spread. 

For the third time in a week, an almost identical spread lay in front of me. The Hanged Man. Where I started from. An infuriating reminder of my own indecision. The Tarot deck wouldn't understand the meaning of tell me something I don't know. 

Two cards, two branches, two options. Ten of Wands or reversed Four of Cups. Work hard or withdraw and wait. Two choices on opposite ends of the spectrum, and then each comes to its own conclusion. 

Ten of Wands to the Eight of Swords. Four of Cups to The Tower. Take action and receive the blame. Do nothing and watch a figure from the tower and plummet to the flames. 

I was just a hanged man trying to choose the lesser of two evils. Again. 

A door clicked down the hall and my roommate emerged from the secretive lair that was his bedroom.