cut down with a bone ax. A Dissy from the 1920s called the weapon the Bonecarver. She even sketched the ax, a drawing I used to make my tarot. I stroke the purple velvet pouch, unloosening the yellow cord even as he protests. Death, the thirteenth trump, a major arcana, represents significant change. Transformation, endings, and new beginnings. I shuffle and reshuffle the deck, stall for time, hoping for some kind of inner vision. Nothing comes through, not even a dirty sock tossed out a window.
He shakes his head. He doesn’t want to hear any of this.
“You got to close one door to open another,” I say, stalling.
“Whatever. Just tell me what you see.”
I’m tired. I drop the cards. He is closed to me. Just like Aunt Dissy. Distrustful and secretive, she never let me see her dreams. “That’s the problem. I can’t,” I say. I can’t look him in the eye. “I, I have to sleep with you.”
His brow shoots up, his sad mouth almost turned to a half smile. “You what?”
“No.” The words aren’t coming out right. I feel like I’m already sleepwalking in a dream. “I mean I am going to have to sleep, to see…” my voice trails off. No sane way to explain it.
He studies me coolly. “You’re telling me you’re trying to go to sleep in the middle of the job? Go ahead then. I’ll be here when you wake.” That’s not what I expected. I study his face again. Now it’s my turn to protest, but he stops me, bloody fists still hitting that wall. “I don’t know if I can explain it, but Mrs. Bannister—”
“Cassie. Mrs. Bannister was my aunt.”
“Cassie,” he said it as if it pained him. “It’s really important that I get some closure here. I can’t—” He stares at the backs of his hands. “I can’t keep living like this. I was engaged. We, we could have been happy but I—I need to know who this woman is, what she is. I don’t care about being with her or not. I just want this not-knowing to be over. So I can make a decision.”
Something in his words tug at me. He is ripping up the whole damn script. Most people sitting in that chair wanted that other relationship no matter what. They wanted assurance. A sign that what they hoped for would come true. But this man didn’t even know who he was pining for. This one just wanted closure. He wanted to sleep at night—but don’t we all? Wanted to know and to walk away—or so he claimed. I wasn’t yet sure if he was the letting go kind or, like my upstairs tenants, the kind with the stranglehold.
He told me how he first encountered her, in some old childhood nightmare of a dream that clearly scarred him for life. Typical guilty conscious mess. But as he spoke, suddenly the silvery threads of his dreams circled around his throat, coiled in the air, weaving and unweaving themselves like silk webs, shrinking then growing longer as they covered me, a gossamer cape until my eyes closed. A sea of blue green sapphires opened up and I stepped inside to see.
In this dream the ground is chill, wet underfoot, the air laced with sweet perfumes. Honeysuckle and moon musk sting my eyes; sibilant leaves prick my scalp from up above. I walk to an aged willow tree, groaning its complaints to a brook. Aunt Dissy taught me the language of trees. Sometimes they offer you real clues. Most of the time they’re just bitching. This one complains about a bruise, a burden too heavy, a man named Iudas. Old dirt he needs to get over. I tune out the trees and adjust until my eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. I know the woman is there but cannot see her face.
She is hiding from me. I am not in the mood. “Look, lady,” I call out, trying to keep up with her. “I’m not trying to get in your business or nothing, it’s just that…” Wait. Is this woman running from me? Oh, hell no! As she flees, she’s stripping, dropping whole swaths of cloth, brightly colored, glittering in the night. By now she is probably buck naked and there is no way I am following her into those woods. She is going to have to Hansel-and-Gretel on her own.
Night is never quite as dark as you think. There is always some starshine, some moonbeam, firefly glow. But not here. Wherever the woman disappeared to is like a black hole floating in the middle of the night. The backs of my eyes are itching, my eyelids and elbows twitching like a needle scratching on a record. I waver in the narrow band of zodiacal light, the faint luminosity of the horizon, the memory of a day that will not come again, the promise of a new one that has yet to begin. Ravens circle my head—a really fucked up sign—I swing at them and moonwalk my way back out of his dream. Like the others, he knows what he wants but he has no idea what he needs. He is asking me to peer into the darkness, asking me to see past what was to what could be. I tell him there is no harder work than imagining a future.
“Hold the deck,” I command, eyes still closed. Time for some theater. He hesitates. “Don’t worry,” I say, opening my eyes slowly. “They won’t hurt you.” Bless his heart. He thinks I’m talking about the cards. He grips them, his sad mouth now a defiant frown. I take the cards from him, still warm from his touch, and spread them out in a fan. “Choose three.” He studies the backs of the cards, his eyes narrowing at the design, a raven caught in the thick limbs of the blossoming world tree.
As I watch him decide, I wonder if I could love someone with the same unforgiving force that pushed forests from the deep ground. People think because they forget their dreams, that they are gone. They are not. The body holds them, the way rich soil holds water. Dreams are hidden somewhere deep in the bones, and flesh, and skin. The residue of his recurring dream hovered around him like a sweet musk, like sweat. With its scent I could feel the Sight stir inside of me, uncoiling again from the back of my brain like a waking snake.
He watches my face, unaware that I am still dreaming even as he sneers at me. He tries to look indifferent, but his eyes are now as sad as his mouth.
I try to recall the woman’s shimmering steps. In the dream her path is the same. Down a road she doesn’t want to travel, with branches for legs and twigs for hands. Raven’s feathers pour from her mouth. A filthy starless sky of rain and blackbirds pierce the clouds, dark ribbons of flight.
I shake my head, try to think of another dream, something of comfort, of resolution, to cut off the images that unfold before me, a troubling silent movie. One of the Dissys, from the seventies, swore by iron and copper. A disc of metal to block dreams. The trick never worked for me. Even as I finger the heavy key around my neck, I can feel my Sight uncoiling and writhing in the air around me. And then they come. The wet mud shining underfoot. Trees twisting in the wind, the twig limbs reaching to grab his hand.
“Are you going to choose the final card or should I?” His voice sounds far away.
His hand covers mine and the shock of his touch pulls me from the vision, his dream.
“I know you saw her,” he says. “I can see it in your face.”
There’s no telling what I look like. I want to speak, want to tell him how she hurts and for how long, but the words get stuck in my throat and slide down to the bottom of my belly.
How to tell him that she is lost to him? That the love he seeks is already a dry husk, gone for many seasons.
He must have thought he was reaching back into the past, that she would be as he remembered her, whichever spring it was when their future was green. Who is she? I do not want to know. I just know she does not want him.
All night, while sleep carries others to dreamland, I work at remembering, rewinding to study others’ dreams, to rework the scene. But some signs you do not want to
