Sounding The Current: Chapter 15 – A Suffered Fool

Lisa caught up on her different social media accounts as she walked home. It was almost one week to the hour since she had demanded that Rebecca teach her tarot, and the intervening week felt more like years than days. She scrolled past posts celebrating drunken actions that landed the actor in the hospital, jail, or both. Past announcements of breakups, screeds of evil exes, announcements of complete reconciliation, and proof that their relationship cycle was about to start again.

The memes about her life weren’t funny anymore as the speculative scuttlebutt shifted to guessing whose couch she was going to crash on any given day to who was likely her murderer and where was her body hidden since she had not been seen at any bars, clubs, or “smoking events” in the past few days by the people she would usually be bumming something off of.

Lisa realized that prior to receiving the tarot cards from Rebecca, this was her normal life. And now that she was one week after receiving the cards, she realized her life was changing in unexpected but necessary ways. It would be very easy to blame the cards for this havoc, to throw them away, and to go back to her old habits, she understood. But Rebecca had reminded her that tarot was a tool. Lisa was making the decision to change her life and walking out those changes, herself.

The walk back to her apartment was uneventful. But each time she stepped into a sunbeam, she was reminded of the Sun card and it encouraged her in the midst of darkness. And each time she stepped into shadow, she was reminded of the Moon card and her surrender to that darkness in the first place.

Is this what Rebecca meant about carrying the lessons with me? Is there a power that comes with tarot cards or is it just something that empowers a person to change themselves? Lisa reflected silently on the masquerade ball where she had met Rebecca six months ago. All the questions she read for publicly were for vision and clarification, for explanation and advice. None for supernatural action.

Somehow she didn’t see any of Rebecca’s clients having visions of Death sitting in their living room. Lisa came to a stop a block away from her apartment building. If she saw the girl child once, there was a good chance that she would see her again. Lisa turned away from the crosswalk leading to home and went to other side of the street corner. She had flowers to buy.

The light remained red longer than Lisa’s patience would allow. She looked both ways and saw no vehicles approaching the intersection. She started to run against the light, but as a gray flash of light in front of her made her stop so suddenly that she tripped and fell sideways on the sidewalk concrete.

The apparition of the eyeless girl child was suddenly standing in the middle of the street facing Lisa. With one arm, she clutched her enormous teddy bear tightly in alarm. With the other arm, she was gesturing with her arm stretched out and her palm facing Lisa. The gesture was an unmistakable command: Stop!

Before Lisa could ask herself if the apparition was really there, a delivery truck completed its turn and raced against its yellow light into the intersection and through the girl child. Lisa shouted in horror at the idea of seeing the child so brutally run over. As the truck continued without even so much as slowing, she realized that this was an electric vehicle and she had never heard it coming.

She pulled her legs away from the street and forced herself to look back to the crosswalk where the girl child was standing. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. The girl child was still standing there, as if nothing had happened. She smiled at Lisa and held her teddy bear with both hands with a tight hug that transmitted the child’s worry.

“Please be careful. Fortune doesn’t like you. Take nothing for granted. I may not be able to warn you again.” The girl child smiled again at Lisa, and for a moment Lisa thought she saw glimmers of light in the child’s eyeless sockets.

“Hey Miss! You okay?” Strong arms reached down to grab hers. Lisa looked up at her would-be assistant. A dirty and disheveled man she had seen haunting intersections with a sign asking for money was looking at her with a determined look of concern on his face.

She accepted his grip and allowed him to help her to her feet. “I… I dunno. Was there… Did you see… ?” She looked back to the crosswalk but the street was empty.

“The only thing I saw was you going down and the truck hauling ass. Did you get clipped? He turned way too damn shallow and you never hear the electric trucks coming, only when they’re going.” He held her arm as she tried to steady herself by holding to the signal pole with her free hand.

Lisa didn’t realize she was crying until she turned her head and the resulting movement of air chilled her cheek. “No. I was clear. It’s just…” She looked back at him and remembered all the times that she saw him begging at the intersection and remembered how she was arrested just for looking out of place.

She started to reach into her pocket to get some money for him. He recognized the gesture and stopped her by pushing her arm, and thus her hand, deeper into the pocket. “No. I’m not checking on you for a reward, Miss. You looked like you saw a ghost. Hell, you were about to be a ghost. I dunno what powers you fuck with, but I wanna stay on their good side. Now, you okay? You’re nice looking and I’m not and if we’re standing here for too long, people’ll think a drug deal is going down and they’ll call the police on us both. And you’re far too nice and clean for that.”

Lisa bit the inside of her lip. She wasn’t sure if to keep from laughing or crying. What she now recognized as the ordeal of the Fool card was started by her being arrested not too far from here for the sin of being disheveled in public. She nodded. “Yea. Just a little shook up. That’s all. The truck never came close. I tripped before I even stepped into the street.”

He nodded as well. “Okay. I’m going to go a different direction than I’ve seen you. Don’t want you to get a tainted reputation. Take care and be careful. May fortune smile on you.”

He left her and meandered towards the coffee house. Lisa stood there watching him, afraid to look away, afraid to look across the street again. But she had to walk away sometime, though she wasn’t sure if she was walking away from the corner or her past. She looked across the street. The crosswalk was empty. She looked up and down the street. All the vehicles she saw were either moving away from her or were stopped on the far side of a red light. She waited for the crosswalk indicator to turn green, just the same.

It wasn’t until she was safely on the other side of the street that she remembered both the man’s parting words and the girl child’s warning. If an apparition could like someone as the apparition of Death said that she liked Lisa, then an apparition could not like someone. “Fortune doesn’t like you.” Such as whatever card this Fortune was a representation for.

Lisa came home with a dozen red princess lilies a short time later. She balked at the price of roses, but wanted something as red as possible to match the red flowers of the decorated card. As she trimmed the flower stems to fit the largest mug she had, she kept mulling over the girl child’s words.

“There. Red flowers. Flowers for the girl who loves them but can’t draw them.” Lisa sat the flower mug on the table and sat at the table herself. “When I was a kid, I used to think that flowers were brought to a funeral because otherwise all the sad would be too much to bear. Flowers are happy even when death is present. Who woulda thought that was true?”

After a moment of introspection, Lisa unpacked her tarot cards and opened her laptop. If Death could manifest as a figure, then so could “Fortune”. Lisa needed to know two things: What was the theme of Fortune’s card and which one of her online friends could she ask for information from without being subjected to ridicule.

The decorated deck’s keywords for the Wheel of Fortune (card number X) was “Fate, Luck, and Movement”. Lisa noted that the near miss happened at the intersection of those ideas in the crosswalk. The list of meanings declared that “Luck still requires a risk.” But if that were true, then why was she almost hit in the crosswalk?

Lisa sorted through her social media connections to see which of them were witchy enough to talk about tarot cards but not so witchy that they would be unapproachable. It’s one thing to see representations of archetypes, Lisa noted. It would quite another to see some elder god with too many tentacles in places tentacles don’t belong coming through the door.

Lisa forced herself not to look over her shoulder and to continue scanning contacts. Finally, she found someone on Tumblr who posted a lot of Witch 101 type posts and was available for questions submitted anonymously.

“Hi. I was given my first tarot deck and now I’m seeing tarot spirits even when awake. Is there something I should have done before getting started with tarot and is there something I should be doing now?”

The question was shown as accepted by the user interface, but there was no guarantee that it would actually be seen, much less answered. Lisa started looking up information about the Wheel of Fortune tarot card in hopes of finding out why Fortune supposedly doesn’t like her.

Most of the forum and blog posts that she found considered the Wheel of Fortune a good and beneficial card. There were many references to Jupiter the planet and Jupiter the Roman god and purple everything and boons and gifts and extravagance. All of which told Lisa absolutely nothing about the concept of a wheel of fortune, or even of fortune in particular. Lisa felt like there were so many good things written about the card because the card writers were doing their best not to draw anything bad.

Which reminded her of Aunt Helen and how even those who hate and despite the woman, the family, and everything her money touches will still speak compliments of the woman if anyone was in earshot. As if by the power of superstition, not acknowledging the bad meant that the bad couldn’t exist.

This in turn reminded Lisa of another worn out catchphrase. “If it wasn’t for bad luck, there’d be no luck at all!” She had only heard it in the context of a string of unpleasant events happening to a person. As if luck of any sort was necessary in like and not having any luck could be the worst thing to befall a person.

Her reasoning led her back to the list of meanings. “Luck still requires a risk.” The person who doesn’t dare is guaranteed not to get anything more, or anything less, out of the attempt. You have to be willing to lose if you want to win. But where does that leave Lisa and the girl child’s warning?

Aunt Helen doesn’t take any action that she’s not all but given to have the desired outcome from. Even if that means stacking the deck behind the scenes. All of the allegories, idioms, and clichés had Lisa’s head turning, but she understood that in the play of words was the answer she was seeking.

“Fortune doesn’t like you.” Neither does Aunt Helen. And much to Aunt Helen’s deepening displeasure, somehow, some way, Lisa continues to not go away. Continues to stick around. Continues to turn up like a bad penny.

As if she was the albatross around Aunt Helen’s neck.

“Fortune doesn’t like me, because the person controlling Fortune doesn’t like me. This isn’t personal to the card, I think. This is Aunt Helen being unable to get rid of me like she has always wanted. But if I had a string of bad luck… well… wouldn’t that be convenient, huh.”

She looked over the decorated deck’s version of the Wheel of Fortune for any hints as to how to counter the card’s effects. A giant clock hung suspended in the upper part of the image, with the clock’s time seeming to read eleven o’clock. Around and over the brilliant blue bezel was wrapped a clinging red dragon. The dragon was holding either a treasure in the form of an orb, or the pendulum of the clock. Regardless of what it was holding fast, its tail hung off of the floating clock to touch one of the opalescent crystal shards floating below it.

A lovely image, to be sure, and rich with the card designer’s mythos. But absolutely useless to Lisa for interpretation. If only she had something to shed some light on the situation.

Wait. Didn’t Rebecca say she could use cards already passed? Lisa pulled the Sun card from the deck and propped it up against the mug of flowers. After a bit of thought, she pulled the Star card as well and placed it next to the Sun card. “I need light to make clear what I need to do, and understanding of what I need to do to actually fucking do it. Sun. Star. Help me out here. What do I need to do to avoid Fortune’s bad luck?”

“You need to stop taking obscene risks, for one.” Lisa looked at the direction the voice was coming from. Seated in the chair beside her was the judge that wore Rebecca’s face as a mask. “What were you told about Elpis? About why some consider her an evil to mankind?”

Lisa shook off being startled quickly. She wasn’t sure how visions like these were triggered but talking things out was the best way for her to understand things so she might as well take advantage when they happen. “Um, because false hope would convince people not to prepare, so when the thing happened, they were caught out and destroyed by it.”

“Tell me, Lisa. What have you done to prepare for going to the house tomorrow? For possibly meeting with your Aunt Helen tomorrow? For the loss of income that you need more than you admit? For anything past the next hour? What are you prepared for, and are you prepared for what you don’t want to happen? For instance, where’s the creamer? When you finished making your coffee, did you put it up? Are you sure? It would just be absolutely terrible luck if the creamer had been left out all day and spoiled, wouldn’t it.”

Lisa wanted to go to the kitchen immediately, but the judge’s presence kept her firmly seated. “If it wasn’t for bad luck, you’d have no luck at all. Isn’t that how the homily goes? How many of your friends went off on a road trip, didn’t check their tires, and had a tire pop on the road because of an issue that was easily detectable if only they had bothered to check? How many times have you overdrafted your account because you had not checked the balance before going on a spending spree? How many times have you missed a billing date because you didn’t check the calendar? Do you see the pattern, Lisa?”

“Your rebuttal has always been that fortune favors the brave. But do you know why? It is because the brave have prepared for what they might encounter and as a result, are more likely to survive. You’re not likely to encounter bears, snakes, or cryptids anytime soon. But you still have streets to cross and people to meet. And it would just be shit luck if you took them for granted and didn’t prepare for what could happen, no matter how much you had been assured that what you wanted to happen would come about without any extra effort from you.”

Lisa sat still for a moment, trying not to lash out at the judge for hitting her personal errors of judgement so cleanly. The judge was right. She knew there were electric delivery trucks out and that they made almost no noise from the front, but she chose to dart into the street anyway. And she knew that there was a standard of appearance for the courier job, but she chose to ignore that because she had been promised the job no matter what. Her bad luck was half of her own making, and the other half was just random acts of opportunity.

Lisa calmed herself and reminded herself that she had called on the Sun and Star card for precisely this open examination of herself and her circumstances. “The…” Lisa couldn’t bring herself to mention the girl child by her card’s name. “The girl said that Fortune doesn’t like me. Is that because Aunt Helen is controlling Fortune somehow or because I’ve been making my own bad luck?”

The judge’s face, like the other two judges, was emotionless and made their single word, single syllable answer hurt deep. “Yes.”

Lisa nodded for the both of them. “So, I need to leave false hope in the jar. And that means I need to grow the fuck up. And stop taking everything for granted. And stop waiting for Jean to rescue me. And start taking care of myself. And…” Lisa looked at the image of the dragon on the decorated deck and thought of how much Aunt Helen dominates her life and thoughts even this far away. “How do I turn this wheel around? How do I stop making bad luck?”

The judge nodded. “Start making good luck. Check yourself and prepare for what you want to happen and what you want not to happen. And just as importantly, be prepared to take advantage of opportunities that you did not expect. Such are you are doing with tarot.”

Lisa looked down at the cards again and thought of another question. When she raised her head, she saw the judge was gone and she was sitting alone in her room. She had an understanding of the card now. While she had the sense that the time of immersion into the card’s effects was over, she would be wrestling with Fortune’s sentiment for some time to come.

She put all the tarot cards back in their proper places in the deck and snuck a peek at the next card to come: The Hermit. She decided that would be an excellent theme for the night and got up. Immediately she recalled the judge’s question about the creamer.

Lisa found that she had put the creamer back in the fridge this morning. She sighed in relief to see it sitting properly on the fridge shelf. But there was something a little off about the container. The sides should be vertical, or a little sunk in. The sides were bulging out a little bit.

Lisa took the container and opened it for a smell. Before she had even removed the lid, the escaping gas told her all she needed to know.

The cream had gone off in the fridge. What rotten luck.

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