Divining a story with Tarot Cards

Note from author: This story was written after our writer’s group each pulled four cards from a Tarot deck. Do I ‘believe’ in Tarot? I’m science-minded. So, no I don’t ‘believe.’ But they tap into a brain hack that allows you to organize random facts into a story which is how writers try to understand the world. Each deck has great characters and topics and classic plots. Thanks to math, each deck has almost an infinite number of combinations. Can a Tarot deck divine your future? That’s for you to decide. But Tarot can help you divine a story.

I know why ye’ve come. Don’t deny it, traveler. They always come but they never leave. Not out the front door, anyway.

I say it to you, now. She said it exactly like that. I remember, after all these many decades.

It all started because I wanted to be King of Swords. No. Not like in some fairytale. I was selling knives door to door. I was just a kid in an oversized blue polyester suit hawking for a pyramid scheme. But I wanted those swords.

See, the sales guy who sold the most knives wins a set of swords. The set hung crossed on a wooden coat of arms. In the 70s, a thing like that in a swinging bachelor pad, well, it would have made me a catch. At least, I thought it might make up for skinny legs and soft hands. 

I drove all over the countryside. I found the farm wives were the loneliest, but sometimes they were the cheapest, if their husbands were home. So, that was a double-edged sword. But, the city wives had no time for me at all. So I criss-crossed the flat country-side praying for lonely women on the prairies. 

I swear I had driven down that dusty gravel road before. But I never noticed an old wagon turned into a flower planter with a sign that read FRESH CORN!

So, I turned. The dirt road was strange because it wound. Folks around here usually opted for straight lines and squares.

As I drove around one curve, the house revealed itself slowly.

The house was old red brick. Red brick should have held shape. But these bricks didn’t. The windows and doors sagged. They sagged and drooped so much, they defied gravity and made a mockery of squareness. Bricks can’t bend, can they? Shouldn’t they crumble?, I remember thinking. 

Sure enough there was a corn crop all around the house. But there was no FRESH CORN in sight. The stalks and the corn were bleached skeletons, their paper leaves flapping in the wind as I drove by. 

It was funny the way the sun shone on those stalks, corn-bright. But a cloud hung over the house, so it stood in red shadow.

It all scared me. But being King of Swords isn’t for the faint of heart. So, I jumped out of my Chevy Nova and walked up the steps.

A stench close to the house nearly bowled me over. If I had trusted my nose then, I would have turned tail and ran and I wouldn’t be telling you this story. 

But wanting something real bad, even if it’s foolish, can blind your eyes and blind your nose. So I decided to dive in head-long. 

A faint voice seemed to croak, “Come in. Come in.”

I turned a crystal doorknob, bright and clean amidst the rest of the decay of the house and I turned that knob, and took a step inside. Some turns you can’t turn back. That’s one turn I regret.

I stepped into a foyer filled on either side with hundreds, maybe even thousands of balls of newspaper from floor to ceiling that barely left a path to walk. But from the stench, I realized, it wasn’t just newspaper. Some had terrible stains. There were jars, too, of yellow liquid, turned cloudy after years. 

I would have run once I realized this was a makeshift bathroom of a hopeless hoarder  but then the voice croaked and commanded again: “Come here.”

I followed a maze of magazines and papers and household junk. The roof of the kitchen was partly falling down. I passed Maxwell House coffee tins filled with nails and screws, lamps of every shape and size, a sewing machine, an antique washing machine, many things gutted.

I jumped when I saw a rat in the middle of my path. But he was long dead — a 2D rat, a flat rat, eaten completely empty with the fur intact. Like a stiff rat suit, it lay in my path, eye sockets empty. I guess he was gutted, too. 

The stuff and stench blurred into a reeking mess.

I continued to follow the voice and came to a room that once must have been a beautiful library. It was crammed with junk, too. The entire back wall was a bookshelf and sure enough, there were books. But there was also rat traps, a toppling pile of records, the head of a gramophone, and the worst thing were the dead and dying dolls perched in front of the books. Their eyes — the ones that had eyes — stared vacant.

It wasn’t really a library, I soon realized. It was a nest. And in that nest of newspapers, a thing perched in front of the book shelf, behind a very old desk. In dusk light, it looked like a huge raven perched on a chair in the nest, setting a book on the shelf. 

But I blinked and the great old raven was simply a very old hunched woman in a black shawl. She wasn’t a raven, but never-the-less, she didn’t sit. She perched there.

“Hello, boy. Sit here. So I command, ye. Sit.”

At first, I didn’t see the grand old chair she motioned to because it was buried in a mountain of Popular Mechanics magazines. They looked real old and one title leapt out at me before the mountain toppled: SHARPSHOOTING AT THE ATOM.

I sat as the raven-thing had commanded. Even with everything I’d seen, I could spot a collector, and a collector might just buy some knives. I set my case beside me on the floor. But I never picked it up again.

The desk between us was strangely clean. It was dark old wood, and the only clean thing in the room. Nothing, nothing lay on it, save three sticks of wood. 

That’s when her beady bird eyes locked on mine, and her claw hand reached out, but didn’t touch me, and she said:  “I know why ye’ve come. Don’t deny it, traveler. They always come but they never leave. Not out the front door, anyway.”

She cackled her raven laugh. It was a laugh without mirth, that almost seemed to choke her. 

“Look at them wands, boy. Look,” she growled, pointing to the strange sticks on the desk.

It was the first time in a long time that I forgot about being King of Swords. Suddenly those wands became a whole world. I got caught up contemplating every nick and polish and hill and valley of those wands. To my eyes, they expanded in detail like the face of a planet.

Her raven cackle brought me out of my reverie.

“They have a hold on you, boy,” she said.

“They do?” I muttered, confused.

“You’ll not have them.” Her cackle turned to a chortle of quiet rage. “A boy cannot best me.” 

“I’m not here to best you,” I protested. 

“Look here,” she said, pointing a talon at the first wand. “This is the Wand of Might. The second is The Ember Wand. To dust it can turn you. To dust, I say.” She paused.

“And the last one?” I asked.

She clasped her talons in thought.

“That! That! That is The Third Wand. All these years here. Watching and watching it. A mystery,” she concluded. 

At first all I could think about sitting in the mountain of junk with this filthy old bird was how to escape. But the more I sat there, the more I looked at The Third Wand, the more the will to leave escaped me. 

“How do you want to die, boy?” The old bird asked suddenly.

“I don’t want to die,” I said.

“You’ll die, anyway. Like all the others. Unless you kill me first,” she said. She began to cackle and as she did, she spread her arms and her shoulders no longer hunched. She looked like a powerful bird about to take flight. Her harpy eyes burned, and her face turned into a great snapping beak before my eyes. 

It was the beak, and maybe the talons, that made me strike her. I couldn’t let the sharp beak pick at me. I couldn’t let those talons grasp me. So I swept up the Wand of Might and swung it as hard as my puny muscles would let me.

To my shock, she flew back as if I’d shot her. She hit the bookshelf and the great bird crumpled down in her newspaper nest.

I can’t explain why I didn’t run then. Or what possessed me to touch her body. But I dug her out from her gross nest, and dragged her through her garbage-laden maze of a home to the backyard. I didn’t even realize it, but somehow I dragged her with one hand and yet held the three wands quite easily in my other hand. 

I touched the great dead black raven lady with The Ember Wand and she lit like gasoline. She didn’t burn as long as I thought a body would. The Ember Wand turned her to dust. To dust, I say.

Why is a dead raven like a writing desk? I thought nonsensically as I stood there in numb horror.

I walked back to the awful house. I think if I had simply walked around it and jumped in my Chevy Nova I wouldn’t have turned back. But I stepped across the threshold with the three wands. 

The loss of will happened quickly. That first day, I pissed into an empty jar and placed it beside the old crone’s cloudy urine in the bathroom closet. I wrapped my shit in the Opinions section — fitting, I thought — and just stacked it atop hers. I drank water from the downstairs cistern. Eventually, I ate rats and an endless supply of beans. Or what travellers like you brought me.  For brief moments it occurred to me that I should leave. I should escape. 

Now, I am a prisoner here. I am desperate to escape the hold of the wand. But I am equally desperate to stay. The wand has fed off my will these forty years. I can’t even kill myself, though I think about it all the time. Every day, I think I should trim my nails. But I never do. So I hobble on infected toes. 

I lay the three wands on the library’s desk — just as they are today — and study them. Sometimes I think I must hibernate here in this nest of newspaper beside the wands. For some nights I go to sleep in winter and wake up in summer. Some days I blink in spring morning sunshine only to open my eyes in an orange autumn dusk. 

Every now and again I leave the wands in the library and look out the front window. I can tell some time passes by how rusted my old Chevy Nova is. 

The Ember Wand and the Wand of Might; one is heat and one is strength.

But The Third Wand. The Third Wand is still a mystery. I must study her still. 

Answer me, traveler.

Will you kill me and be The Wand Watcher? Or shall I turn you to dust. To dust, I say?

I would sort of like to die, for once. But then, I think I’d like one more look at The Third Wand.

No matter what, traveller: Ye’ll not leave through the front door.