Laura Valeri
Spread I was once an avid Tarot reader, so avid that I would pull out my Tarot pack to schedule a haircut. I had one little problem, though: I was a re-shuffler. If I didn't like the answer, I'd rephrase my question and do another spread. I got the feeling that the genies of the Tarot didn't like that method. Especially because most of my spreads were about the fate of my relationship with my fuck-buddy Paul who took me to Biloxi and gambled one hundred dollars on me at the black jack table, fucked me mostly after midnight, and had a roommate, but we'd been at this game for years and I was sure change was coming. Invariably the cards would deliver: the upside down lovers, the devil, the stabbed-in-the-back-and-lying-face-down-in-the-mud card…come on, couldn't I take a hint? But no, no, I kept doing the spread, asking compulsively, frequently, obsessively, but will he, will he finally get it that great sex equals great love, will he stop asking me to have a threesome with that slut he calls his roommate and move in with me? Four hundred up-side down tower cards later, I was still asking, but really? I got it into my head that the deck was the problem: too many people with their funky energies had pawed it. Whenever I did a spread, I asked the petitioner to keep their hands on the cards. Later, years later, I read that nobody can touch a Tarot deck but the owner. I was a home-schooled girl with lots of patience and lots of books. I didn't always read the books cover to cover. I had a tendency to read from the last chapter backwards, and not always in order, skipping and filling the gaps with deductive reasoning. So when I found out that I'd absorbed George the-penniless-gay-guy's luck, and Christine's one-cuss-word-short-of-a-divorce's penchant for collision, and William's I'm-so-in-love-with-myself-I-break-my-heart's ambivalence, I was sure I had the answer to my negative spreads: no wonder everything I asked, from the intentions of my buddy Paul, to the likelihood that I'd lose ten pounds on Atkins, manifested with a collage of swords, corpses and skeletons popping out of graves. I wrapped my deck in its silk scarf, tying it in a loose knot, and planned for its demise. I was convinced it had an intelligence and knew I was plotting, but was banking on the fact that I would not dare: getting rid of Tarot cards is complicated, at least as complicated as getting rid of voodoo dolls. A voodoo doll is made of a real person's nails, hair, clothes and spit, ingredients easy enough to assemble if you're a light sleeper after sex, like me. But how do you disassemble it without dismembering the subject? Dig, burn, bury or shred…how can you be sure that it won't accidentally scorch, dismember, suffocate and mutilate a real person? That's why I don't do Voodoo dolls anymore. Now Tarot cards are similarly complex. You don't just "get" a Tarot deck. You don't go in and buy it from a store and expect it to work. The Tarot deck is supposed to be gifted to you: by a friend or relative, or by Fate Itself (say you find it on your front porch), or, as in the case of the deck I currently held, by a dead person who willed it to you. Jonathan had given me that deck right before he got sick with AIDS. It was the last casual present he passed on to me, besides the chaise lounge and the yoga mats and the last month's rent on our apartment. I was sorry I had been careless with it, imagining the hands that had pawed John's spirit and wish I had paid more attention to him while he was still alive. Tarot decks must be carefully handled, cleansed with sage, kept in wooden boxes or silk, cradled and spoken to and treated with respect. Tarot decks are rumored to develop personalities: some are very fussy and insist, like old Gods, on ritual and formalities. Mine was one such deck. Maybe it had something to do with John, I don't know. What I know is that once, one of the Paul-replacement cuties I picked up on days when I was organized and thought I could put my life back on track was watching me shuffle my deck, his head cocked to the side in an expression that told me he should not quit his day-job. "I have a better way to do that," he said, picked up my Tarot deck, and shuffled it like casino cards, breaking the deck in two and sifting the cards through the thumbs. My Tarot deck with its spine curved and its corners bent! I was all over that bitch: "You don't shuffle a Tarot deck that way, what is WRONG with you, boy?" My pretty beau was speechless, his pink lips poised in a slightly idiotic gape. "This is how you shuffle cards!" "Tarot decks are not cards," I howled, hugging my deck to my breasts, hoping it hadn't heard the insult. In retrospect, that relationship was star-crossed. My Tarot deck would not speak to me for weeks. Everything I asked it responded with sardonic combinations of happiness cards appearing in all the wrong places, and all the fuck-you cards positioned as the final answers, scrambled just enough not to make sense: this is what you want, but… hoe, hoe, hoe, bitch! And then pretty beau broke up with me because he found me texting with Paul when I was certain he was asleep. It was time for the Tarot deck to say bye-bye. I knew that if the Tarot knew that I was trying to get rid of it, something horrible might happen to me, or worse, to me and Paul. I could almost feel the deck vibrating into my hands with some complacent evil cackle: you wouldn't dare, it bragged as I shuffled, the cards snapping superiority. Then, one day, I drove up to a car wash. It was with me, always, that Tarot deck. It lived in my purse, tucked in its silk foulard, ready to come out and tell me what I needed to do, if to pick up the phone when Paul called or reroute the call to his roommate, if to go camping now or wait till next week, if to buy low-fat or real mayonnaise. It was that important. I was getting my car ready, stuffing the "valuables" in my purse, getting rid of the trash, and other miscellaneous rigors of car care, when I looked down at my gaping, open purse, and saw the Tarot deck leering at me. It had been sunny until that moment, but a cumulus rolled over, and I swear I could almost hear the asphalt sigh with relief. The car wash guy was waving for me to drive the car up to the tracks. The garbage can was deep, only my McDonald's receipt and empty smoothie Styrofoam in it. The Tarot deck read my mind, said: hey! Hey! I picked it up by the silk ears of its foulard knot and dropped it, evenly and without rite or ceremony, into the garbage can. Quickly, quickly I got into my car and drove away, forgetting the car wash I had already paid for, forgetting the guy who, dumbfounded, was still waving at me in my rearview mirror. Three miles later I could still hear the Tarot deck screaming in my mind: a garbage can, a garbage can, really, a garbage can….I pictured Evil Tarot Deck sitting atop a pile of noxious, toxic drip in some stinky wet landfill along with McDonald boxes and tin cans of motor oil, cussing me out in its little silk getup, all pissed off and plotting revenge. But if I'd abandoned it on some street corner, someone might have found it, and someone else would have inherited its evil. What were the chances that someone would empty out that can, find this curiously tied up foulard, and oh, look what's in it, what a great present for the wife? I could feel the deck calculating the same odds and contemplating its undignified end. Payoff for all the work it had done to warn me. I looked into the rearview mirror, trying to see the woman Paul refused to love, the lover that Jonathan had left behind, and I saw this angry thing with puffy eyes concealed in too much make up and clothes too tight, toxic with regret, and the garbage of voodoo love piled up high all around, and I pondered just how likely it was that things might get better from now on. Dead Your heart is already detaching, as if discarded in an accident, with everything you and I shared already tossed in the confusion of cardboard boxes, legal papers, and lawyers' fees, lost in the splitting of things that could not be shared, like the ghost of her sex on your skin that last morning when you tapped the coffee spoon on the table knowing already what you wanted to say, delaying, as if every second of your silence weren't some special cruelty-yet, even as you stand right now, with your hands in your pocket and your casual disregard of averted eyes, there is still something you're not sharing, beyond those romantic delusions between us extinguished too soon with soiled diapers and processed vegetable pastes, or that sacrifice of trust funds and teacher-parent conferences that we both wasted as our son's future birthdays and school degrees dripped out of a hospital catheter—no I don't seek your absolution from that, nor from the church oaths, which after all, did not insure us against the ugliness of our petty betrayals, missed soccer games and shut bedroom doors, and oxycodone smiles ignored in favor of the female musk smell soaking your shirts after late nights at the office, but you owe me at least a glimpse to a place inside you I know is bereft and raw and sore, and its concealment from me is in itself a weapon I need to disarm, your secret code embedded in a look you may choose to grant me, or a gesture of your hand that you pass off instead to the window, to the empty yard of our house, where beside the real estate sign, the blue swing undulating in the fall breeze, its gently groaning chains marking time. The Prophet A shepherd came back to his tribe after a long time wondering the desert alone, without his flock. The harshness of the desert light had taught the shepherd to mistrust shadows. In his exile, the shepherd had learned to glide from oasis to oasis above the vast sea of sand astride his mule, sensing the sweetness of the watering holes through the scorching heat with his tongue. His skin had turned a sooty color that deflected the punishing lick of the sun's rays. His keen eyes had learned to discern, through the hazy bent of the dry light, a mirage from an oasis. He learned to listen to the wind for warnings of sand storms, and had learned to find shelter for himself and his mule, upon whom he relied for survival, by burrowing deep into the hot sand for hours, in spite of how he urged to unearth himself from his shifty tomb. But the shepherd knew to wait out until the high pitched hiss turned into a song in his ears, a long protracted hum, and in that hum, the shepherd had learned to release his fears. When the shepherd went back to his tribe he found he'd been gone too long: his kin had been wondering around the pastures as if sleep walking, and didn't recognize him. The shepherd saw that the tribesmen bodies were soft and milky, untried by the harshness of the sun, and their eyes could not discern a weed from sweet grass. The sheep they tended to were thin as wild dogs and their milk was sour, but the men of the tribes drank of it and savored it as though it were mead. They stumbled around in their somnolence, not knowing which way to point to the sun. They had mistaken a great wide boulder for their leader, and the shadow it cast on the ground for the law. They roamed around and around, following that shadow through its daily course, tracing endless circles around the stone's girth. When they cast their inquiries of justice and divination, they heard their own echoes answer back to them, and these they interpreted as decrees. The shepherd did all he could to wake his kin from their spell. He led their flocks away from the boulder's shadow to wider steppes, pointed out the poisoned weed and the sweet grass, cast his voice to the wind to demonstrate the trick of echoes, but to all that he did, the tribesmen only answered with a shrug, their eyes trained on the apex of the boulder, where the sun struck it and broke into luminous rays spreading out into glittering colored shafts of light. The tribes people chose to trust only the evidence of their own eyes. Then one day the shepherd took his axe to the stone and went to work until of it there was ground down and hacked to a pile of rubble, upon which the shepherd stood, calling to his tribesmen to awake. But the tribesmen saw that the shepherd's hair, which was golden, caught the light of the sun. They saw that his shadow, cast long upon the meadow in mid day, was taller than any of theirs, and that his words, which from atop the high rubble and through the hissing wind, they could not clearly discern, broke into echoes against the surrounding mountains, sounding as many voices, and they said, Behold, there is a prophet born from stone. And they began to trace the man's shadow in its daily cycle, and to believe the broken echoes over the shepherd's true words, and no matter how many times the shepherd would try to climb down from his tower of stones, the tribesmen would catch him, and carry him back up to his lofty height. Blood Travels In Derrien, Georgia, on my way to St. Petersburg, I started to worry about where I left my blood. It trickled on the rim of a toilet at a gas station and I realized that my DNA was going to be stuck on the seat a while, slowly getting absorbed by the plastic and mixing with the dead skin cells of thousands of urgently urinating women and little girls, maybe even some male drunks. I wonder how much of my blood I've left everywhere. I've traveled from Guatemala to Japan and I bled, I must have bled, even if I don't remember, and I must have hastily wiped up with rough tissue paper the DNA helix and the protein and iron that make up who I am. I have compressed Laura in a compress wrapped in toilet paper, and dropped vivid bright stains of my life onto the underground sewers of Tokyo, San Jose, Guatemala City: and less glorious places, too, the sewers of Illinois and Florida, the underground subway pipelines of New York, rumbling with trains and mythical baby alligators, the hasty Iowa 80 trucker stops where I stayed only long enough to remember I couldn't wait to get out of the prairie, and some visitors centers in Tennessee or Alabama, maybe a museum toilet or two in Washington DC. I bled in Spain, Madrid, Toledo, Cordoba. I bled in Italy, in Venice, Florence, Pompeii, Capri, and Rome. I even bled on the Coliseum's toilets, and now I ask if my fresh blood ever seeped deep enough into dust and grief to touch the dried particles of a gladiator, several feet of dirt and granite above the catacombs; my blood, blood of a childless and aspiring mother, how morbid and profound might your journey become. Women, we leave our signature in the flush and flotsam of civilization, but no one cares how careless we are with our blood, how hastily we leave it behind, tucked and concealed from its protest of musky fetidness and warmth, forgetting the distance of billions of years it has traveled to find us and shape our kind and kin. Mothers whose bloods of sons fed battles, grandmothers who cradled the bodies of starved infants, the earth is soaked with our course: even this grime-rimmed hotel's lobby toilet on this beach in St Petersburg where I sat on this morning, cursing my blood, cursing the hotel towels, is now forever marred by my plan-spoiling inconvenience, my signature, my "Laura was here" on her wedding anniversary. Unexcused Absences Did you know that we have an attendance policy here at this college? Did you read the syllabus? Did you know that all assignments are posted on the board at start of class? Did you know that you're responsible for what you missed? Did you know that there are legal and illegal absences? Did you know that we have a health center on campus, a counseling center and even a hospital? Didn't you read my policy that I don't answer my phone after ten? Do you know what constitutes an emergency? Don't you understand, I'm not your mother? Did you know that these are not my office hours? How did you get my phone number? Do you see I'm not a trained psychologist? How did you guess that I'd hate to look at your black eye? Can't you tell I really don't want to know? Why do you want to involve me? Can't you understand why your ex is filing the barrel of his gun? Do I need to call the police for you? Did you notice that your black baseball cap makes the shadows pool around your bruised eye? Do you know I can see the broken capillaries and the jaundice of your swelling even in this light? Do you realize that your skin is the color of sunset? Do you understand that when I advise you to seek professional help, I really mean that you should change your address, and carry a mace with you at all times? Do you know what's going to wake me up tonight, my words echoing in my head and your future tittering on the crack of my school-approved advice? Don't you see I'm only a teacher? Do you know that a hug could get me fired? Why are you crying? Don't you know that I give extensions? Can't you see that of course you can ask me for a loan? Will you laugh if I tell you that from now on, when I see your empty seat in class, I will browse for headlines and the photos of a black eye, a baseball cap, a crying girl whom I could not hug? Would you stop crying, please? Don't you understand that until I see your face again, under the shuffle of feet in these crowded hallways, I'll hear the sound a file makes against the barrel of a gun? And of course you can come home will me: how else would I know that I won't wake up tonight when the door bell rings, wondering if I'll have to answer a woman in a uniform asking me, Didn't I know, didn't I intuit that your life had come to this? Laura Valeri's debut collection of short stories titled The Kind of Things Saints Do (U of Iowa Press) was an Iowa/John Simmons Award winner, and winner of the Binghamton University sponsored John Gardner Award. Her work appears in Glimmer Train, Big Bridge, Gulfstream, Literary Potpourri, Night Train, Waccamaw, SN Review, Fiction Writers Review, Soundzine, Clapboard House, and Adirondack Review and his forthcoming in Zahir. Her short memoir "These Innocent Lambs" was featured in Lee Gutkind's anthology of Creative Nonfiction essays by Italian American writers titled Our Roots Are Deep With Passion, published by Other Press in collaboration with Creative Nonfiction. Laura Valeri has an MFA from Florida International University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She was a Walter E Dakins Fellow at the Sewanee Writers Conference in 2008 and a Hambidge Fellow in 2010. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing specializing in fiction at Georgia Southern University.
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