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. 

Lucas Niequest fulfilled a lot of expectations I had for a college roommate. Mostly, he appeared to live off of ramen noodles and cereal, drank energy drinks in the middle of the night, and looked the part of it. He was slight and weary and I recognized him from a dream I had, right down to the stickers on his cracked laptop case.

Nothing sped up the roommate interview process like clairvoyance. 

He raked his fingers through his sandy hair like it would fix the rampant bedhead.

"What do the cards say today?" Lucas asked.

"Damned if I do, damned if I don't," I replied.

A bundle of ten sticks, too many for a man on a card to carry for long. If it were alone, maybe it would have appeared that the struggle could be worth it. Faced with Eight of Swords? A figure bound and blindfolded in a field of blades? Not so much. The reversed Four of Cups where an inexplicable cloud offered a chalice seemed like a step in the right direction. Except when that step led toward fiery death The Tower. It didn't give me an answer I wanted. 

"Read mine. I would like a large fortune, please," he said.

He wiped off his glasses on his blue work shirt before slipping them back onto his face, magnifying his tired eyes. Energy drinks were a prayer, not a cure.

"Are you staying downstairs tonight?" he asked. 

I shrugged. "Planning on blasting death metal later?" 

Lucas smiled wryly. "How did you know?" 

The flat, dry delivery had to be how he survived work, explaining to grandparents how to operate their cellphones. The right tone could make even the most scathing repetition of basic instructions fly under the radar. I would never be able to keep a straight face like Lucas could. 

I should have known more about him. Lucas was an outlier in an apartment complex full of students. Boston College in one direction, Boston University in the other, and Lucas going to neither despite how technically savvy he was. I knew he was from Salem. I knew he knew more about computers than I ever would. I knew we talked about plenty of things while strategically avoiding hitting on anything personal. Don't ask, don't tell. 

He started a pot of coffee, only reminding me how much caffeine I was going to need to make it through the school day. 

"Follow-up question: if you're here...?" He let it trail off.

I cringed. In this case, I was by far the worse roommate. It was Lucas who drew the short straw, landing the nightmare trauma-scarred, occult adjacent, relationship-obsessed semanticist. 

"Will Jane? Yeah, probably." If I could help it. Her first floor apartment with her first floor bedroom window out into the parking lot made me first floor paranoid. 

The evenness of Lucas' expression was somehow worse than any obvious concern, even though we both knew he couldn't always sleep through my episodes, even from the other room. 

"Hey, if I wanted to basically do an Google image search without the image, what's my best bet?" Lucas presumably knew a lot more about technology than just how to change app subscription settings. Supernatural means only got me so far. Real world solutions had to come into play sometime.

"That is a very broad question. Find a database, I guess. Theoretically, if you don't have an image for an algorithm to analyze, you have to do the analysis yourself." Lucas shrugged, crossing his arms. "What are you searching for? Latin plaques?"

I wish it were just Latin plaques. It would make my internet search history look less sketchy. 

"I don't know. Cars. Symbology or something." It sounded stupid to say out loud. In any other case, questions about cars would be directed straight to Jane, but not when I didn't want her asking why I was interested.

If Lucas didn't already see roommate red flags waving over my head, he should have now. The briefest flicker of confusion crossed Lucas' face. 

"Symbols like what?"

How did black hands fit into a picture of the universe? Gang signs? Cult warnings? 

"Hands?" 

I hated the way I said it, like a question. My dreams were just answers to questions nobody asked. I couldn't just work backward like it was algebra, solving for X in an equation.

Lucas paused, his brow furrowing behind his glasses. 

"Where are you seeing hands?" Lucas asked. I earned that, but I couldn't explain. I feigned checking my watch, not even looking at the time hard enough to remember it a second later. 

"I have to head to class." I poured my Thermos full of coffee and grabbed my jacket and backpack off the back of my chair, leaving Lucas standing alone in the middle of the kitchen. 

I locked the door behind me and checked it. I walked down the flight of stairs and out the building entrance and checked that behind me, too. Both locked. Both should have helped ease a conscience with nothing but a vision to rely on. 

In broad daylight, a parking lot lost it's edge. Just an asphalt pad of cars rusting in their wheel wells and bumpers, tags for work and school parking lots hanging on rear view mirrors. None of them struck a chord of distant recognition, none stirring adrenaline in me unprompted. My fingers itched for something. Action, maybe, like Jane's instinctual reaction to anything. Instead, I just wrapped my hand around my truck keys.

There was only one choice. The Ten of Wands. If I only knew how to fight.