Tarot Sour Read Online Free Page A

sense that a poison is being distributed deeper up my arm by doing so.
    â€œGoodness, what happened?” she asks me. She lifts my hand up into the light by the wrist to examine it. She rotates it as though it is a diamond and she can’t quite believe the karat of it.
    â€œI slipped mopping the kitchen and caught myself on a mug. Thank God it wasn’t the one I’d just filled with hot coffee!” I feign pleasantry, she feigns it back to me. It is the oil of human machineries.
    â€œSorry to hear that,” she says, lowering my hand back to my lap. “But it doesn’t look too bad, so that’s a relief. Did you hit your head? Twist your back? I know you had some back problems a few years ago.” A displaced vertebra.
    â€œNo, nothing like that. I just knocked the mug onto the floor and landed on it with my hand.” She gives me a pitying look. It would have sickened me to be looked at like that if I hadn’t become so desensitized to it in my mirror by now.
    â€œI should be able to handle this myself, no need to call the doctor in. It’ll save you a shitload when the bill comes.” She tries to laugh. I smile at her. “I have to check in another patient and tell Dr. Bellows not to bother, but I’ll be back in five minutes. I’ll fix you right up.” She punctuates her sentences with smiles, and that in itself is as patronizing as her tone. They all know what has happened. It is all really just a matter of who is going to hold out longer on bringing it up, her or me. I will win. I will always win this game.
    I listen to the tissue paper beneath me crinkle as I shift waiting for her. There is a window behind me. I turn my head in time to see a cardinal land momentarily on a thorny branch before taking off again. It is a rare blur of color in an otherwise monochrome county. I keep my neck locked in position and observe the slow breeze move the branch and shift the faraway sands. A tumbleweed passes along the road, which is demarcated from the rest of the desert as a shallow embroidery winding away until it vanishes as a pinpoint mirage. I will the cardinal to return to the window, I will it to return to me and teach me the secrets of flight so that I can lift myself off the ground and leave it for good. My good hand goes to my shoulder and feels the two dimples where the feathers have been plucked. I regret pulling them now and wonder, if I did it again, would they regrow?
    When Margot Fasch returns, fluttering her silken wings behind her, the clipboard she wears as a breastplate is gone and she is smiling, she looks more casual than she did when she’d gone. I turn away from the window, fool-heartedly dismayed by not being able to summon the cardinal back. Ms. Fasch rolls an aluminum skeleton chair from the corner to where I am sitting and pulls my hand out toward her until my wrist is resting on my knee. She unfolds my fingers one at a time, wary of my wincing as the stiff tendons flex. I feel like a gnat invading the moth’s cocoon, and here it is unpeeling me layer by layer, waiting to sink its wiry proboscis into my chest to discover what pollen I might be hiding from her.
    There is a line of stainless steel tools on a rolling cart at the side of the table on which I sit. She leans and grabs a long pair of tweezers. I watch the pucker of the puncture marks as my hand flexes under her guidance. She bends my index finger back and reaches into the first hole, a large opal in the wrinkles of my second knuckle. I think I can hear the tearing of the thin fibers as the hole grows but I am more fixated on the gleam of fluorescent light off the shaft of the calipers. I think of the hundred cat eyes reflecting off his workshop tools as they hang on their hooks and pegs above the table where an unfinished coffee table still sits. I wonder if God has a table like that where unfinished bodies lay with skinless, unprepared limbs sitting in an orgied pile, waiting to