Tarot Sour Read Online Free Page B

be assembled.
    She plucks out the small triangle of off-white ceramic and tosses it into a pan along with strings of my blood and a clear liquid that must be plasma seeped from popped red cells. “So how’s—?” She stops herself and a dull faux pas glare washes over her. “—your morning been?” she finishes.
    â€œFine. Except for this.” I let my pocked hand pulse upon my knee. “And how’s Ingot?”
    â€œOh. Well, she’s fine. Things are…well, she’s okay.”
    I see her refuse to look up at me. Granted, she needs to concentrate as she plucks this shrapnel bit by bit from my freshly bleeding palm. She is pretending that her entire world is a rolling marble trapped somewhere in the curves of that palm. If she loses view of it for a second, if she turns away to look up and face me, she will never be able to find her way back to that world again.
    â€œWeather’s starting to turn,” she says after she reaches the second half of my hand, on her slow approach toward my bent wrist.
    â€œIt is. I almost needed a coat this morning.”
    â€œI don’t think I’m ready for the winter,” she says.
    I see my chance to pluck her wings and pin her down. Like her, I refuse to look at her. “At least I’m not by the sea. Can you imagine the winter they’ll be having on the other side of the woods?”
    I feel a pinch as she digs one of the pincers deeper into the pulpy muscle than she needs. “I’m sure,” she says. “Must be awful.”
    I feel satisfied. I look over her head and trace the grain of the wooden cabinet. This room is analogous to our kitchen. I wonder if all of these buildings here were constructed as homes, and only later were some transfigured to be office buildings and hospitals. I keep our fine china in that cabinet right over her head, the paprika and thyme just to the right. We even have the same sink. The same counter running along the wall. In our home, though, this reclined, cushioned table coated with tissue paper is a marble island.
    â€œLook, Margot,” I relinquish, “I’m sorry. That was—I shouldn’t have said that.”
    â€œHey, Elizabeth, don’t be sorry.” She puts a hand on my knee, my other knee, and squeezes it consolingly. “Don’t be sorry.”
    She finishes plucking out the glass shards in silence, and then rinses my hand with a stinging disinfectant. I don’t wince or whimper. I don’t want to break the silence. Ms. Fasch suddenly seems to me just as trapped in her own cocoon here as I am. She turns her back to me when she’s done and begins washing her hands and calipers in the sink. “Have a good day, Elizabeth. I’ll see you—” She wants to say at the next PTA meeting but she catches herself. This time, she turns and makes direct contact with my eyes, before turning back to the sink where she disappears.
    I bid goodbye to an empty room, “I’ll see you, Margot. Have a good day.” I want to ask her, before she can no longer hear me, Are you afraid, Margot? Are you afraid to disappear ? But I don’t. As the winter rises, she will fall, a withered husk of a moth. Her legs will jerk for a bit, her wings will spasm weakly to flip her off her back, but eventually the frost will claim her. This is the life of moths.
    * * *
    As I walk home from the hospital, the sun has risen almost to its peak. In this state, days get lost as instants, and hours get lost in daze. The ice cream shop where I used to walk hand in hand with them, with Nickolas and Kyra, for hot chocolate late after dinner on days like these, on days when the summer seems further in time than the frozen oceanic winter, is gone. I stop for a moment and peer through the old splintered plank of wood that has been nailed up over the storefront. CONDEMNED, it says, drawn in faded red paint. The window is starched with patterned dust. The glare