Sirenz - By Charlotte Bennardo Page 0,1
could be magnanimous as long as I was going to be warm and they kept me out of it. Who really believed that stuff anyway?
A silver bell tinkled brightly as we rushed inside. The shop was cozy and redolent with the spicy aroma of cinnamon incense—the joy of Cinnabons without the temptation. My stomach grumbled. The walls were lined with bookcases and cluttered with hanging stone and brass sculptures of pentagrams, angelic goddesses, and leafy-faced men. Colorful glass globes and wind chimes dangled from the ceiling, while the center of the store was crammed with displays of pouches, stones in baskets, and other hocus-pocus tchotchkes.
A woman walked out from the back room. “Hi,” she said.
She’d avoided the stereotypical fortune-teller look. No jangly earrings, India-print skirts, or head scarves. I breathed a sigh of relief. She looked like an average New Yorker—great jeans, vintage cream Irish cable knit sweater, and sexy, black-heeled, not-too-high boots. I didn’t think she’d be giving Meg the “you’ll-meet-a-stranger” B.S.
“Hi,” Meg said matter-of-factly. “Can I get a reading?”
“Come on back. I’m Katharine.” A nice normal name. I relaxed a little more. No bizarre madame, no Hollyweirdness.
We sat at a round table covered with a celestial-print cloth. Katharine took a deck of cards from a stone box carved with a skull. I looked around. Were there a lot of skulls around here, or was I just … ? No, there were a lot of skulls.
Katharine caught me staring and grinned. “I love cemetery art.”
Meg nodded. “It’s intense.”
“Uh, yuh,” I said.
“Think of a question as you shuffle the cards,” said Katharine, handing them to Meg. “Put them on the table when you feel it’s right.”
Meg’s face lit up, an expression I never liked and one she always wore when talking about weird stuff. She shuffled the cards for several minutes, then gingerly placed them on the table in front of Katharine, who laid them out in a five-pointed star pattern. I dug through my Coach bag and searched for pen and paper to list the outfits I wanted to find, the shoes to go with them, and things I had to do that weekend. I didn’t want to listen to this even if I could hear it.
“You’re at a turning point. The Wheel of Fortune indicates that a change of events is going to alter your current situation,” Katharine murmured. I peeked over as she pointed to the first card and flicked a glance my way. “If you’ve been having a tough time, say, in a relationship with a friend, things are going to improve.”
She lifted the second card and held it up—a picture of a man who appeared distraught at three overturned cups. “In the past, it seems that you didn’t get what you wanted or expected.”
Meg’s eyes widened, and drawn in against my common sense, I scooched over so that I could see better.
Katharine smiled and shook her head. “Look at the picture. There are still two perfectly good cups behind him and he’s ignoring them. Your situation has a lot of good in it, but you’re just not seeing it. This one,” and she pointed to a card that pictured a single man fighting with a staff on a hill, “tells me that you have a challenge coming up. Nothing you can’t handle. If you take the higher ground, you’ll prevail.”
Sooo mystical, I pooh-poohed. That could be applied to anyone. I tuned the conversation out and went back to my lists. Finally, Meg stood up to leave.
“Nice meeting you.” I thrust my hand into Katharine’s, quickly shook it, and tried to hurry Meg along before she asked yet another question, or worse, put me on the spot to get a reading too. As genial as Katharine was, all this psychic stuff was a tad too creepy for me.
“At least she didn’t say you’d meet a handsome stranger and fall deeply in love,” I quipped after Meg paid and we left the store. “I would have thrown up.”
Meg’s forehead creased. I could almost hear the wheels spinning inside her head.
“Don’t worry about anything she said, Meg. I’ll bet every fortune-teller—”
“Katharine isn’t a fortune-teller, Shar. She’s a psychic.”
“And you know this for sure just because she told you?”
“I’m in for a big challenge. I—”
“Oh please! Your only challenge is going to be to find something that’s not black!”
“You’re so skeptical!” Meg huffed. “Don’t you believe in anything other than what you see?”
“Right now I’m so hungry the only thing I want to believe is that I’ll find food