Fortune Teller

Winter 1914

Arthur put his nickel in the slot. Anastasie, a mechnical fortune teller in a box, waved her wooden hands over a mirrored ball. She selected a card from a deck and dropped it down a hole. The card appeared in an ornate tray beneath Anastasie's window. Arthur pulled the card out and saw something resembling a Tarot. It bore the title "Lover's Shade" and pictured a man follwed by an inverted shadow, a silohouette with a head that touched its owner's feet. The man covered his eyes from blinding sunlight, but was unable to stop a crack that was splitting open his face. An eye peered through the crack.

The adolescent boy put his ears up to the listening horn, by which one was supposed to hear the voice of Anastasie herself. At first all he heard was the static of a needle treading a phonograph record. Then the voice came, soft spoken and drifting on the waves of a French accent.

"Daylight uncovers hollow faces and eyes awake in kind

"Hoping strangers lie in places of love left twice behind."

A few moments of silence followed the couplet. And then her voice returned.

"If you are still listening... help me."

Arthur glanced up at the window. Now there were words scrawled across the glass in blood.

LET ME DIE

He stumbled back and toppled into a crowd of boys. Rather than catch him, they moved away so that he fell on the hard dirt. He heard change spilling from his pocket. When he turned his eyes up, the words were gone from Anastasie's window. One of the boys kicked his toe hard against the ground just a few inches from Arthur's face, sending a cloud of coarse grit into his mouth. He spat it out.

"You let him be." said a girl's voice.

Arthur pushed his fingers through the cold, packed earth as he retrieved his lost money.

"Get up." said the kicker. "Sister's here to rescue you."

Arthur stood as Dorothy approached. He shoved the coins deep in his trouser pocket. Dorothy was a slight girl and shorter than her brother, despite being several years older. The boys came to attention as she strode over in a navy blue poplin dress, her pleated skirt swinging around her legs in time. She'd changed a lot in the last year and her new clothes, a Christmas present from the seamstress she had been working for, showed it well. Certain people took notice.

One of those people was a boy hanging at the back of the group. To Arthur he looked as though he were keeping one eye on the kid who'd kicked the dirt and one eye on Dorothy. This boy was a bit taller than the others and wore his bones with confident bearing of one who'd passed over the great divide of adolescence and passed it well. Rather than cut through the crowd or stand uncertain ground with a dry mouth like the others, he chose to fade back. That boy turned away from his friends and left the group without Dorothy noticing that he was ever there, but not without allowing himself a lingering, luxurious look at her. Arthur didn't like him.

The petulant kicker opened his mouth.

"Something's wrong with your brother."

"Jackie." said Dorothy.

"Yeah?"

She took two steps forward, hands clapsed behind her back.

"Jackie?"

"Uh huh, what is it?"

He spat and the clod of splittle wasn't even big or sticky enough to darken the earth.
Dorothy placed a finger under his chin and said, "Show me where your daddy's touches you."

"Sorry kitty." Jackie brushed her away. "Yeah my dad's mean as hell and so am I. What of it?"

"I din't say he hits you. I asked about where he touches you. Gently. Softly."

The other boys snickered. Jackie just stood there with a stunned look. Somehow Dorothy knew these things about people. All she needed was one dirty secret to make a person wonder how many others she'd uncovered. Those eyes, blue as the goddamn ocean sky on a clear day, drew you out to the thin horizon while at the same time staring back into your own depths. There you were, with your little boat and no site of land. And there she was beneath you, either filled with monsters or maybe just completely empty, hoping to swallow your little soul to fill her canernous expanse.
Keeping her silence after landing her shot was Dorothy's way of letting the injury linger on her targets. And they were targets, thought Arthur, not victims. She had every right to destroy whomever she liked, as far as she was concerned. She drew her brother away from the group.

"Why don't you fight?" she said to him. "You're twice the size of those boys."

"Dotty? How do you know that stuff?"

She sniffed. "Hmm. I read their minds."

They walked among the crowds beneath and enormous steel canopy. The building was a big box over packed soil. The pair came to a line people leaning against a fence. On the other side stretched a wide oval area filled with tractors. Above that hung a banner welcoming the throngs to the Winter Fair in the Mortmarie Building of Wessex Collegiate Vocational School.

"I like that combine harvester." said Dorothy.

"What do you know about farming?" Arthur said.

"Nothing, but a combine like that was in an issue of Dark Detective. Slim Stone solved a case when he found a guy's teeth in the pebble basket."

The smokey air was filled with a thousand smells. One that stuck out to Arthur was that of dough frying in a vat somewhere. His stomach ached with hunger. Arthur felt in his pockets to verify he still had his money. He rubbed the rough edge of a quarter along the side of his thumb.

“I’ve got to eat.” he said.

His sister laughed. “Fried dough is gross.”

“What do you want?”

“Spend your money on what you want, Arty.”

They wove among the crowds in search of the elusive food truck, Arthur leading the way with his nose. At one point they passed a row of tents selling various wares.

“So Arty, if you were going to kill someone with something here, what would it be?”

“Well, not that.” he said, pointing to one of the tents.

Dorothy stopped and her brother bumped into her. They were standing in front of a display of saddles and brushes and other equestrian merchandise. Arthur had pointed to a pair of fetlock scissors, which were used to trim hair around the hoof. They were long, but rounded at the ends.

“Because you can’t stab anyone with that.” he said.

His sister looked distant. She wasn’t just in another place, but another time.

“No.” she said. “You can kill someone with that. It would just take a long time and hurt a lot.”

And there it was, the old part of her, the ancient ocean. Arthur was used to Dorothy's dark imagination, but he prefered when she lit it with a gleam of humor. She didn't seem like she was joking now. She didn't seem like she was having fun. Then Arthur noticed something that might snap her out of it.

"Dotty, what do you think of this?"

The next tent over housed an array of clothing. The item of interest was a woolen hat with a rolled brim and a fleur-de-lis embroidered with silver colored thread. Dorothy broke her trance and grinned at Arthur.

"Let me buy it for you." he said.

"You've got to eat."

"I'll be fine."

"Maybe next winter. Where to?"

He took a turn through a break in the crowd and wound up in an alley of sorts behind a row of carriages. At the end
stood the backside of a little horse drawn diner car. Arthur dashed forward, not noticing a plank thrown out in front of him. He hit the ground again and the boys reappeared. Two took Dorothy by surprise and spun her around and slammed her up against one of the carriage wheels. Jackie approached. He pushed his floppy blond bangs further up his sweaty scalp before thrusting his hips against Dorothy’s back side. She fought him, but his friends helped restrain her. As they did so, they ripped the bottom of her new dress.

"I'm no faggot." said Jackie.

Arthur was frozen. Why didn't he fight? Then the older boy before, the one as the edge of the crowd, came dashing around the corner. He shoved Jackie back.

"Get off her." he said.

"Charlie, what the hell?" said Jackie.

"I said get off." He shoved again. "The rest of you get lost."

The boys loosened their formation around Dorothy but didn't quite retreat. Charlie picked out the smallest one and reared a first. The kid turned tail. That was all it took to force the rest break ranks and scatter. Jackie was left to face his opponent alone. He squeezed his face into angry creases so deep they swallowed up his eyes. Then he spat and stormed off. Dorothy's rescuer opened up a shiny aw-shucks grin, complete with perfectly formed dimples.

"Charlie Finn." he said to Dorothy. "Sorry about those morons."

"I'm Dorothy. Thank you." She looked at her brother. "Let's go now."

"Sure," said Charlie Finn, as if she were talking to him. "I know you don't need rescuing. I just saw trouble and jumped in without really thinking. Glad you're okay. See you around."

He left, just like that. The young man had a talent for taking his time. Arthur thought about asking his sister if she though maybe Charlie had put the other boys up to their nasty prank so he could coming riding in as the valient hero. But what would that do? Dotty always said Arthur was suspicious and uncertain of what was going on around him. Then it would turn to how he thought about everything way too much and that's why he never did anything. That's why he was paralyzed, like a man blinding by the sunlight, hampered by his own doubts and fears crawling from the darkness.
hoping strangers lie in places of loves left twice behind

Arthur sometimes saw someone else in his sister, someone he'd seen before but didn't really know. He'd failed her twice now. The first time he'd been unable to defined her, and because of that he would fail again, if he even tried to warn Dorothy about what he saw in Charlie Finn. Arthur had played out a million arguments with her in his head and somehow even in his own imagination she always won, whether that was good for her or not.

“You still on Planet Earth, Arty?” she said.

“Let’s go.” he said, leading the way out.

“Aren’t you getting your fried dough?”

“Not hungry anymore.”

They passed the clothing tent and he ducked in.

“Arty, you don’t have to…”

He returned with the woolen hat rolled brim hat.

“I’m sorry, Dotty.” he said. “I think too slow.”

She took the hat and gave him a warm hug.

“Someday all your thinking is going to matter.”

They left the Mortmarie Building and crossed the campus of Wessex College, as the residents of this city called it. At the edge of the modest campus stood its landmark structure, two brick towers with pyramidal roofs and a span of windows between them. Beneath the windows stretched an arch over a tunnel that bisected the building. The siblings passed through the tunnel on the way to the main road and Dorothy shivered in the semi-darkness, taking a few glances behind her.

“Cold.” she said.

Arthur was humiliated by his presence not making her feel safer. What was the point of being tall and broad for his age if he felt like a little train engineer trapped in that lumbering locomotive of a body, working the controls and growing frustrated with the sluggish response? Dorothy, for her part, always lived about a mile outside her own skull, in the heads of others. She was often too quick and her impulsiveness didn’t do her any more good than Arthur’s caution.

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