Carnival
Kahlil stood dressed for work with his travel mug of green tea in one hand as he slid into his glossy work shoes with the other. He turned to face the hunched figure on his leather ottoman.
“Kestrin, you're eventually going back to work, right?”
Kestrin brandished his hand and stuck his nose into his palm for a few seconds. “Fortune says…nope. Not in the near future.”
“You can't stay like this forever.”
Kestrin eyed Kahlil's white dress shirt and leather briefcase. “It's been less than twenty-four hours. My marriage has dissolved. You want me to just go back to work like everything is fine?”
Kahlil turned on the lamp beside the armchair and sat down. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“I'd rather rewind and erase it, actually.”
Kahlil smirked.
Kestrin rubbed his eyes and sat up. “Okay, fine. You want to know what happened? I'll tell you. Lorona broke into my journal and read it.”
“She found the dream, right?”
“Right. I would have told her about anything in the journal, dream included. But there's just something dirty about reading someone's journal without them. It's like breaking and entering, only more personal. And I was going to tell her, but I needed the journal to do it, and it was missing.”
“You know, I still don't understand why you rushed to get married,” Kahlil snapped his fingers, “just like that. Maybe she got curious because you two knew so little about each other.”
Kestrin screwed up his face, prepared to mock. “Didn't your parents teach you to marry the woman you loved?”
“Sure, but they would never give their blessing if I got married as fast as you did. They would have believed I was either rushing to my own destruction, or that I'd impregnated her.”
Kestrin swallowed. It was pointless to explain that he wanted to run toward and away from Lorona at the same time. His eyes landed on a dark wood crucifix in the corner, nestled protectively over Kahlil's bed. Kestrin looked away.
“And now?” Kahlil said. “She's seen the dream, and you still know that you should have married her, right?”
Damn. He's perceptive. As a best friend should be. Not just a best friend, a best man. Double damn. Kestrin started pacing. “No, something's gone wrong. She didn't have anything for me, no cryptic riddle, no explanation. For the cherry on top, she accused me of creating the entry to manipulate girls.” Kestrin paused. “Remind me, why in the world did you agree to be in my wedding?”
“Because you were sure of yourself, but mostly because you asked me to. ”
“You should have warned me.”
Kahlil changed the subject. “Did she leave you after she read it?”
“No. I was the one who left. I think maybe she was willing to pretend it had never happened, but the evidence gave her away. She somehow made a big gash on the journal cover, and I knew it hadn't been there the night before.”
Kahlil waited in perfect stillness for him to continue.
Kestrin kicked at the edge of the Persian rug until it flipped over in half. Kahlil twitched, then chose to say nothing.
Kestrin blew his breath out. “She read the dream and she couldn't finish it. It's like my world just stopped working.” He looked up suddenly. “If you need to go to work, I'll be fine.”
Kahlil unclipped his watch and slipped it into his pocket. “Albert Einstein didn't believe in time. Let's sit on his side of the fence for now.”
“Ironic, isn't it? I was looking for the one because of that dream, and it gave me the societal appearance of wanting tons of them. In my bed.”
“But after the other girls failed your dream-girl test you didn't throw them out, either. At least not right away. Admit it, man, you weren't exactly the chivalrous knight.”
Kestrin grinned. “I'm only human. I knew the girl would have to be gorgeous, as well as fulfill the requirements of the dream. Their beauty preyed on my powers of resistance. It was like intoxicating myself and then trying to walk in a straight line.”
“Somehow you always find a way to make yourself the victim.”
Easy for you to say, Kestrin thought. Kahlil had frequently demonstrated that he had more self-control around women than Kestrin, even in their teens. Another thought, hot and acidic, rose to the surface of Kestrin's mind. Did I subconsciously marry Lorona so that she'd wear a white dress and fit the visual image for my dream? Bile flooded his throat. He had to fight to the surface before he could speak. “I left the last part of my dream blank in my journal so that the person I read it to could finish it. It's crazy, right?” Kestrin felt like a broken record, explaining the story over and over, as if the result might change.
Kahlil nodded. “Lorona didn't know what came next and now it's killing you. I get it, Kest.” With his dark eyes, Kahlil could have been the figure on the crucifix over his bed, enduring quiet suffering on Kestrin's behalf.
Kestrin blinked to remove the imaginary nails in Kahlil's hands.
Kahlil walked to the kitchen. “Have you eaten today?”
Kestrin shook his head. “Just orange juice and some vodka that I found in your cupboard.”
Kahlil slid a bagel into his burnished steel toaster. “Let's start with this.”
The scent of cinnamon and raisins coaxed Kestrin's stomach to unclench a little. Outside the window, the clouds parted and sunlight poured through the small stained-glass saint that Kahlil had hung across it.
Kestrin pressed his palms into the floorboards. His stomach growled. “The alpha male finds his strength returning.”
Kahlil quietly buttered the bagel and set the food on the ottoman next to Kestrin.
“Who needs a wife when I've got you to take care of me?” Kestrin bit into the bagel.
Kahlil glided into his shiny overcoat. “Your wife will do more for you than I will. Don't make me remind you.”
“All right.” Kestrin glanced at the Seattle Weekly lying open on the coffee table. “Let's do something fun tonight. I need a diversion.”
“Does this mean enjoying ourselves, or doing something questionable for thrills? On second thought, I'll pick the activity, okay?” Kahlil took the newspaper with him.
As soon as Kahlil left, Kestrin put the breakfast dishes away, showered, and having nothing more to do, he checked his phone log for calls. He sighed and dialed the missed call from the previous night.
“Baby boy? Hi! How are things?”
“Hi Mom.” He paused, gritted his teeth, then said, “I think you might have been right.”
Yuki returned from work and spent half an hour rummaging in her closet and banging boxes against the wall, which meant she was up to something. She waltzed out of her room, telling herself “one two three, one two three” to keep her timing. She twirled a black velvet cloak in front of Lorona. “What do you think? I wore it to a party junior year.”
Lorona rubbed her forehead and barely glanced at the costume. She had a headache from the musty bookstore storage room in which she'd quarantined herself for the day to prevent herself from looking people in the face. A mug of chamomile tea steamed next to her atop one of Yuki's crocheted coasters, which was supposed to be a yellow Christmas star, but looked like scrambled eggs.
“Did you find a pointy hat to go with it?” Lorona said.
“I was actually thinking of painting my skin green and going as Elphaba in Wicked.” Yuki twirled and stopped suddenly with a hard look at the cup of tea. “So you're not going back to him, are you?” she sighed remorsefully. “You know, Kyle wasn't trying to ruin everything. He didn't mean to wreck your love life.” Yuki's eyes were a mix of emotions; the protective friend seemed to wrestle with the sappy romantic.
“I don't know if he's just decided he's done with me. Let's not talk about it, okay?” Lorona let her eyes fall shut.
“I'm worried about you,” Yuki said. “Can we at least—”
“I'm serious. Talking about marriage or love or Kestrin is off limits.”
Yuki gave a pouting sigh. Lorona heard the dull thump of cupboards opening and closing in the kitchen and the click-pop of the gas stove.
“I'm going to grill you some chicken so you have protein, and then we're going out tonight,” Yuki announced.
“Have fun.” Yuki's energy made Lorona feel more exhausted somehow. “I'll be right here, drinking my tea.” Lorona reached for her mug. She felt the handle pried out of her fingers.
“I'll warm it up and put your tea in a sippy cup, if that makes you happy.”
“I don't use sippy cups.”
“Then don't even think of throwing a tantrum. We're going out.”
“Wait, this is for me?” Lorona stood in front of Yuki's long bedroom mirror while Yuki fixed the black cloak around her neck. The fabric was a tight wool weave on the outside and a soft velvet interior. A triangular clasp conjured the memory of the design on Kestrin's journal. Lorona tucked part of the cowl over the clasp as Yuki fluffed her hair.
Yuki sighed, “I love the way the black makes your hair contrast.” She said the word with a French accent and giggled. She pulled on a pair of heeled black boots and applied garnet red lip gloss with her finger.
“Why aren't you dressed up as crazy as me?” Lorona challenged.
Yuki pulled an enormous red hat out of her closet. The brim easily extended a foot out from each ear. “Better?”
“Where are we going?”
“To a carnival.”
“In November?”
“Some people like carnivals when it's darker.” Yuki's eyes twinkled, and not in a purely innocent way.
Half an hour later, they parked on the side of a dirt road. A violent gust of wind buffeted them as they climbed out, sending a wall of brown and yellow leaves straight for them. The leaves were so thick that the “wall” looked solid, and they couldn't help screaming a little. When it had passed, half a dozen leaves had lodged in Lorona's hair.
Yuki pulled her in the direction of complete darkness, pierced only by what looked like a glowing archway. Lorona resisted. “Call me crazy, but don't all good carnivals happen in the summer? Aren't we supposed to be running around in shorts and eating popcorn and cinnamon elephant ears?” She eyed the stand-alone archway warily. “This is really weird.”
“I want you to just have fun, okay?” Yuki continued dragging her. “Can you trust me?”
Yuki and Lorona had mutually adored each other ever since colliding during freshmen orientation at college. Lorona reminded herself that her friend deserved to be cut some slack. She followed Yuki into the blackness.
A shape loomed several hundred feet down the road. It sharpened to a huge barn with an arched strand of illuminated bats that blinked in a marquee around the gaping entrance.
Lorona knew the common themes in all carnivals: booths with cuddly, oversized stuffed tigers and panda bears, bouquets of pink cotton candy, and rides that flung people in nauseating circles. But here all those things were forgotten. As they stepped inside, Lorona clamped her teeth to stop their chattering. The room felt backward, like the shadows had been turned inside out. Light leaked out of cracks in thickly curtained vendor booths. Every time someone went in or out, something blinding flashed, the kind of light you'd see in alien movies when the unsuspecting human zap-beamed onto the mother ship.
“This place is freaky,” Lorona whispered.
“Let's get some apple cider!”
“Is it spiked with hallucinogens?”
“Lighten up, sunshine. Here!” Yuki held up a pair of ghastly glowing stalactite earrings and shook them. “Put these on!”
Lorona almost refused, but gave in and slid the earrings on. A green halo radiated under her chin and around her ears.
Yuki dashed toward three witches who stood over a large bubbling cauldron and returned in record time with two black paper cups, sloshing their contents. Lorona couldn't tell if the drink was green, or if it was just a reflection from her earrings, but either way she didn't want to try it.
Yuki took a long slurp and purred.
Lorona took a hesitant sip. It wasn't bad. “How'd you hear about this thing?”
“My goth co-worker told me it was really awesome. He goes every year.” Yuki stopped to examine a booth selling charms. She swung a rabbit's foot pendant and read its tag, “For good luck and warding off jealousy.”
Lorona thought of Kestrin's talisman, the shield of destiny. There was more to Kestrin's necklace this than his father's heritage. It represented his belief in fate. Something tickled the back of her mind, the unanswered question, the failed test. She shoved it down.
Yuki dropped the charm. “My house is already full of peacock feathers, so I'm doomed regardless.” She moved toward the branching rows of booths. “My aunt says those feathers are bad luck.”
Lorona twitched involuntarily at the word “feather.”
I'm seeing him in everything. In my head I was already “Lorona Feather.”
Yuki carefully reached under the cloak and found Lorona's hand, as if she knew her thoughts, but still respected the conversational ban. Lorona squeezed back tightly. Yuki pointed to some strange costume ahead of them that looked like a double-headed leech and laughed, tugging her along.
Lorona couldn't resist for long. There was something magnetic about Yuki when she was happy and adrift in the excitement of the moment. This was why Yuki rarely lacked a boyfriend. But her moods were inconsistent, and the once-happy Yuki might next be clinging to you in tears, filled with desperate visions of freeing Tibet or gardening in an English nunnery to discover her life's purpose. The oscillating moods made Yuki unable to keep boyfriends long, too. The mix was exactly why Lorona adored her. Yuki always showed both sides of her coin.
“I love you, Yuki.” Lorona said it quietly, but Yuki jumped as if she'd shouted it.
“Why?”
“You're good for me.”
Yuki flashed a smile, her lip gloss shimmering in the light of her glow-stick earrings. “You like it here?”
“I like being here with you.”
Yuki threw her arms around her. “There, that should be a good dose of me.” She hooked her arm through Lorona's.
“Do we have a destination?” Lorona asked.
“Yes. Anywhere to make you loosen up and remember how to have fun.”
A tent ahead stood a few feet taller than the rest. In the dim light, Lorona made out a dusty pink fabric with gold fringe along the flap edges, which concealed the interior. A sign painted like a scroll dangled from the side, framed by a string of rose-shaped white bulbs.
Madame Ovary—Psychic Extraordinaire.
Serving the Feminine Persuasion
“Oh, that looks fun,” Yuki said.
Lorona tossed an incredulous look at her.
“What?”
“We drove all the way up to Arlington to see a psychic with a pun for a name?”
“Pun?” Yuki frowned at the sign.
“The book is Madame Bovary and she's calling herself Madame Ovary? Have you ever read the novel, Yuke?”
“I might have skimmed the spark notes…maybe.”
“She's married, has affairs, gets sick a lot, drinks arsenic—”
“Gross!”
“The affairs? I know, fidelity is really—”
“No, I meant the arsenic!”
“Yeah, well, she dies alone, and her husband discovers only after her death that she had the affairs, and then he dies alone in his garden.”
Yuki smiled hopefully. “Maybe she picked that name because she wants to prevent women from having a life like that lady in the book…Wait a second! I think I've heard about her. Sometimes her readings are the real deal! Once in a million, or something, but she's been right about stuff.”
Lorona rolled her eyes and surveyed the long line of girls fidgeting outside the tent. In a gust of alien tractor-beam light, the entrance flap jerked open and a huge woman in a swath of blood-red velvet swept majestically into view.
Behind her, a skull-sized crystal ball glowed on a pedestal. A slender girl with almost-white hair stood just inside the tent, clutching her purse. She smiled timidly at the imposing bulk of Madame Ovary's enormous shadow before scuttling like a mouse freed from a trap and collapsed into the arms of her waiting boyfriend. She was whispering something into his ear energetically and Lorona looked away, groaning in disgust. “Please tell me you know I don't believe in any of this stuff.”
“Yeah? Well, neither do I.” Yuki shrugged with exaggerated carelessness.
“What about the horoscopes you read in the newspaper?”
“I just think they're quaint.” Yuki tried to laugh lightly, then said, “This will be a good distraction for you.” She grabbed Lorona's elbow. “I'm taking you in whether you like it or not, babe.”
“She'll just put bogus stuff in my head and then I'm supposed to believe that it'll come true.”
Yuki took a clipboard from an attendant who wore smoky eyeliner. “Then why do the police hire psychics? Explain that.”
“I don't know, but—”
“Do you want to know why I think you should see this psychic?” Yuki brandished a pen at Lorona like a wand. “Because I'm afraid you'll get stuck in the past. I could see it in your eyes. If what she says is junk, it will at least make you think of the future.”
“Isn't this a little premature? It's not like I've been locking myself in my room and not eating.”
“Oh, but you were going to. I could see the ‘I'll just have tea diet’ all over your face. I don't need to be worrying about your health while I'm at work.”
Lorona felt her nostrils flaring.
“I know you.” Yuki thrust out her chin. “I might have psychic blood, too.”
Lorona looked at the clipboard and her subconscious thrust a new agitation to the surface. She knew why she didn't want to see the fortune-teller. It made her think of Kestrin's dream. Real or not, he was definitely submitting to its voice, and this made Lorona angry. An amorphous force was fencing her out and probably looking down at Kestrin right now and laughing.
Bizarre survey questions covered the clipboard, asking for her name, which she said was Martha Washington, and birth date, which she wrote truthfully but changed the year to make herself four-years-old, and then the questions turned to things like, Have you seen any of the following animals cross your path with a high level of frequency (cat, dog, raven, owl)? Have you ever woken with a sensation that you were not in control of your body?
Lorona drew a line down the “no” boxes.
Yuki snorted as she peeked over Lorona's shoulder. “You're impossible.”
Lorona handed the sheet to the attendant, who glanced at the answers before giving her a withering look.
“If that woman is a real psychic, she'll know I'm lying,” Lorona muttered.
“If she's a real psychic, she'll give you what you deserve and scare your panties off,” Yuki whispered back.
“I went commando today. Too bad for her.”
They were both snickering when the tent opened and Madame Ovary practically threw her client out. The girl never stopped running. She skirted the crowd and vanished, her face round and white as a full moon.
“Next,” Madame Ovary boomed, her eyes roaming the line. She raised a finger and pointed, not to the first in line, but farther down, near where Yuki and Lorona stood at the end.
“What did she just say?” Lorona whispered.
The assistant examined the list on her clipboard quizzically as Madame Ovary stared right at Lorona. Lorona's Adam's apple froze into a lump of ice. Yuki turned to a pillar of stone beside her, pinned under the same burning glower.
“You're here for your fortune, yes?” the psychic said, clearly addressing her.
“Uh, yes,” Lorona managed in a voice that was not nearly as skeptical as she'd planned.
Madame Ovary crooked her finger.
Dragging their feet, Lorona and Yuki filed past the column of eight girls, ignoring the glares for line-cutting. Yuki squeezed Lorona's hand tighter and tighter with each step.
“Just you,” Madame Ovary ordered Lorona. “Your friend can wait outside.”
Yuki throttled her hand and all five of Lorona's knuckles popped. She slipped gratefully away as the tent flaps fell and whispered to Lorona, “I'll be right outside.”
Madame Ovary turned to face Lorona, her giant shoulders silhouetted by the glow of her crystal orb. She didn't smile or say a word. She just stared at her.
