Re: Nick & Wren: Fortunes
He removed his hat, as though he was a gentleman caller after Sunday church, and Wren thought it sweet. She knew he was assessing, looking, making determinations about the space, the con, the woman sitting behind the table. She knew these things, and she didn't care. She wasn't a fortune teller by trade. She had no gift for cards or tea leaves or crystal balls. She knew nothing of nattering on in ways that could apply to everyone in the world. I see a man. I see a woman. I see an old woman. I see an old man. I see a young lover. I see someone dead. And everyone had these things to lay claim to, but she didn't know this tactic.
She knew truths. She felt them in her fingertips, and they sang in her head. Like Eddie's magic, his animatronics, his wonders, and those were all real too. Carnivalgoers, they walked out of Eddie's tent and wondered what the secret was to the things he did. They marveled, the spectators, and they looked for hidden wires and hidden doors, and they only barely allowed themselves to believe that the curiosities on the stage were real. And she was the same, doe eyes blinking slow and her gaze hazy. She was the same.
He spoke of baubles, and he said the tent wasn't Christmas, and she laughed. It was nearly a giggle, a sound with no depth. Light, as if the world was made of sunshine and benedictions. "Sometimes better than the truth is barely good. Sometimes, ami, the truth is bad." She didn't flinch away from that reality. Sometimes, and often, the truth was bad.
And he asked for truths, oui? She looked at him long, and she looked at him hard. She was omens. She was harbingers. Those were the things she felt strongest. Those things, when they came, pressed and pressed until she spit them out, and often they were insensible things wound up in madness like wool unknit. But she didn't feel any of those things as she looked at him. She blinked slowly, her fair lashes fanning against the apple of her cheeks and then she raised her gaze to him once more. "You don't want the past, oui? You know the past. Do you want the now? You've come all this way to nowhere, and yet your past is here, isn't it? It's come for you, or you've come for it."
She still didn't ask him for a cent. This wasn't a fortune, oui? This was conversation, and it was nice. It was a distraction from the things that did scream louder in her head. The facility, the house of ghosts, the antique store, all of these things. They throbbed.